••• shopper insights
New sensing platform for retail environments
Uses IoT architecture
In-store behavior analytics firm VideoMining Corp., State College, Pa., now offers a new sensing platform called OmniSensr for retail environments. The integrated hardware package combines video, Wi-Fi and beacon technologies. The platform is optimized for anonymous shopper tracking and generation of behavior analytics – from storewide tracking to shelf-level interactions with demographic segmentation. All processing is carried out onboard in real time, eliminating the need for large, elaborate hardware in stores. Employing an Internet-of-things (IoT) architecture, the sensor’s outputs can be integrated in a cloud environment with transaction data and other data sources (store map, product layout, promotions, etc.), facilitating the ability to provide repeat visitor analytics, store-wide tracking, trip-type analysis and brand-level behavior analysis. In addition to the shopper behavior analytics, the technology enables mobile location-based marketing to allow retailers and manufacturers to serve targeted content to shoppers at the point of decision in the form of promotions and relevant product information.
www.videomining.com
••• LGBTQ research
IPhone app enables participation in LGBTQ study
Examines priority health issues, disparities
Tustin, Calif., firm Thread Research announced a new iPhone app that gives the LGBTQ community a way to participate in the University of California, San Francisco’s PRIDE study of the LGBTQ population. It is the first population-level longitudinal study of LGBTQ health and will help researchers gain insight into priority health issues as well as unique health disparities in the LGBTQ population. The app will enable real-time consent, enrollment and participation in the study from the iPhone and will allow LGBTQ participants to voice their health concerns so researchers can crowdsource health topics that are important within the LGBTQ community in order to design the longitudinal questionnaire.
http://threadresearch.com
••• DIY research
Microsoft launches free DIY research service
For surveys, audience engagement, ad tests
Microsoft’s Bing Pulse has launched Pulse for Market Research, a free, self-service solution for surveys, live content rating and moderated response groups of any size. It supports the measurement of real-time TV audience engagement through instant sentiment tracking and surveys for response groups, ad and video tests and audience studies. Some of the features include: pulsing (stimulus response) and polling functions; the ability to live-stream a video or event through Azure Media Services or Ustream; customizable voting pages; API access to gather raw data in real-time and the ability to upload content for participants in the platform and allow participants to share ideas and thoughts through Yammer chat rooms. It also runs a Web interface that works on any connected device and can be iFramed into any Web site or app.
http://pulse.bing.com/pulse-for-research
••• predictive modeling
Modeling technique simulates purchase journey
Borrows from epidemiology
London global media agency MEC has unveiled MEC Velocity, a predictive modeling technique borrowed from epidemiology to create purchase journey simulations and predict consumer behavior and interactions with brands. The technique builds on MEC Momentum, the agency’s proprietary approach to understanding consumer purchase decisions. MEC Velocity allows the agency to build simulations that run into the future, predicting consumer behavior and interactions with brands and services and the impact on sales and market share in a category. It can then simulate experiments by changing key metrics or campaign engagement to see how fast and by how much they will affect consumer behavior and then sales.
www.mecglobal.com
••• political research
Research Now debuts U.S. voter panel
Can survey based on party, district, other variables
Plano, Texas-based Research Now has launched a U.S. voter panel that allows political researchers to capture the perception of American voters on the latest issues. The panel provides insights into political trends like candidate perception, voter turnout, key campaign issues and insights into the perceptions of Millennials. Pollsters and political researchers can access a targeted audience of over 600,000 voters from every state and U.S. Congressional district with the new panel and can survey constituents based on their party affiliation, historical election turnout, congressional district and other key political variables. The design enables panelist participation in surveys via smartphone, tablet or PC.
www.researchnow.com
••• mobile research
Apple Watch app from 20|20 Research
For QualBoard Mobile platform
Nashville, Tenn., firm 20|20 Research has launched an Apple Watch market research app for the company’s QualBoard Mobile platform. The app is a free update for all research participants who download the QualBoard Mobile iOS application and is designed to increase engagement in mobile qualitative research studies with reminders and push notifications. Apple Watch users can touch the notification sent to their wrist to respond to survey questions via the QualBoard Mobile application. 20|20 Research is expected to release an updated version of the app this fall, with enhanced features and more on-device capabilities.
www.2020research.com
••• Briefly
Skokie, Ill., research industry information firm RFL Communications Inc. has released the RFL Global Top 50, a list of the top 50 research organizations along with a list of the top 10 big data analytics insight organizations.
