Market Research Questionnaire

I've been getting very close to most of the mobile platforms on the market today, and wanting to summarize my thoughts about their potential impact on mobile research. Seeing Samantha's February 25th post about smartphone market share, a brain-dump on the subject should dovetail nicely...

Looking back on key announcements over the past year, Google, Apple and more recently Microsoft have made the most significant splashes in terms of mobile innovation. However, when the dust settles we still see Nokia and Research in Motion (RIM) leading the charge with 47% and 20%, respectively, of the mobile OS market in 2009. Why is this the case, and what can we expect to see moving forward?

I believe the current mobile market is a race between 5 horses, but I will not count others out over the long term due to the still-early nature of this arena. The key players today are:

• Apple: since its release, the iPhone has set the bar for smartphone usability; its slightly thinner sibling, the iPod touch, is the definition of a sleek, modern Personal Digital Assistant (PDA); and the forthcoming iPad is one of the most anticipated products of all time. Simply put, Apple has a lot of swagger and momentum in the mobile space. But Apple runs a very closed environment that people either love or hate, and this creates opportunities for other more open platforms to shine. Also, while Apple has done very well in the consumer space, it has made fewer inroads into the enterprise, where RIM and Microsoft thrive.

• Research in Motion (RIM): the BlackBerry is one of the most impressive brands of our time. While RIM is often considered less marketing savvy than Apple, I would suggest that their marketing tactics have been every bit as effective as Apple's -- just different. Despite a barrage of criticism about the sexiness and usability of their products, RIM continues to grow and profit at an astounding rate. I personally questioned the usability of BlackBerry products compared to more elegant competitors like iPhone and Android, but I have come to appreciate them as solid, enterprise-worthy devices, and to see the company as a very savvy player in the mobile space. RIM has developed very deep roots with both wireless carriers and enterprise IT departments, as well as a powerful brand that is almost synonymous with thumb-typing on a mobile phone.

• Nokia: the Nokia/Symbian world is complicated. Having personally handled dozens of Nokia phones, I would summarize that their strength is in their diversity of offerings to multiple levels of the marketplace. This is also their weakness. With countless products, three current operating systems, and a solid-but-aging feel on much of their hardware, it is hard to believe that Nokia still outsells its nearest smartphone competitor at more than a 2-to-1 ratio. But while they are not as strong in North America, Nokia is a major player in Europe and downright dominant in many other regions of the world. It is hard to discount a company that produces over 1 million phones per day (yes, you read that correctly). With the incredible depth of carrier relationships and distribution channels which they have developed, Nokia's challenge now is to fill those channels with products that compete with their ever-growing range of competitors.

• Google: Google has garnered a lot of attention since announcing the open-source (and freely available) Android platform in 2007. By providing a smartphone operating system that is free and extensible, Android has garnered support from dozens of handset manufacturers including major players like Motorola and HTC. In contrast to Apple, Google's greatest strength (and weakness) is its openness. I am personally very impressed with most of the Android devices I have used, and as a consumer I have great optimism that Android will be a force to be reckoned with in mobile technology. But I also recognize that openness can lead to fragmentation, and I've heard a lot of grumbling from developers about the lack of standards on Android devices. As Microsoft learned when it allowed device manufacturers and wireless carriers to customize experiences based on its Windows Mobile platforms, I believe that the many emerging flavours of Android devices will make it difficult for developers to target. That said, I believe that Google's ability to integrate the mobile experience with all of their other web-based services will make it a formidable player in the mobile space, and I believe the fragmentation issue can be overcome as Google and other Android licensees learn to coexist.

• Windows Mobile: I recently spoke about the forthcoming Windows 7 Phone Series, so I won't repeat myself on the details. Suffice to say that I think Microsoft has re-entered the mobile race, and demonstrated that they are not planning to turn away from this increasingly important battlefield. Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons over more than a decade in mobile computing, and I believe their enterprise roots will serve them well as they re-assert themselves with a brand new mobile platform. What remains to be seen is whether Microsoft can garner enough consumer interest to unseat competitors in the mass market, or whether it will continue to play a more niche role as an enterprise solution.

I have not even mentioned the likes of Palm (webOS), Samsung (bada), Linux Mobile (LiMo), or expanded on the now open-source Symbian OS (the Nokia-bred OS that was recently spun off as a freely available platform). And there are others... but the rabbit hole is simply too deep to cover here, so I will get back to the purpose of my post: to discuss the impact of mobile platform trends on market research.

