Mobile Data Collection

How to do Mobile Research... and Why!

Tuesday, June 1, 2010 by Sean Conry

We're presenting this week at the CASRO conference with Ipsos. We worked together to field a mobile, self-initiated digital ethnography with users who have Blackberry and Nokia phones. We think it's the first study of its kind, and I wanted to put down my thoughts on why we did it.

With all of the press that Apple creates, I think most people can intuitively guess about the 'how' of mobile research. All modes have their use. It ranges from quick polls via SMS, to mobile web through to Apps.

We use SMS for notifications and invitations because that's what method of communication works best in many cases. But we don't collect data that way. Readers of this Blog know that we are strong believers in Apps. And here's the reason why... In general, businesses and academics alike look to Mobile Research to accomplish one of three things.

Researchers A) want to access populations that aren't responding to other modes, B) know some of their respondent's are going to attempt take their online survey on their mobile if they darn well please, or C) want to accomplish something new.

We're trying to get at C - with the rich capabilities being built into phones, we have a tremendous opportunity to get at the moment of experience, understand a day in the life, and much more through photos, GPS, etc.

Apps are the only mode that allows this today. Yes, you have less reach, but you can't believe the richness of what comes back.

Just like every other mode, Mobile is just one more option in the Researcher's toolbox. For those who know when, how and why to use it, the results can be pretty amazing... As things unfold, I'll look to share some of those over the coming weeks.

Is Co-Creation the Newest Research Fad?

Monday, April 12, 2010 by Sean Conry

At the recent Mobile Research Conference in London, Mick Couper, methodologist extraordinaire and mode effects expert from the University of Michigan, reminded us to think about the "what's in it for them" when it comes to our respondents. The message I took was that if we don't, then we can expect mobile research participation to erode in very short order.

There may just be a groundswell afoot about making research more meaningful for respondents. Well I hope so anyway - for example, take this blog on Co-Creation of surveys. This post in particular focuses on cooperating with respondents to ensure the translations in your interview survey make sense.

That's a really great idea, but there's also a new future emerging where wireless survey participants will also help create and shape our research instruments over time - to actually influence the crux of the insight we're trying to gather. Some of the next innovations in research thinking will be to engage people over the long term, with functions of real value to them. Check out how the American Legacy Foundation is engaging people who are trying to quit smoking.

Sure they're doing diaries to collect valuable research data which will help society (maybe even their neighborhood) over time, but they are also providing real value to the participants by establishing a new social and support network of peers, and by providing access to their own trends and data. This could even provide compelling inputs to motivate changes to the research instrument over time.

I do not envy the analyst who's job it will be to figure out how the evolving changes in the research, and respondent knowledge of their habits, might affect the data! Some companies already offer respondent-generated response lists that grow over the life of an Internet survey - For example, the first 10 answers are basically a 'specify other' which gets turned into a multi response option.

But WOW! What an exciting thought that people will actually drive the insight, rather than just be put in to pre-defined check boxes. I can't wait.

Choosing the Right Hardware for Survey Research

Monday, March 29, 2010 by Sean Conry

A client of ours is giving a presentation to a group of colleagues on why they chose the hardware they did for a self-completed study. We help clients through this all the time, but it got me thinking... What are rules when it comes to picking the right hardware for MCAPI, diary studies or other mobile data collection.

Consider hardware and software in Tandem.

In many cases, the software provides the capability you are looking for, and the hardware is secondary.
(well, maybe this one's really 1.b.) Don't be swayed by what's sexy, what's inside counts too

You'd be surprised how often we hear from someone who has bought a fleet of iPhones, or sourced a no-name device from "a guy who could get them a really good deal". They soon learn that it's not a good deal if it wasn't the right hardware for the job.
Don’t buy too far into the future.

