Following the recent acquisitions in the research industry, think about Toluna buying Greenfield Online/Ciao Surveys, one would expect a response from other players in the market. And to be a bit more specific; what would smaller players in the market do with their panels? There are several obvious solutions to the troubles of maintaining smaller panel(s), one could thing about an advanced sharing system or outsourcing panels.

As all of these seem to be happening there is the other obvious solution to which I’ve been pointing several times in the past; several companies ‘chipping in’ together and combine their panel efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe you are familiar with the fact that a webserver can see which browser version you’re using and for example also how big the window is you’re using to view that website. In itself that is interesting enough for some statistics on the visitors of your website.

But there is more, way more and that is where thoughts of privacy, but also of marketing and research potential come in to play. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has made a website to show a bit of what is possible. (Go support them here, by the way.)

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Have you ever taken a survey recently, or maybe several surveys? If so you might have wondered about several things. And maybe those things are exactly those things that bother me about surveys. One could have, of course, something against surveys altogether, but they remain a powerful research tool, that is one thing that’s for sure. Even though I’m personally calling for a broader way of doing research, I don’t think we should abandon it.

I do think we should look more into some of the things that come to mind when you look at a survey. These things are often related to a certain tradition that lies in doing survey based research and indeed in a sort of tradition that is created per tracker survey as well. Not changing things for tradition’s sake, is one of the worst things a researcher could do and still this seems to happen all too often. Survey methodology in general is one thing, but a lot of me wondering about survey research is the lack of changes, of innovation.

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It’s that time again; once every for years geeks from all over the globe come down to the Netherlands for a Hackercon. This year it’s HAR; “Hacking at Random“. I will be there as well to watch, learn, do and have fun! I’ve written a bit about this event on Dutch blog Retecool (so yes it’s in Dutch), as it came up a bit earlier this year as well. They will try to provide you all with streams of the talks (Dutch article), so you can all enjoy the latest news on tech and security related issues. You can find the program here. I will try to follow some cool stuff myself, of course and will write a bit about it later on, hopefully as soon as next week. I will try to be at “My BREIN hurts! ” and “Panel discussion with Brein and HAR” so you will definately hear from this and possibly some GSM network related stuff that I will try to cover with a blogpost…