There are fundamentally two ways to engage people on their mobile devices in a data-intensive way: (1) via their web browser; and (2) using a downloadable application. 

• Mobile web browsers are improving in capability and usability, and are finally emerging as a lowest-common-denominator approach to mobile engagement. If you need to reach a lot of people in a relatively shallow way, e.g. to conduct a brief mobile survey about a product or experience, then a mobile browser may well be the way to go. Although mobile browsers are still fragmented, the emergence of mobile web technologies such as HTML 5, JavaScript, CSS and Adobe Flash are making it more viable to reach a wide mobile audience.

• Downloadable applications provide a richer user experience for applications such as diary studies and mobile panels, but they are typically harder to deploy to a broad range of users. Also dovetailing with Sean's recent post about quality over quantity, I would argue that in many cases a more select audience that is highly engaged is more valuable than a broad audience that is minimally engaged. It is these cases -- for example digital ethnography with alarms to trigger highly contextual questions at random times -- where mobile apps really shine.

Bear with me as I attempt to tie all of this information together...

The mobile jungle is in some ways becoming more wild every day, but I am also seeing signs that a handful of gorillas may be starting to establish some turf. While I don't believe that all five gorillas outlined here will win over the long term, each one represents sufficient market share and resources to be considered as key players for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, I think we will begin to see some stabilization of mobile platforms, resulting in more reliable ways to reach the masses via both web browsers and downloadable applications.

For the next while solutions focused on mobile research will have to choose between "wide and shallow" or "narrow and deep" -- i.e. either focus on reaching a broad range of people with a more basic level of engagement, or on providing a high level of engagement within a more narrow scope of users.  I don't feel that one is inherently better than the other, and both represent significant opportunities within the burgeoning mobile research space.

Over the long term the two paths that I have identified will converge. In the meantime, having invested a lot of time and energy developing methods to engage people in a deep and meaningful way, I am a big believer in the power of rich mobile applications. With over 3 Billion application downloads in less than 18 months, Apple has more than proven the viability of downloadable apps, and all other major platforms have since poured significant resources into their own mobile app stores.

Over the next while it is prudent to focus on the five key players I have identified here: Apple, RIM, Nokia, Google and Microsoft. But peripheral vision is often what sets the great apart from the good, so I allow my eyes to wander a bit in search of innovative smaller players that might just have a thing or two to teach the gorillas. 

For many outside of our industry, Market Research has always been a fuzzy concept, and let's face it, a weird choice of career.

But no longer! A major Hollywood movie (Last Chance Harvey) features a market researcher as a main character.



But what is she doing with pen and paper? What an antiquated approach! We would expect her to be using a computer assisted personal interviewing system or some kind of PDA survey software, of course. Where are these movie script writers doing their research?

Legal Note: This post in no way confirms that my wife convinced me to watch a movie which could be described as a Romance Drama.

Can anyone deny that the conventional understanding of what constitutes "real" research is being challenged? This Research Live article nails it:

"The rise of the Internet and social media has caused the received wisdom to be questioned on issues including sampling, anonymity, the relationship between researchers and participants, and whether there aren’t better ways to understand what people think, feel and do than just asking them."

With online research being at the forefront of so many researchers' mentality, do we move to an approach where we simply monitor and observe? Of course there's the problem of access as it relates to your sampling frame. But at least thanks to Anderson Analytics', we know 'Who's using Social Media?':




Personally, I think a moderate, measured approach is what's needed. If you read one article on this, check out the Zinc research blog entry on Social Media and so-called "legitimate research":

"...the traditional model for marketing research needs to be overhauled, and social media will be one of the impetuses for changing the role of research in the marketing toolkit. That said we should not throw out the existing research model too quickly"

And finally, if you want to read a sound, measured debate on both sides, then I'd suggest checking out this article: Is Social Media Measurement Meaningless?

As it gets harder for businesses (and researchers!) to reach people, the buzz about the affect of social networking applications is starting to get louder in our ears...

Apparently some people are wondering if the rise of direct forms of customer interaction like voice of the customer programs will make the use of Mystery Shoppers for mobile data collection a thing of the past.

Judi Hess, president of MSPA calls mystery shopping "a means to measure customer service, product knowledge, and sales ability." More important, she says, it offers subjective, targeted feedback that companies just can't get from less structured kinds of feedback, like social networking tools or surveys.

Ok, I can buy that. Read more here (you'll need to sign up for a free account).


