Techneos Systems

Smartphones are rapidly gaining popularity in Brazil as recent price reductions have made these devices more accessible to people of all economic levels according to new research from The Nielsen Company.  Sales of smartphones were up 128% in the first half of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009, and up 17% versus the first half of 2008, the period prior to the global recession.   The volume of handsets sold also jumped 31%.  Overall, smartphones make up about 10% of mobile phones owned in Brazil.

The average price of smartphones dropped 2% in the first six months of the year compared to the same period in 2009 and by 5% versus 2008.

In this post we have extracted some interesting facts about the behavior of iPhone users in the United States and Latin America.

The Latin market promises to break records this year in sales as the overall market in 2010 in Latin America is making a recovery in technology sales.

This is not only because of the change in the amount of sales, but also the characteristics of the products purchased. According to several studies, in 2010, sales of smartphones could reach a historic level in Latin America with approximately 11 million units-4 million more than in 2009.

Guess what are the three things people take when they leave home? - Wallet, keys and yes, mobile phones! Imagine browsing your Facebook account and accessing the news while on a bus on your way to work, or passing time playing games on your Ipad and checking the latest stock trends while waiting on an airport for a business trip? Sound all too familiar?

Gone are the days of paper surveys or email questionnaires where you often get poor response rates. With the advancement of mobile technology, market research surveys can be seamlessly integrated into mobile apps, making it more fun for consumers to respond than traditional methods. Mobile platforms such as Revelation Mobile, FocusForums’ Iphone App and Techneos’ Soda are just some of the mobile survey platforms available in the market.

According to Frank-Thomas Naether, the Managing Director of NMRC, “Mobile research is about ‘capturing the moment’. This is highly relevant when it comes to gaining insights into the decision making process of participants. There are many tools and methodologies available in the market, some of them are really interesting and fascinating, and offers many possibilities to researchers”, said Naether. 

He added, “Mobile Internet devices will become more and more central in everyone's life. Everybody is online and communication is possible in both directions. Online tracking studies are an interesting possibility and GPS technology will offer additional valuable information on how, when and where people do what. Mobile Research is still in its infancy and the possibilities are endless”.

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What's next for mobile market research?

IDG News Service - Google's Android was expected to become the world's second most-used smartphone OS by 2012, after the Symbian OS, but now accelerating sales will help it get there this year, according to analysts.

Android was in fourth place during the first three months of 2010, trailing the Research In Motion (RIM) and Apple smartphone OSes by a margin of about 5 million and 3 million, according to market research company Gartner, which tracks the number of smartphones sold to end users.

However, since then sales have picked up significantly. In February, Google said 60,000 Android phones were sold per day and in June that number had gone up to 160,000, according to Google. Today, 200,000 Android-based smartphones are sold every day, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on Wednesday.

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Android growing much faster than expected, say analysts

The mobile medium offers various channels that are ideal for collecting information about merchants’ and marketers’ target consumers, including SMS, the mobile Web and applications.

Survey-based market research company Ipsos and survey software provider Techneos are working together to pilot new technologies and applications for mobile research.

Their latest project called “The Great British Weekend” was conducted during the May 2010 Bank Holiday long weekend using Techneos’ survey research application, service-oriented development of applications (SODA) across multiple mobile phones, including Nokia and BlackBerry devices.

“[Marketers and merchants should] start making it easier for their customers to tell you what they think, where and when it’s important to them, and do it now,” said Sean Conry, vice president at Techneos, Vancouver, BC. “Mobile is the perfect channel for learning from your marketplace because it helps you to get anytime-everywhere feedback.

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Merchants should use mobile to find out about target consumers: study

Final take
Dan Butcher, Mobile Commerce Daily

Ericsson, which provides technology and services to telecom operators around the globe, estimates we’ve hit another milestone in the Internet becoming increasingly mobile. The company claims, based on estimates based on industry information, that the 5 billionth mobile subscription was accounted for on Thursday, July 8.

The 5 billion mark was hit largely thanks to a surge in mobile subscriptions in emerging markets like China and India, the company says. In the year 2000, about 720 million people had mobile subscriptions, less than the amount of users China alone has today, still according to Ericsson.

Mobile broadband subscriptions are growing at similar pace and are expected to amount to more than 3.4 billion by 2015 (from 360 million in 2009).

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Ericsson Estimates 5 Billion Mobile Subscriptions Worldwide, Growing Fast
 

The new 1.3 version gives researchers access to information such as addresses, database lists or results from other surveys to be pre-populated and assigned to individual participants or interviewers for completion.

Researchers can also keep in contact with respondents through an email-style messaging system, and a data-cleaning option corrects any fieldwork errors at the source, rather than at the end of the project.

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Techneos upgrades SODA mobile survey service

Click here, to see the Techneos press release: "Techneos Announces Version 1.3 of SODA®"

Drawing from research data from one of its syndicated studies, ZINC Research points to a strong correlation between these two phenomena [Web 2.0 and its  social media platforms, tools and applications].  The report’s highlights:

Mobile phone usage

71% of Canadians (70% of males and 73% of females) now use a mobile telephone;
The majority of these users are young adults (18-34 years old, 76%) and adults (35-54 years old, 73%), most of whom have a higher level of education (college, 74%, university, 73%).

Mobile Internet access

44% [of Canadian] mobile phone users can and do use their mobile phones to connect to the Internet;

The majority of mobile Internet users once again skew towards the two core adult segments (18-34, 58%, 35-54, 42%) and towards higher education levels (college, 46%, university, 44%); mobile Internet surfers tend to skew more male (46% compared to 41% of female users).