Technology is going to change, so it’s likely not even possible to try and pick something you think will still work for you 6 years from now.
Ask your technology partners. They will often have
1. Blogs: http://blog.techneos.com
2. Whitepapers : http://www.techneos.com/resources/white_papers
3. Staff who are up to speed on the latest offerings
Ask your colleagues. They will undoubtedly have valuable experiences to share.

Mobile Research Concepts in Practice

Monday, March 15, 2010 by Sean Conry

The basics might seem obvious... The inherent benefits of mobile diaries & digital ethnographies, as well as other mobile research techniques delivered via mobile applications include:

1. Augment traditional survey questionnaires with photos and locations to enrich data and drive new insights
2. Greater mobility means a higher likelihood that respondents will have the ability to take a survey anytime, anywhere
3. Time & location stamps give higher confidence that data was entered where and when it was supposed to/reported to be
4. Real-time data allows for compliance monitoring
5. Eliminate the problem of recall

But a lot of research practices, even those departments which are "ad-hoc" by definition, are built around creating an operational expertise which is replicated over and over again to collect market research data for various clients and scenarios. So sometimes we like to share specific examples to help people understand where a new technique might be useful...

Scenarios which can benefit significantly from a mobile survey system include:

· Detailed Category Interaction (diary studies)– EG. Snacking/Eating:

o Where and when did you eat? Why did you choose what you did? What options were available? How did you feel? Show us what you bought/made?

· Consumption/Usage that happens anywhere, or where location affects choice:

o FMCG, or disposable consumer goods

o Tobacco & Alcohol (typically done in academic or social research settings)

o Diapers

· Understanding a day/week/month in the life of a respondent segment:

o GPS capture for significant insight in to patterns

· Shopping/Retail:

o Exercises to create outfits, or understand how segments choose where to buy different articles of clothes

o Pseudo-mystery shopping (audit retail vendor knowledge or Sales Rep attention to customer)

· Medical:

o Physician Drug rep encounters

o Prescription/consumption and results of regulated products

· Exploratory & Innovation. Perhaps most valuable for dynamic, important or changing segments:

o New parents, Brand Mavens, Primary Grocery Shoppers, Baby Boomers

· Advertising and Media Exposure:

o Where & when did you see advertising? Show us the ad. How did it affect you?

· Mobile populations, or users of a product or service that by definition is mobile:

o Frequent fliers / Airline V.I.P.’s

o Commuters /Heavy Transit Users

o Sales/Service Reps

Are we in for a wireless traffic jam?

Thursday, November 26, 2009 by Mark Cameron

I read a fascinating blog post from Michael Mace at mobileopportunity.blogspot.com, called "The mobile data apocalypse and what it means for you". I won't paraphrase Michael's comments, which were insightful as always, but I urge you to read the article if you are considering how to incorporate mobile technology into your business.

There is growing concern that wireless data usage is about to explode. The main culprits for this will be web browsing and multi-media streaming, which have grown by leaps and bounds since the launch of the iPhone.

Personally, I agree with Michael that the doomsayers' estimates of expansion to the point of implosion will turn out to be far-fetched (I look forward to his next article on that subject). Smart people will find ways to reduce data usage and to solve the bandwidth problem, and may even allow unlimited data plans to be viable over the long term. But there is also little doubt that we are heading for at least some uncomfortable congestion on the wireless super-highway, and possibly worse.

I am often asked why downloadable applications will matter in mobile computing when the wireless web provides an easier and more ubiquitous solution to many problems. I am a bit fan of the wireless web, and I believe that any serious mobile strategy has to recognize the web browser as a key channel for communicating with people on mobile devices. But you can't beat the responsiveness and performance of an application that is installed on a device, just as Windows applications are still more usable in most cases than their web counterparts.

Hybrid applications are an ideal solution for many business tasks. E-mail software is a good example. While mobile e-mail is highly dependent on a wireless network, it also leverages the power and usability of the device on which it runs. The e-mail client connects to the network as needed to send and receive e-mails, but it does not depend on a persistent connection or clog up wireless bandwidth unnecessarily.