Tom Anderson in particular is pushing us to think about the role of Social Networks and what he's calling "next gen marketing research". He recently interviewed representatives from Facebook and LinkedIn. It's just a start, but you can see that the social networks are starting to think about the convergence of these worlds, too.

Click here for the Podcast


All three of them will be a highlight of an upcoming ESOMAR panel session. This will be one you don't want to miss...



These are great articles to get us thinking about engagement, the future of survey conducting and the way we deliver insight from the market... But one of my favourite approaches comes from a seasoned researcher right here in Canada.

More on that next week...

Here are some articles of interest I ran across last week:

Cell-phone-only Penetration by Market

Interesting visual mapping the penetration of cell-phone-only households down to the local market level in the US.


Why Aren't You Leveraging Mobile?

The use of mobile marketing is increasing. What are you doing to take advantage of mobile marketing and mobile channels?


The Question Isn't What Research Is. It's What Research Will Be

CMOR is attempting to agree to a definition of market research to protect it from potential threats. But the move comes at a time when views of what research is -- or should be -- are in flux.

I've found myself pondering the effect of mobile technology on the future of research, and figured it warranted a blog post.  I've been involved with both handheld surveys and wireless technology for most of my career, and throughout that time I've been amazed at both how quickly and how slowly things change.

Mobile technology itself moves incredibly quickly, but adoption of technology can range from lightning fast to incredibly slow. Market research professionals are analytical and pragmatic by nature, so it is understandable that researchers have been slower to embrace new technology than many other industries. Ironically, market research is often a key driver for decisions which drive technological advances, yet it can take years for those advances to be reflected back into the research process itself.  

Methodology is central to any decision relating to survey research methods.  When new techniques are introduced to "improve" tried-and-true processes, it is important for researchers to understand all of the implications of the potential change before implementing it en masse.  So research about research, or more specifically about new techniques for conducting research, is very important. But this is easier said than done, as most researchers are so busy generating revenue through existing methods that they lack time to explore new ones.  The academic community breaks a lot of ground in this regard, but it takes time for academic research to reach--and to be embraced by--the commercial market research sector.

Recently I have seen mobile research being embraced as a reasonably mainstream approach for survey data collection.  It is still "leading edge", but it is no longer "bleeding edge" -- at least for face-to-face interviews and diary studies.  While the application of mobile survey software is still a niche play today, we are about to see it extend beyond its traditional application to touch every other aspect of survey research -- including web surveys, phone surveys, mystery shopping and other methods.

What intrigues me more than anything is where this bottom-up thinking will really lead the research industry. While we are busy planning for the evolution of survey research to involve mobile technology, I believe it is equally important to see things from the top-down: i.e. to realize that researchers are losing control of people's attention, and consumers are increasingly recognizing the value of their opinions.  Will the methodologies of today be effective in the future, or do we need to reshape our thinking to embrace emerging realities?

I believe the future of mobile survey research looks a lot different than the past.  We will not simply see old methods enhanced by new technology; entirely new methods will emerge around the cultural phenomena that shape our societies around the globe. There is no limit to the opportunities that will be enabled by social networking and location-aware technology, which will be bundled into mobile technology that will make today's most impressive devices seem as archaic as early PCs appear today.

Those of us who wrap our arms around the cultural changes that emerge as a result of new technology, rather than just trying to shape new technology to meet old and tired methods, will realize amazing new opportunities for mining insight from consumer opinions. There will be many false starts and a lot of experimentation, but in a few years we will look back at the way we did things in 2009 and be amazed by how dramatically human communication -- and in turn market research -- have changed within a very short time.

I'll share some of my predictions on this blog over the coming months. Today I just wanted to get the thread started with some background thoughts...

Unlocked Palm Centros are on sale for over 50% off at TigerDirect.ca.

Grab them before their gone!

These Smartphones work great for mobile market research, and are a good device to use with Entryware mobile survey software.

It seems as though reseach online has recently reinvented themselves. They were always a great source for information, but they seem to be exploding with news and original content lately.

A recent article titled "Survey Geek vs. The Cord-Cutters" offers an audio interview with self-confessed 'survey geek' and blogger, Reg Baker.  There are also great links to relevant articles on the cell-only population and the affects on research. You can listen to it here:



This interview is great in my opinion, particularly in that he begins by describing the "cell-only" problem in terms of the sampling frame. He also eloquently yet concisely descsribes the issue of bias due to undercoverage, and how the target group of the research and the topic may affect results. Not to mention cost and data implications of doing a survey on mobile phone. Reg also identifies the "wireless mostly" problem. I won't replicate every point here in text, but here's a researcher who knows his stuff.

