blog.msurveys.com

Via Research Magazine:

"Consumer goods manufacturer Procter & Gamble has created a new research facility which uses computer-generated imagery to re-create shops.
P&G spokesperson Marina Barker told Research: “It’s an area the size of a small office which uses computer technology to provide 3D simulation of a virtual store.”
Research participants enter the room, known as 'The Cave' and walk through the simulated store, looking at different displays, 'picking up' products to look more closely, and choosing to 'buy' the ones they like.
[...]
Gianni Ciserani, general manager for P&G in the UK and Ireland, sees 'The Cave' as a quicker and cheaper alternative to arranging a pilot study in a real store."

This is exactly the kind of thing I could (would love to) see happening in Second Life, as an even quicker and cheaper alternative to the kind of mixed virtual/real environment described here. An entirely virtual 3D store inside Second Life, which avatars can visit and interact with, would likely cost a fraction of the money invested here. Items in the store could be scripted so can provide feedback as to how they're being used (picked up, put in basket etc.). Research participants wouldn't need to go to Weybridge, but could do it from the comfort of their own home. Granted, there may be things that couldn't be done easily in Second Life, but given that the store is already virtual, it would seem a logical next step to move the entire experience into a virtual 3D world like SL.

GMI (my employer) has acquired Appian Analytics, a California company particularly strong on dashboard and data visualization solutions, as well as business analytics and high volume data processing.
Welcome to GMI!

Apart from intensely disliking the term "consumer generated", Stowe Boyd calls Nielsen clueless for making their CGM summit a no-blog zone. Hard to disagree with him on a first look, seems disingenious at the very least. Stowe's full post in title link.

*Update*: A couple of posts from Jonathan Carson and Max Kalehoff (both Nielsen BuzzMetrics employees) explaining/defending the decision.

A Pew report, via Yahoo News:

"The cellphone-only crowd is not yet large enough and their views not different enough to affect the accuracy of traditional political polling, a new study suggests.

Not yet, anyway.

The report, based on polling by the Pew Research Center and The Associated Press, reaffirmed that those with only a cellphone tend to be younger, less affluent, more likely to be male and more likely to be minorities.

But when the responses to a series of political questions from those with only cellphones were blended in with the rest of those reached on traditional landlines, results were not affected. Very small differences in the results virtually disappear when the cellphone sample is blended together, and weighted to match the demographics of the national population.

The growth of the cellphone-only group has raised concerns among survey researchers that it would render obsolete the most commonly used polling method of contacting a random sample of the public on traditional landline phones.

Growth of the cellphone-only group may eventually reduce their differences from the overall population, said Scott Keeter, a survey researcher at the Pew Research Center."

Just got this through the uk-wirelessmarketing mailing list:

"To promote the launch of mobileYouth06 - part two, Wireless World Forum and the mobileYouth06 team are proud to announce our first ever virtual mobileYouth networking event in the popular youth hangout - the UK branch of Habbo Hotel."

Interesting, and proof that Second Life isn't the only virtual world used for real-life meetups. Up to now, my daughter and her friends have been the only Habbo users in our household, but maybe I'll need to get off Second Life for a moment and check out Habbo Hotel myself?

You can barely move for news and blog posts reporting that Reuters have opened an office in Second Life (see http://secondlife.reuters.com). I just went to visit their island in-world, and there's one thing I particularly love: you can pick up a HUD (heads-up display) that shows RSS headlines from various Reuters sources. So far so good (and all done before), but the kicker is that beside each headline, there's a "chat" icon, which - if clicked - offers to teleport you to a chat room in the Reuters building, where you can discuss news with others.
At the moment there only seems to be one chat room, and clicking on any subject takes you to the same place, but I imagine with sufficient interest there's scope to extend this functionality so clicking on a chat icon next to a headline you're interested in takes you to a chat room with people wanting to discuss that same subject.

Think focus groups and qual research - you can provide respondents with a "live" list of topics, and they click on the one they want to go and talk about, and get teleported into a room with other people discussing the subject.. pie in the sky at the moment maybe, but for how long?

In a rare convergence between my day job (survey software technology) and some of my on-the-side experiments (bbc backstage developer community), I've been creating some 3d objects that grow or shrink automatically, depending on some external data. See my post here for more info.

Methinks this could have some use in MR and data analysis/ visualisation. Maybe what I'll do is create some of these "living barcharts" next to my survey object, so you can see the aggregated responses to the survey as growing/shrinking 3d objects standing next to you..