The Presentation

Communicate your story in 10 slides.  This forces you to get it down to the essence. Use the 10 slide when you have 30 minutes. (see storyboard)

Then distill it down to 3 slides. Use the 3 slides when you have 15 minutes. Useful in early sales calls and account qualification.
Then distill it down to 1 slide. Use 1 slide when you have 5 minutes. Useful in early sales calls and account qualification.

Make your slides pretty. Lots of graphics. Light on text (push the written voice-over to the PowerPoint notes section).

The presentation should stand out as something different.  You may like to use a creative design firm to assist.  Sends the message to the world that you’re different – you are a thought leader.

It takes many weeks to do it right, test it and refine it.

Test it on an industry analyst and a customer.

Example: In the early days of Abatis, we would give presentations to customers and at the end of the meeting, they responded with a blank expression. Struggling with their obvious ignorance, we hired an industry consultant. He flew to our office for the day at great expense. 15 minutes into the presentation, he stopped us and said "Do you guys have any idea what you have here? You have the solution to every CEO's nightmares - but you're pitching it all wrong." We then spent the next 6 weeks internally refining the pitch and working with a graphic design firm to polish it. We tested it out on the consultant and refined it with our PR firm's critique. In the end, we left every media briefing with complements on our presentation. We won numerous prestigious industry awards. We would conduct phone briefings with senior executives and within 20 minutes, we'd be invited to participate in face-to-face meetings to discuss how our products could fit into their network. It took enormous time and effort, but it paid off!

The Storyboard

Here's a general storyboard (budget 10-12 slides). Use this in your launch presentation to analysts and the media. Here are examples from Abatis and OctigaBay (see attachments, below)

Title Slide with company logo, what business you're in and presenter's contact info.  (Give your elevator pitch as a voice-over and add it to your speaker notes).  
Who we are and why we are credible (subject matter expertise, serial entrepreneurs, Board/Angels/Advisors).  
Here's the problem and why it hasn't been properly addressed to date.  
Here's our vision/solution.
Here are the trends that lead up to our solution and why it couldn't have been done before.
Product Specifics. Trends have lead us to where we are today. We have the solution and here it is...  
Here are the 3 technical innovations we bring to the table with our solution and here's why our customers love it.  
Here is a customer case study. including expected TCO/Payback analysis if possible.  
Competitive Landscape that puts you on the map with others and shows why you've got a different approach and why yours is better at solving the problem than the status quo. Show your competitors respect - don't put them down. Try not to name them but instead talk about them as a category of competitors such as "big iron, established vendors" . For example, try to paint them as big and lumbering whereas startups like you are more innovative and closer, more responsive to the customer.
Summary: We've got a new way of solving the problem. We have happy customers. We save our customers money.  
Specifics for the VC pitch:

Financial Projection. Include a financial investment/return graph.

VCs care about risk. You need to show them why you have low technical risk (proven and unique technology), Low market risk (happy customers), Low management risk (good leadership with necessary expertise in key areas) and low financial risk (time to profit, time to revenue, total spend to revenue, total spend to profit).

Here's an excellent reference: Guy Kawasaki