Brilliantly, he surmises (and hopes) that researchers will adapt to the problem by matching the method to the problem - execute "fit-for-purpose methodology decision", to paraphrase slightly.

But one thing stuck out to me... there's no mention of three significant and growing ways to conduct a mobile device survey, cellphone survey, mobile marketing survey (mobile research by whatever name you choose): WAP, SMS and Survey Applications.

Check out the latest numbers from CASRO. You might find it's worth getting ahead of the curve by adding other mobile techniques to your methodological tool box.

Mobile is mandatory. 

You can't get away from it and the evidence is everywhere. Even the University of Missouri has made smartphones mandatory for journalism freshmen!

And everyone now agrees that "Mobile" is more than 'my cell phone'. Mobile is changing the way we live. Business and society is seeing the benefit, but we are also seeing the pitfalls.

Rapid growth of the use of the wireless Internet is causing wireless broadband services to slow down and interrupt from data overload, and according to one report, the result is that mobile broadband sales are slowing. Don't get me wrong - there is still impressive growth overall, it's just that the growth is slowing as consumer frustration sets in.

There's more than an inconvenience factor... now we have to worry about 'cellphone elbow'. Doctors are indeed seeing more instances of this.

As people get more engaged with their devices, I'm betting we'll see more opportunities for doing deep and personal research with respondents, as can be done when people are recruited for a targeted, self-completed digital ethnography. 

Regardless of the specific research techniques to be employed, we will undoubtedly begin to see advances in the sophistication of mobile market research methods arising from this cultural shift.

In the meantime, watch this space for more updates on what fabulous new ailments arise as a result of increased mobility of the population!

According to Marketing VOX, mobile marketing is set to explode, with a forecasted 26% increase this year.

The article predicts that local mobile advertising will be the next hot trend - particularly when it comes to mobile search. This info comes from BIA's The Kelsey Group.

This is no wonder. In Canada, Eight per cent of Canadian households have cellphones but no land line. The number jumps to jumps to 34.4 per cent when looking at households composed solely of 19- to 34-year-olds! In the US, it seems that across all age brackets, 1 in 5 households have cut the cable.

This is a tide that no one can fight. To not be making plans for mobile engagement is to miss out on the next evolution of engagement. 

It's important to note, though, that growth in engaging with mobile advertising is coming mostly from Smartphone users (which comprise only about 5% of the global mobile market today).

So while most marketers are focused on advertising, I wonder: who is really focusing on engagement? Market insight will not be delivered entirely through analyzing click through rates on mobile ads. We will need to engage people, and find ways to encourage them to provide feedback and ideas in a time and place that suits them - this is the promise of the mobile device survey and mobile market research.

I ran across this article recently that highlights the results of a report that the Center for Disease Control put out on wireless substitution (aka canceling your land line for a cellphone).

There were some very interesting results:

• Over one in five U.S. households (20.2%) are cellphone-only, an increase of 2.7% over six months ago.
• One in every seven homes (14.5%) took all their calls on cellphones despite having a landline.
• More than three in five adults living only with unrelated adult roommates (60.6%) were in households with only wireless telephones. This is the highest prevalence rate among the population subgroups examined.
• Nearly two in five adults renting their home (39.2%) had only wireless telephones. Adults renting their home were more likely than adults owning their home (9.9%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Men (20.0%) were more likely than women (17.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Adults living in poverty (30.9%) and adults living near poverty (23.8%) were more likely than higher income adults (16.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.

This information is certainly handy to market researchers as it helps them figure out the best groups of people to use mobile marketing surveys on rather than other survey methods.

But then I began to wonder, why would the CDC need to do such an in-depth study on mobile phone usage? Shouldn't they be focusing on health-related data collection?

Well, it turns out that most major survey research organizations, including the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, do not include wireless telephone numbers when conducting random-digit-dial telephone surveys. Therefore, the inability to reach households with only wireless telephones has potential implications for results from health surveys, political polls, and other research conducted using random-digit-dial telephone surveys.

So, to combat this problem, the CDC conducts in-person surveys to collect information on health-related issues. During this interview they also take the opportunity to collect information on household telephones: is your family wireless-only or landline. This information is released via the report above twice a year.

I think it is great that the CDC is aware of this problem, but why keep conducting random-digit-dial telephone surveys if you've already proven with your own study (not to mention all the other mobile phone vs. landline statistics that are out there) that you will get biased results?

