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MOBILE MARKET RESEARCH

Mobile Folk is building a smartphone based research panel to meet the needs of market researchers in the mobile age.

Why:

Current Web and Telephone based panels have so far done a good job of serving the industry, but they will be affected by the following trends:

• People in increasing numbers have gone mobile, and responding to conventional phone surveys over a mobile phone is prohibitively expensive for most of them.
• An increasing percentage of phones today are smartphones. The adoption rate of such phones is very high - one needs to only look at the [Apple iPhone's sales] to get some idea of where the consumer communication industry as a whole is headed.
• Smartphones such as iPhones allow for the ability to access the internet - from the phone. This is changing how consumers access the internet. Rather than using a conventional web browser, they prefer to download apps onto their phone to do very specific tasks - there's an app for fetching the news, an app for checking the weather, an app for checking email, an app for seeing the latest tv listings. Instead of going to websites, people prefer to download an app. Needless to say, how people communicate is a subject of great interest to us.

We believe that to get the best out of someone, they should be treated on their own terms. This applies to surveying - if people are communicating through smartphones, then market researchers should find ways to let them respond to surveys using their smartphones!

When?

• We are rapidly building this panel at the moment. As it grows, we will be in a better position to give numbers, demographic information and other data. Stay tuned!
• In the meantime - if you are a market researcher, panel provider or other firm that is interested in surveying smartphone users, a software provider, or another firm that is interested in our work, contact us.