Samsung is hoping to double its global smartphone market share from around 5 percent to 10 percent by the fourth quarter, according to a senior Samsung executive.

Lee Donjoo, senior vice president of the company's mobile communications division, told Bloomberg that Samsung is banking on the success of its Galaxy S smartphone. His comments largely echo those made recently by J.K. Shin, the president of Samsung's mobile communications unit.

Samsung has made it clear it plans to significantly boost its smartphone presence this year. In February the company said it aimed to triple its smartphone shipments this year, up from 6 million units last year. A jump to a 10 percent share of the smartphone market could catapult the world's No. 2 handset maker into the No. 4 slot among smartphone makers, just past HTC.

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Samsung plans on doubling smartphone market share

If you haven’t heard yet, AT&T is dropping unlimited data! By the time I post this, it probably will be unavailable altogether. I'm sure it had nothing whatsoever to do with the timing of the Apple WWDC development conference where the new iPhone is expected to be announced - you know, the one that will probably make it even easier to consume hoards of wireless data. AT&T is letting existing customers keep their plans, but isn’t signing up new customers.

Now there will be two basic plans, one for ‘regular’ users and one for heavy users. If you believe AT&T, then this move will actually save most consumers money. But the problem is that people have no idea how much data they are using. Sure you can get apps to monitor your data use, and in reality, it’s only heavy video conference and mobile TV users who will surpass the new limits and who are causing problems, but it’s an easy decision for them – it ‘s the rest of us I worry about.

Is this a sign of things to come? Sprint still offers unlimited data, as I’m sure do many others. As the iPhone is released on more networks (if those rumours come true), then we will likely see the other carriers experience the same bandwidth problems that AT&T is experiencing.

p.s. for a good read, check out the previous post on this blog post “Are we in for a wireless traffic jam?”.

Furthermore, there’s some talk that 4G will deliver the ability for metered billing.

So what does this mean for research? Well, in one sense it bodes well for the use of Apps over the Mobile Web because Apps can be so much more efficient than the web. Furthermore, survey data is measured in kilobytes, let alone megabytes (until you start incorporating heavy multimedia transfer for display or capture). These plans allow for gigabytes – so we’re probably safe on that front… Apps also don't suffer from Latency like mobile websites do, so the experience is better (a little more on that here).

So will it truly matter to research? Users could become more hesitant to use their precious data allotment on surveys, no matter how compact our data is. Our primary challenge could become one of education in our screening and recruitment activities when we go to launch a customer satisfaction questionnaire, or any other mobile research program. Of course, we must also incent adequately to cover those costs AND the respondent's time.

Personally, I think the mobile Internet will eventually reach the state of the “regular” Internet, where most broadband companies stratify their offerings based on bandwidth (How fast can I get what I’m downloading), not total use (How much will it cost me if I download this)?

We have had good success getting people who are on a wide variety of networks to participate in a cellular survey, so frankly I’m not that worried. But, we continue to keep an eye on the evolution of the wireless marketplace, optimize our products, and work with our partners and clients to educate participants.

Meanwhile, the rest of the mobile world continues to trudge along the App path – Google now includes Apps in search results.

It’s all part of the fascinating evolution of mobility and research!

In a recent blog post I wondered about who was going to tackle the issue of new multi-faceted datasets that incorporate rich media like photos alongside traditional survey answers. Aside from the sheer overwhelming nature of these datasets, the industry is crying out for non-static dashboards and reports as opposed to the tried and true PowerPoint file & stacks of cross-tabs (this was driven home as a major theme at the recent CASRO technology conference).

At that conference I showed how we used Pivot by Microsoft to dig into quali-quant ethnographic data from a recent diary research pilot project. It’s very cool – I recommend checking it out. Microsoft is releasing a way to integrate Pivot “collections” as they’re calling them into Silverlight Websites! It’s a way to share meaningful data in a cool and informative way like I’ve never seen before. (p.s. a big thanks goes out to Candice at Luminosity for pointing me towards this…)

… And if you like that, check out SeaDragon, the underlying technology. This 6 minute overview from the TED site will blow your mind.

Lastly, it looks like there are some new players in this space in MR. I learned about Cognicient, a UK company that specializes in dynamic dashboards for longitudinal data.

Connect these tools to your survey system, and you may just tackle that data yet!
 

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.

Research and advisory company Gartner has released its analysis of worldwide mobile phone sales for the first quarter of 2010, and when it comes to smartphones, the numbers look really good for Apple and Google. Microsoft, on the other hand, might want to reevaluate its strategy for the Windows Phone 7, the success of which might determine the company’s fate in the smartphone market.

According to Gartner, which measures smartphone sales, Google’s Android has surged to fourth place overall [see table], growing from 1.6% to 9.6% market share in a year.

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Android and iPhone OS Pave The Way For Huge Smartphone Growth [STATS]
 

Quant Scale Qual... I thought that sounded more elegant than "Qualnt - the new Quali-Quant". 

What happens when your diary studies routinely generate 2000 completes? Or maybe they're not "completes", but life blurbs, media micro blogs, or any other new research thing you can invent a name for. Our clients are starting to work through these issues, and companies like Language Logic provide a great starting point with tools that broach predictive/automatic coding and easily handle multimedia data formats.

But multimedia data is a complex beast. It may take Google or Apple to bring us the tools we need to get over the automation hump. For example, check out Google’s face detection technology and iPhoto’s Faces technology.

How this could be licensed, bent, twisted or re-purposed for research is yet to be seen… but the possibilities are exciting and I can't wait to see who solves it first.