Seems pretty obvious here that the best answer for the CDC, as well as the other major survey research organizations, is to switch to mobile data collection.

I ran across this article in the most recent MRA Alert! magazine, discussing how Smartphones, and the desire for a richer mobile service experience, are changing how we look at the mobile phone.


MOBILE PHONES ARE SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST A PHONE

From text messaging to GPS to online banking to social networking to web browsing to gaming to online coupons to watching videos to, well, almost anything.

A quote from this same article says it really well:

"...the most dynamic and important technology platform today is mobile technology, and that from a marketing research perspective, it is becoming clear that mobile devices will be the next breakthrough research environment."


MOBILE RESEARCH GETS GOOD REVIEWS

Contacting people through their mobile device to conduct your mobile market research will also ensure a good response rate.

Robert Manchin, managing director of Gallup Europe, has found that respondents embrace mobile interviews. In a recent article, Pragmatism Over Ideology?, in the May 2009 Research World magazine, Manchin says:

"'We have quite a bit of evidence now that it's more personal because you are not losing someone at the first stage of sample selection (recruitment).' And people seem more likely to give up time on their mobile because 'dead time' is easier to find, such as while commuting or during breaks."


Survey conducting via mobile phones is certainly coming into its own. Why not look into mobile survey software for your future marketing research needs?

A recent survey done by Pew Research Center shows that Americans have cut back on most electronic items, due to the recession, that they used to see as necessities three years ago.

One of the only items that did not see this decline in importance is mobile phones. 49% of people see cell phones as necessary, which is the same as in 2006.


So, with mobile data usage on the rise and the necessity of mobile phones not decreasing, even during a major recession, it is clear that mobile research is a still a viable option.

People are willing to cut back on cable television, cars and household appliances, but never fear, they will still have their mobile phone with them even in this down economy.

You will be able to reach them anytime and anywhere with a mobile phone survey to get the most up-to-date market research data for your market research needs.

A recent study is claiming that mobile web browsing is 30% slower than typical online browsing.

I'd like to learn more about this study... Most desktop users (in North America, anyway) now browse with high speed Internet. But many only access the Internet at work where they have T3 speeds (learn more about T1 vs. T3 here). On the other side of the spectrum, some still use dial-up.

On the mobile side, some users have 3G, and some only browse when their HTC TyTn finds a WiFi connection.

Smartphone users are increasingly allowing their devices to be absorbed in to their daily lives. In particular, a new study shows the mobile web is popular with commuters. I'm one of those who browses on the way to work - I regularly browse mobile cbc.ca and The Onion Mobile, among other small screen friendly sites.

But The Onion recently eliminated their nice clean text only WAP site, and now forces me to download images. I could set my browser not to download images, but other mobile sites are more sparing with their use of jpgs, and I prefer that because like all consumers, I'm impatient but still want a good experience. I can only get through about half the content that I could before in the same amount of time, and I wonder if the flashier site is worth it.

Perhaps they are just staying ahead of the curve, but it's frustrating. And when users get frustrated, they go elsewhere.

What I'm really wondering is whether the stat is much worse than 30% for most of the population, given how bad mobile browsing is on some phones.

It just made me think about the implications for mobile market research. We need to make sure we present our mobile survey participants with fast-to-load and easy-to-navigate surveys, otherwise they're not going to participate in another cellphone survey until the wireless web catches up with the regular web for all users in every city on every phone.

The April 2009 edition of the Marketing Research Association's Alert! Magazine includes a feature article, Research in a Mobile World, by Mark Cameron, President and Co-founder of Techneos.

The article is filled with a variety of information including, the basics of a mobile survey, how mobile research can work today, and the future of mobile data collection.

I want to expand on my recent post about viability for wireless surveys on respondent devices...

People carry their mobile phone with them just about everywhere they go, and they increasingly view their mobile device as more than just a phone. The landscape is ripe for survey conducting anytime, anywhere, so why hasn't mobile market research completely blown up yet? 

If you take the cost of wireless data out of the equation, then the answer largely lies with the vast array of devices on the market.

Compare the infrastructure question to telephone surveys. Every landline phone transmits voice - it's the main purpose of your home phone. You have decisions to make regarding your CATI software, RDD and sampling strategy. And getting people to pick up and stay on the line and talk to you is a problem, but when you place that call, the phone on the other side will work no matter what brand of phone is in use.

Now move to the Internet... On the web, you have respondents choosing to interact with you through Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and now Chrome. Your email invitation might get filtered out as SPAM, but there's a relatively small number of permutations that your survey software has to deal with when it serves up questions and answers on a computer screen.