http://rflonline.com
Boston firm Cintell launched its cloud-based customer intelligence platform that allows businesses to create, manage and share data-rich SmartPersonas (the company’s digital model of ideal customers) throughout their organizations. Cintell’s proprietary analytical model Cintelligence, the core of the new platform, is used to combine primary research, big data insights and actual user behavior to create and maintain actionable customer intelligence.
http://cintell.net
Germany software supplier SmartMunk has launched story.ly, a software for text analysis that analyzes customer feedback from responses to customer service, continuous customer satisfaction surveys and reviews of online panels. It also reduces the complexity of all unstructured text data and delivers the key messages.
www.smartmunk.com/wp
Washington, D.C., strategic digital communications and marketing agency Delucchi Plus unveiled its Insights product line, which offers a range of research products and analysis to provide context and next steps for clients. Insights provides online positioning, competitive review, sentiment analysis and audience identification as well as communication tools like Webinars, public speaking and a bimonthly digital trends report.
www.delucchiplus.com
San Francisco mobile marking automation firm Swrve has launched the Swrve Predictive Marketing Suite, a combination of predictive analytics with messaging and conversations for mobile apps. It uses behavioral algorithms to predict which app users will use next and automatically present relevant communications to customers. It is designed to allow mobile marketers to create better user engagement while growing revenues and reducing risk of churn.
www.swrve.com
Amsterdam firm Winkle released its latest Concept Screener offering, which provides qualitative measurements combined with emotional analytics via the company’s new proprietary engine, Pansensic. Pansensic decodes unstructured narrative to identify true, unfiltered consumer intentions that matter in product development.
www.winkle.eu
Redmond, Wash., analytics and insights provider Blueocean Market Intelligence has released upgrades to LiNK, the company’s end-to-end software that aggregates primary market research data and connects it to other sources, allowing integrated data analysis across brands, product lines, languages and geographies. The latest upgrades include a more powerful reporting interface, improved visuals and a suite of new tools for connecting survey data to general analysis and business intelligence.
www.blueoceanmi.com
Mountain View, Calif., social media analytics company NetBase announced PowerTags and Sentiment Classification. PowerTags enables NetBase customers to categorize insights for organizing and mapping social information and provides a space for users to build their ideas to support development of marketing approaches like consumer journeys, paths to purchase and target personas. Sentiment Classification lets users adjust sentiment based on their project needs and business objectives.
www.netbase.com
New York firm Easy Analytic Software Inc. has introduced the Right Move, a mobile app designed for business, real estate, education and personal use on iOS and Android devices that provides location, neighborhood and site evaluation information. It offers prospective homeowners, realtors, brokers and anyone scouting for a location key current neighborhood demographics.
www.easidemographics.com
Los Gatos, Calif., big data analytics firm Kyvos Insights now offers its flagship product Kyvos, an online analytic processing solution for Hadoop, a software solution that processes big data. It enables business users to derive insights from their data for more informed decision-making with no programming required and allows businesses to convert raw data into insights.
www.kyvosinsights.com
Amadeus, a Madrid, Spain-based IT solutions firm for the travel and tourism industry, has launched Amadeus Agency Insight, a travel intelligence suite of products and services that help travel agencies leverage big data technologies by turning market and traveler data into actionable insights including new routes and markets to address, travelers’ search behavior and performance against competitors.
www.amadeus.com
Renaissance Research and Consulting, New York, has introduced ItemSat, an algorithm for accurately measuring the importance of consumer product attributes. ItemSat is part of Renaissance’s ICSS customer satisfaction system.
www.renaiss.com
Amsterdam research software supplier Nebu has launched Dialer as a Service (DaaS) for research and fieldwork firms that conduct telephone interviewing in-house. DaaS allows interviewers to connect their headsets to the computers already in place, log in to the DaaS site and start calling without upfront hardware costs and no minimum time contract.
www.nebu.com
Nashville, Tenn.-based 20|20 Research has introduced an online version of dial testing that can include respondents from anywhere in any dial test project, eliminating travel, facility rental and the need for specialized equipment.
www.2020research.com
Burlington, Mass., smartphone visual IVR provider Zappix has added a survey package to its smartphone IVR solution, allowing companies to create, distribute and analyze surveys as part of the customer service experience. After each service interaction, the surveys are delivered at a set time to users via smartphone notification alert.
www.zappix.com
Ypulse, a New York research firm, has partnered with Austin, Texas, research firm Kinesis Survey Technologies and New York data collection firm Paradigm Sample to develop the Mobile Future Forum, a white-label solution based on Paradigm’s native app. The app allows panelists to participate in every portion of a project using a mobile-responsive and user-friendly platform.
