Category: Cell Phones
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Whither mobile?
I spent two days last week in Chicago at Market Research in the Mobile World (MRMW). I now have been to all four of the North American versions of this event, all the way back to Atlanta in 2011. Last week’s iteration caused me to go back and look at my post about the Atlanta…
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A little theory might help
As best I can remember it was November of 2009 when I first sat through a conference presentation setting out some basic design considerations for mobile research. I can’t imagine how many times since someone has presented essentially the same advice whether from the conference stage, in a corporate white paper, via a webinar, or…
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If You Need to Know What’s Legal, You’re Already on the Losing Path
This is the second and final post from Michael Link on location. Privacy and ethics concerns in research are not new, but they have taken on considerably higher visibility in our 24/7 news world as researchers test the bounds of new measurement approaches. At a recent symposium on Leveraging Location hosted by Nielsen, a panel…
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Storytelling comes to the conference podium
The first two presentations at the conference this morning have helped me to understand what it is that I'm finding so disquieting about this conference. What we are hearing is not the usual kind of research conference presentation. What we are hearing are stories. No data. No experiments. No hypothesis testing. Just stories. Oral blog…
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Kids in a candy store
I'm at the Market Research in the Mobile World Conference in Cincinnati where the constant stream of cool MR mobile applications is off the charts. You can't help but be impressed with the creativity being brought to the task of using mobile to give us a whole new perspective on consumer behavior. And the people…
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Truth in texting
I admit that I've never been much of a fan of SMS surveys. Too many limitations to do anything meaningful. Once Nathan Eagle started showing up at conferences and talking about his experiences with SMS in developing countries, especially in Africa, I could see a niche. That is, if you can call accessing two billion…
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Is mobile finally ready for takeoff?
Not that I claim to have read them all, but the one thing that most of the year end MR prognosticators seem to agree on is that 2012 will be the year in which mobile finally takes off. But will that takeoff be more reminiscent of the Wright brothers or the Saturn V? Larry Gold…
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The (wireless substitution) beat goes on
To no one's surprise the gold standard on wireless substitution in the US, the NHIS, reports that the proportion of wireless only households keeps growing. As of July, 2011, it was 31.6%. That's a 1.9% increase since December of 2010 and translates into 30.2% of all US adults. Just eyeballing the graph below it does…
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Mobile apps or HTML5?
One of the inside baseball debates about mobile is whether it will be driven by apps or web browsing and HTML5. At first blush it would seem that the cost of developing, certifying, and maintaining apps across mobile platforms would give a clear edge to HTML5 with its enhanced offline browsing and (forgive me) flash-like…
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How to write a mobile research pitch piece
I've not always been kind to mobile in some of my posts. It's not that I have a problem with it or don't expect it to become an interesting and important part of how we do research at some still undefined time in our future. It's the hype that gets me. That hype mostly follows…