The mobile web is getting better everyday, and that is turning out to be a double-edged sword. As web usage soars with the explosive growth of Smartphone and Netbook adoption, the very thing that is driving that growth -- anytime, anywhere access to information -- is likely to cause some major hiccups along the way. I'm betting on the mobile web long-term, but in the meantime I'll be quite content to keep my data safe and sound on a mobile device, and run applications that use the inherent power of the computer that I call my phone.

The Frustration of Mobility and Reach

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 by Sean Conry

In my last post, I wondered about device market share and it's affect on our ability to reach the right people for survey conducting.

I focused on the manufacturer / operating system, but another element also has a significant affect on reach. I guess you could call it Mode. We normally talk about mode in terms of whether we're collecting data over the web, over the phone, face-to-face, etc. Mobile is it's own mode, but there are choices within that mode.

Specifically, the primary mobile mode possibilities for a mobile survey system are text message, mobile web, and applications.

Check out this interview/podcast from a recent interview at a CASRO event. Heidi Dickert has some good points about how a different type of technology is required when looking at mobile surveys. The message? You can't just replicate the same old approach when it comes to mobile research.

Text messages give you ubiquitous reach, but the commonly held experience among those I speak with is that SMS surveys are good only for very, very quick polls. The burden on the respondent is high, and you can only squeeze in 3-4 questions before participation drops off - and if you haven't seen it yourself, believe me, it doesn't just stumble off the curb, it careens off the grand canyon.

Mobile web feels like it should be familiar since CAWI has taken over as the primary mode of choice in so many countries. However, the problem is that the mobile web isn't great yet for the vast majority of users. You still need a lot of patience. Think about a news page that requires 10 seconds to load, but then you spend 5 minutes reading. That's much more palatable when compared to refreshing screen after screen after screen of a mobile web survey. To reinforce this, check out Mobile Marketer's recent article about slow load time is the #1 performance issue on the mobile web.

Off course we believe in Applications (particularly Java where possible, native where needed). With iPhone App store just reaching it's 2 Billionth download in September, and Facebook's install base leaping from 2 million to 10.5 million in two months with the release of targeted Java versions, the path seems pretty clear to us...

Cheap Netbook for Mobile Data Collection

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 by Sean Conry

Hardware markets have never been so attractive.

Check out the hot deal on the ASUS Eee PC with Windows at $285.

MCAPI used to only apply to PDA Survey Software, but with the introduction and proliferation of Netbooks, and powerful mobile survey packages like the ones offered by my company, now you can easily deploy complex surveys to small and large screens alike, depending on your project need.

Google and WPP offer $4.6m in research grants

Monday, September 28, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

If you are an academic researcher, you may want to take advantage of Google's and WPP's offering of $4.6 million in funding for media research grants on a variety of topics, including online and offline media interaction, relevance and effectiveness measurement, audience types and engagement, and verticals and new media.

Our company specializes in diary research tools that have been used extensively to study media exposure, linking it to environment, mood and other consumer behavior. So, using our mobile data collection tools may be a perfect solution for research you conduct with this grant money.

The Affect of Social Networking on Research

Thursday, August 27, 2009 by Sean Conry

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...

Is the future of research directly related to the past?

Sunday, August 2, 2009 by Mark Cameron

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...

Do-Not-Contact Trumps Opt In

Friday, July 24, 2009 by Sean Conry

I recently read that in this economy "opt out is the new opt in".

Yeah right.

This was literature on a site (which I won't mention) that sells marketing lists, so I had to chalk it up to wishful thinking rather than benevolent distribution of informed market information.

For those of us that take this stuff seriously and know that blatant Spamming erodes respondent cooperation, we need to know that even when we think we're following the rules, local laws might derail our efforts. As as we move too add SMS survey invitations to our toolkit, the landscape is getting tricky to navigate.