www.ypulse.com
San Francisco mobile app intelligence platform App Annie has integrated Google Analytics to provide In-App Analytics, a free offering for app developers that allows users to view key usage metrics alongside data from five major app stores and 34 advertising platforms within one unified dashboard. The additional usage data joins performance metrics from existing App Annie products and provides a holistic view into the health of an app portfolio, enabling time saving analysis and optimization.
www.appannie.com
Malaysia media company Astro Malaysia Holdings Bhd has partnered with London-based firm Kantar Media to launch a dynamic television audience measurement (DTAM) system to capture and collate viewing data across peninsular and east Malaysia. DTAM will represent viewing behavior of linear channels and high-definition channels, recorded and on demand viewing and will be able to track viewership of advertising spots across all Astro channels.
www.astromalaysia.com.my
Flemington, N.J., firm HCD Research Inc. and Frankfurt, Germany, research firm Sensanalysis are collaborating to co-develop and market products and services that integrate neuroscience methods and qualitative multi-sensorial research tools to study emotional and subconscious response to products and the sensory experience. The two companies hope to provide comprehensive testing methodologies that explain how customers perceive products, what the subconscious and conscious contributors to their responses are and how to determine product attributes which can impact product usage.
www.sensanalysis.com
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, a London panel research firm, has launched a consumer panel in India. Consisting of more than 20,000 individual consumers, the new panel represents the growing Indian urban population of age 15 and over, a category representing more than 500 million people. Building on Kantar Worldpanel’s existing partnership with Indian market research IMRB International, the new panel will submit 100,000 interviews a year on purchasing behavior, usage, billing, carrier and vendor brand awareness and preference for mobile phones and tablets. That data will be reported to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech clients quarterly, starting in October.
www.kantarworldpanel.com/global
India IT solutions provider Mphasis has launched HyperGraf, a solution developed by its research and innovation initiative Next Labs that provides enterprise decision makers with real-time customer engagement insights by analyzing millions of multi-structured data points spread across multiple customer engagement channels. The technology correlates data from multiple consumer touchpoints and external data to build a single view of the customer with recommendations specific to the channels of interactions.
www.mphasis.com
Nielsen, New York, has extended its global alliance with Vancouver, B.C., customer experience management software provider ResponseTek to offer the Nielsen Listening Platform, which merges customer experience management software tools with business insights to help drive operational advancement for brands and businesses. Organizations can now manage performance at an individual consumer and store level through transactional surveys and real-time reporting to convert insights into operational improvements.
www.nielsen.com
Toronto, Ontario, marketing and analytics platform Turnstyle Solutions launched a new app specifically for the Shopify point of sale (POS) solution. Shopify, a cloud-based consumer platform, opened its Shopify POS app, allowing partners like Turnstyle to help merchants improve the in-store consumer experience. Shopify merchants can now download the embedded Turnstyle app to learn their customers’ behavior within their store, provide them with branded Wi-Fi access and engage with customers through proximity messages on their mobile device all from within the Shopify POS.
https://getturnstyle.com
MetrixLab, a marketing analytics and research firm based in the Netherlands, has added the availability of mobile norms for optimizing mobile advertising in the U.S., Europe and Asia, offering mobile-in-mobile copy testing and the ability to benchmark against its norms to allow marketers to optimize their mobile executions. The firm’s norms test ads on mobile devices and test advertising breakthrough in context.
www.metrixlab.com
San Francisco visual dialogue platform GlimpzIt has launched its self-service freemium platform developed to specifically reach consumers via mobile and images, allowing users to start a conversation and receive responses in the form of words, images and videos.
www.glimpzit.com
Reltio, a data management firm based in Redwood Shores, Calif., has launched Reltio Cloud 2015.2, the latest release of its data platform. The new version offers various features including granular segmentation and comprehensive audit and is designed to improve insights and productivity for business teams.
www.reltio.com
Leominster, Mass., research and technology firm Jibunu has added a coding tool to its platform that enables real-time coding while data is being gathered. The tool, named CODY (Coded Open-ends Done Yourself), is part of the Jibunu Report Portal which allows access to open-ended responses at any time. It will allow researchers to begin the coding process immediately instead of waiting for a project to be completed and gives access to real-time counts, quota management and advanced reporting features. Separately, Jibunu has introduced Roundtable Interview Conversation Kickstarter, or RICK, a product that combines qualitative and quantitative methods with instantaneous reporting to create a way to capture opinions before discussions that could lead to biased responses.
www.jibunu.com
Nuremberg, Germany, firm GfK has released the latest iteration of GfK Echo, its customer experience management solution that now has predictive analytics capabilities and better access to insights. It integrates structured and unstructured customer feedback with client and third party data and uses predictive modeling to identify which actions drive sales growth.