Executing on a cellular survey provides a completely unique challenge. The number of devices, operating systems and even capability within a company's product line are staggering. Add to this that some users might only be able or willing to respond to you by SMS, not over the web, and it becomes clear that choice in the mobile marketplace is a problem.

Corporations don't develop with the notion that compatibility with their competitor is good. In the ever-changing world of mobile devices, they just want to get the next handset out, and get it out fast. Things don't always work as you'd expect...



I wish I could link to the source, but hearsay will have to do for now. At a recent wireless summit, a prominent panelist mentioned that when Transformers the Movie came out, they wanted the accompanying wireless app to work on every mobile device. It took 20,000 versions.

So which methodology do you choose if you want to reach respondents?

Do you go with a strategy that takes advantage of the iPhone, which sold 3.8 million phones in the first quarter this year, or do you choose an application that has been customized to excel on a wide variety of devices, or do you go with SMS - something everyone can use, but limits your research options?  It's a tough choice, because your sampling strategy needs to be considered in tandem with your method of data collection.

Will the market eventually show convergence, or will mobility follow the laws of entropy? Only time will tell...  

CASRO's popular Annual Technology conference is coming up. With budgets being slashed, you might not be able to get on a plane at the end of May, but if you're interested in mobile survey software and mobile market research, then try to catch AJ Johnson's talk "Avoiding the ‘Hang ups’ - Understanding Mobile Phone Self-completion Surveys".

Learn more about the conference here.

A recent post on this blog linked to some interesting stats:

• Worldwide mobile phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with 4.1 billion mobile subscribers at last count (that's a global penetration rate of 61.1 percent).
• 1.27 billion fixed line subscribers (18.9 percent global penetration)

In areas like North America where traditional telephone research is a hefty percentage of the data collection that gets done, researchers might have a heart attack for the implications on their sampling plans! It's tempting to think that maybe moving to cellphone survey are just around the corner to relieve our response rate woes! 

Being at a company that specializes in wireless surveys, we're in a very exciting time. But I also have to have a dose of realism - Not all phones are created equal. 

In this story about Smartphone viruses, I learned that Smartphones currently make up about five per cent of the total mobile market, and the most popular smartphone operating system, Symbian, has 64.3 per cent of the smartphone market (3.2 per cent of the entire mobile market).

The line between smartphones and feature phones is blurring with the entry of WebOs, Android and the like. But have you ever browsed the mobile web on anything other than a Palm, Windows Mobile, iPhone or Blackberry? It's miserable.  My Samsung SPH-a920 is awesome - I'd recommend it to anyone, as long as you don't brwose the mobile web.

Setting aside connectivity problems for a moment, and just thinking about the hardware people own, wide acceptance of a mobile phone survey via the mobile web is probably further away than we would like to admit. Perhaps survey applications, text msg surveys and IVR will be our best options for doing a cellular survey in the short to mid term.

As a follow-up to my previous post about the Palm Pre Smartphone, we are increasingly excited about bringing mobile research to this exciting new hardware platform.  More news is emerging about the ability to run Palm OS applications on Pre devices--such as this Youtube video showing some flashy gaming examples, or this FAQ that provides more technical information about exactly what features are supported.

Planned for release in the US later this quarter, Entryware software running on the Palm Pre should be a great solution for mobile surveys.  A beautiful screen, slide-out keyboard and both WiFi and 3G wireless options make the Pre an ideal device for conducting surveys in the field.  And its multi-tasking operating system will enable researchers to get very creative with third-party applications.

The Pre's interface operates like a deck of cards, so you can run a questionnaire on one "card" while running other applications (e.g. videos or location-based services) on different cards. Palm's new Synergy communication infrastructure and built-in GPS system also open up innovative new ways to manage your interviewers, respondents, mystery shoppers, etc.

We plan to turn this amazing new platform into an ideal solution for mobile market research.  Stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.

According to a CTIA wireless surveys, mobile data service revenues increased 39% in 2008 over the previous year and amounted to almost 22% of all wireless service revenues.

Steve Largent (President and CEO of CTIA-The Wireless Association) had this to say about the survey on mobile devices:

"Wireless technology is an integral part of everyday life for more than 87% of the U.S. population; changing and improving the way we connect and interact with the world around us. The wireless industry consistently evolves, innovates, competes and grows every year at a rapid pace, and 2008 has carried on this remarkable trend."

With mobile device usage on the rise, have you looked into doing your market research via wireless surveys?