Now, marketers who advertise products and services such as alcohol, tobacco and gambling cannot market to any phone number or address which is registered on a do-not-contact registry within Utah or Michigan. It's all about protecting families, and you can check it out here.....

"But I don't advertise tobacco! I'm in research!"

Maybe... But my point is that we need to be careful. Extend this to our world of mobile data collection for a moment, and is it really so hard to believe that similar legislation could be introduced to protect certain groups.... like children for example, a segment for whom we already need explicit parental consent before we can engage.

"One odd aspect of the laws enforcing these programs is that even if a consumer double-opts-in for an SMS campaign and verifies that he or she is 21 or older, marketers would still be in violation if that person previously submitted their mobile phone number to either state’s do-not-contact list."

Could you be unwittingly inviting minors to participate in your mobile marketing survey? Or are you treating SMS invitations with less ethical scrutiny than email? Might be time to re-scrub that list...

Link of the week

Friday, June 12, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

Here is an article of interest I ran across this week:

Cheap Phones are Big Business

A new report from Juniper Research forecasts that by 2014, annual sales of low-budget mobile devices will be up 22% from this year. This is good news for those looking to do mobile data collection in low-income environments or developing countries.

Why conduct landline-only surveys when 1 in 5 households are cellphone-only?

Friday, May 29, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

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.

Mobile phones a necessity, even in a down economy

Friday, May 15, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

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.

Techneos featured in MRA's Alert! magazine

Thursday, April 30, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

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.

The wild west of mobile devices and the cellphone survey landscape

Thursday, April 30, 2009 by Sean Conry

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...

Cellphone Survey for Mobile Market Research on Respondent Devices - Is it viable?

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 by Sean Conry

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.

Mobile phone usage continues to climb

Thursday, April 9, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

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?

What's the right device when using PDA survey software?

Thursday, April 2, 2009 by Sean Conry

A customer recently called me and said "we have a big MCAPI project starting this summer. We've used Palms in the past with your PDA survey software for customer satisfaction questionnaires, but Palm is losing market share. What device should we use for our mobile data collection?"

I argued that market share in the consumer world is irrelevant to what gets the job done best for intercept research.

Some people think Palm is all but dead, but that's far from the truth. Did you know that Bono (yes THE Bono) just put hundreds of millions of dollars in to Palm?

And did you know that Windows Mobile is losing market share?

And no, it wasn't displaced by iPhone, but by RIM.

Yes, I realize that Palm is the smallest slice in this pie, but you don't even see Android on here (yet). Also, the Palm Centro was one of the best selling devices of 2008, with sales surpassing 2 million units in July of 2008.
The point is that you want to run your survey software on a device that is reliable and easy to use. It probably should have a touch screen and a keyboard, and offer good battery life. Palm and Windows Mobile both offer great devices in this regard.

I'll admit that Palm's story isn't all rosy, but they have a strong chance at re-winning some of that market share. ..and if you still don't believe me, check out this segment from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Mobile research is coming into its own

Wednesday, April 1, 2009 by Susan Bilczo

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). Compare this to only 1.27 billion fixed line subscribers (18.9 percent global penetration).

The graph below shows this dramatic evolution unfold over the last 10 years:

In comparison, the PC industry is forecased to see its sharpest unit decline in history.

Prevailing economic conditions will accelerate this trend, as users consolidate pricey communication services into cost-effective, all-in-one mobile devices.

And for the first time ever, half of all new connections to the internet will come from a phone in 2009.

So how does this play out in market research? Well, I'd say it might be time to take a serious look at mobile data collection if you haven't already.

Mobile market research has been around for awhile now, but with the dramatic increase in mobile phone subscribers in the last few years, it is quickly becoming a permanent and important fixture in the market research industry.

A mobile phone survey or PDA survey allows you to reach people worldwide quickly and easily, and in many cases costs less than paper surveys.

Why not look into mobile survey software as a viable option for your market research?