www.gfk.com
London research firm Tonic Insights has launched Q-Club, a new collaborative working approach that gives its clients additional benefits like free training sessions, thought leadership reports and the availability of desk space and meeting rooms located in central London and New York.
www.tonicinsight.com
New York data solutions provider Return Path launched Consumer Insight, its data-as-a-service solution, to make e-mail data on over 2 million consumers’ retail transactions and commercial relationships accessible to help analysts understand consumer behavior and market trends. By capturing online purchase receipts, the new solution will give insight into shopping activity and allow for analysis of buying preferences and patterns and offer granular detail like SKU-level data, itemized pricing and delivery information.
www.returnpath.com
London customer science company dunnhumby has launched dunnhumby Health, enabling health care institutions to leverage data to understand behavior and identify opportunities to improve patient interactions.
www.dunnhumby.com
Costa Mesa, Calif., firm MFour Mobile Research has launched MediaMatch 360°, a product that integrates media matching technology, validates consumer exposure and tests recall and behavior with a real-time view of consumers, allowing clients to see total ad exposures and survey panelists in real-time.
http://mfour.com
The Reputation Institute, a research and advisory firm based in New York, has launched a reputation tracker service that gives companies measurements and quarterly reports on their corporate reputations.
www.reputationinstitute.com
Provo, Utah, online survey company Qualtrics now offers bitcoin as a rewards option for consumers who respond to surveys and research requests.
www.qualtrics.com
Israel-based software solutions provider NICE Systems has launched a new solution that enables organizations to use a combination of voice of the customer feedback and predictive analytics to improve the customer journey in real-time. The new solution allows companies to intercept the customer journey and adapt it to reduce customer effort, improve retention and enhance the customer experience.
www.nice.com
New York social media intelligence platform Unmetric has launched Sense, an app that allows marketers to monitor their competitors through live streaming of campaign images, videos and hashtags. Users can select the brands they want to follow from Unmetric’s database and pull images and video from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The company will add YouTube in the coming months. Users can also bookmark specific content and tap individual posts for full text and engagement metrics.
https://unmetric.com
Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle has added a customer service management tool to its Oracle Social Cloud that allows companies to use Twitter as a major feature of their customer service offering. The tool uses an algorithm developed by Oracle that processes Twitter interactions and engagement metrics to help brands identify influencers and the impact of social messages.
www.oracle.com
Frisco, Texas, health care data collection company GLocal Mind has introduced its proprietary panel and process management software used to increase efficiency and ease of use for clients and in-house teams. The new software automates business processes such as feasibility check, quote creation, reporting and panel management, among other things.
www.glocalmind.com
Twitter has launched its Full-Archive Search API, a tool that opens its entire archive of tweets to marketers. Gnip, the Boulder, Colo., social media platform Twitter acquired last year, can access real-time Twitter data with its Historical PowerTrack and 30-Day Search API tools that help customers gain audience insight by analyzing archived posts. The new tool is an extension of the 30-day search solution and gives Gnip customers complete access to over nine years of tweets and allows them to search for any historical public tweet.
London research firm Simpson Carpenter has launched Klondike, a program that reads and analyzes text from customer e-mails, open-ended survey questions product reviews and other text and extracts themes and sentiments.
www.simpsoncarpenter.com
Needham, Mass., television and digital video advertising firm Extreme Reach Inc. has been granted accreditation for its suite of video ad viewability services by the Media Rating Council, an industry group that audits and accredits media measurement capabilities.
www.extremereach.com
The Media Rating Council (MRC) has granted Reston, Va., media measurement and analytics company comScore accreditation for video viewability measurement in the Ad Validation suite of validated Campaign Essentials, comScore’s campaign delivery validation and in-flight optimization solution. Additionally, comScore has integrated its video viewability technology with a list of partners to make measurement accessible for a variety of publisher and technology providers. New partners include AOL, Gannett, Videology and others.
www.comscore.com
U.K. consumer insight agency Join the Dots has been awarded accreditation from the Market Research Society as a training provider for its graduate development program, which provides training courses and project experience and placements.
www.jointhedotsmr.com
Fishkill, N.Y., incentive solution firm Virtual Incentives and Austin, Texas, insight community icanmakeitbetter, who formed a partnership last year, are now increasing their reward offerings for research participants in an effort to increase panel engagement. Virtual Incentives provided icanmakeitbetter with an API integration that allows automatic delivery and fulfillments of gift cards. The two companies customized the offerings, developed new products and built a system to allow faster incentive delivery to respondents, provide ease of use along the research continuum and provide a support staff and customer service to manage the incentives program.
www.icanmakeitbetter.com
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