Poll Everywhere Blog

1. To participate in a poll, your audience has to text the word CAST followed by a space and a randomly assigned number. This can be unintuitive for first time texters.
2. Our text message replies are currently built on a wonderful service called TextMarks which supports its business by tagging SMS replies with a short text ad. We’d prefer to be ad-free because it encourages your audience trust the overall service to be spam-free.

In a couple short weeks, we’ll finally remedy both annoyances because we’ll have our own SMS short code. We’re also going to let premium subscription customers choose their own keywords (there will be no per-keyword fee). Free users will still have numeric keywords automatically assigned, but without the CAST prefix.

Some savvy observers may be thinking, “What about keyword land grab?” Not to worry, we have a good solution to follow soon.

The process of obtaining a short code is neither pleasant nor rational. You have to pay for the non-functional short code for months while the mobile carriers hobble through their approval and provisioning process. We calm ourselves by imagining an artisan from the 1800s working a huge pile of new short code applications, but taking the time to lovingly craft each short code with care. Our baby has been three months in the making.

We want to acknowledge that Ariel at TextMarks has been wonderful to work with. If it wasn’t for TextMarks, we would never have gotten off the ground. We enthusiastically recommend their service to any website looking to add SMS functionality with a minimum of BS and pain.

Bonjour, ni hao, y konnichiwa! Poll Everywhere is unveiling new international text message (SMS) coverage. Hundreds of people have emailed us about using Poll Everywhere in their country, so we’re very happy to finally offer text message service to areas outside the United States. “Beta” features are things that might not be perfect; We’re calling this a beta feature because, while we tested it from five countries, we haven’t tested it everywhere. Be sure to test it yourself on our free plan, and email us if you find any quirks.

We now have text message coverage in the following countries, with more coming soon:

• Asia, Africa, & the Middle East
  • China
  • Hong Kong
  • Indonesia
  • India
  • Japan
  • Korea (South)
  • Malaysia
  • Singapore
  • Taiwan
  • Thailand
  • Saudi Arabia
  • South Africa
  • Qatar
• Australia
• Europe
  • Italy
  • Greece
  • France
  • Belgium
  • Czech Republic
  • Hungary
  • Austria
  • Germany
  • Netherlands
  • Spain
  • Portugal
  • Sweden
  • Turkey
  • United Kingdom
• Brazil
• United States

All existing customers can use Poll Everywhere when traveling overseas by changing their text message coverage in the profile page:

When you return home just switch the coverage area back to your home country.  Paid customers on our three largest plans may run different polls in different countries simultaneously - just give us a call or send us an email and we’ll be happy to help you out.

In the first months of Poll Everywhere’s life, we used to have a pie chart mode that people could select as a way to present their poll results. Our usage reports showed that nobody was using pie charts. When we took them away, nobody complained. And nobody has requested pie charts since!

Pie charts have been on our mind lately. We’ve seen a few around.

Everyone who has an interest in the effective communication of information knows the work of Edward Tufte. I’ll never forget the first time I saw his 32 page essay that compares PowerPoint to Communist Russia on the cover, and his analysis of the slide that failed to communicate the risk of O-ring failure in the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster.

Tufte has a clear opinion on pie charts. In the second edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Tufte says on page 178, “Given their low data-density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pie charts should never be used.”

We generally agree. Picture real-time voting in a large audience. Imagine that three of the voting options are in a tight race for first place with 26%, 23%, and 25% respectively. A bar chart reveals the leader at a glance, without forcing the eye to search for a backup data source such as textual data labels. Especially when data is changing, a pie chart doesn’t tell the story without requiring lots of iterative eye movements.

Interestingly, Tufte also has a criticism for bars as well: the length of a filled and labeled bar is redundantly shown in six ways (2 sides, cap, fill, label data, label position). Fortunately, most of our polls have the space to spare, and audiences prefer this kind of linear reinforcement. As viewing distance increases, the redundancy of bar graph visual information converges gracefully.

One thing we hope to release soon is the ability to pick from predefined visual themes: preselected combinations of colors, graphic effects, data positions, and background overlays. Maybe we’ll try creating a Tufte theme.

But to get past the religious debate of chart minutiae, you’re the customer and we love listening. If you need a pie chart for an upcoming event, we’ll build you one.

We’ve added instructions for how to use your live Poll Everywhere polls inside 280 Slides presentation.

If you’re not aware yet, 280 Slides is a breakthrough in web application design and usability.  It’s like PowerPoint for the web, and it’s even more powerful than Google Presentations. Using standard web technologies, they have proven that you can transform a regular web browser into something that practically feels like a desktop application and they’ve managed to make it look really good, too.

Since we think 280 Slides is such a great app (and totally free), we believe our customers will find it useful and may want to use it with Poll Everywhere. It’s perfect for when you don’t have PowerPoint installed, or you want to share a presentation easily.

If you create a slideshow in 280 Slides, you can still download it into PowerPoint 2007. Don’t forget that Poll Everywhere supports native slide format downloads for both PowerPoint 97-2003 and PowerPoint 2007.

This is just one more way that we’re making it easy for you to use polls from Poll Everywhere in your next meeting or event.

For the latest release of Poll Everywhere, we improved many small but important details. The most visible of these improvements are in the charts. During Brad’s time at NECC he noticed that a lot of presenters didn’t change the default poll settings, making the charts unreadable in larger rooms. In response to this problem we made the text message voting keywords appear in the chart area, which comfortably allows all text in the chart to be bigger.

Our customers asked for clear and visible voting instructions, and a way to show that votes are being received without exposing the popular choice too soon.  Therefore we also added a “Hide Results” button. This view shows the options that the audience can respond to as well as a real-time running total of the responses.

For customers subscribed to our premium plans, we added a few additional variables to the custom reply message that you can configure.  When participants respond to your polls via text message or over the web, you can automatically reply with information like the total number of responses received for that poll.

Nobody likes to lose their audience’s valuable feedback.  Our polls now send their creators a short email notification if they fill up to 95% of their capacity.

A little while ago we had the opportunity to use Poll Everywhere at an event that Bob Metcalfe presented at.  Bob co-invented Ethernet, founded 3Com, and is now a partner at venture capital firm Polaris.  His only suggestion was that the error messages weren’t clear enough, so we made them smarter.  They will be much more intuitive to our web, smartphone, and SMS voters.  Smarter error messages make for a less confusing experience if a user responds to a poll incorrectly.

We figured Bob was worth listening to.  So are you!  Tell us what you need, and we just might build it.

Earlier today we switched short codes in response to the outage on the 41411 short code. We’re happy to say that the issues have been resolved and we have switched all of our polls back to the 41411 short code.

We realize at Poll Everywhere that reliability is a huge deal for this type of application; our customers simply can’t afford even a second of down-time during their presentations. It just has to work. In response to today’s incident we are going to invest a lot of time and money in building a more reliable and redundant infrastructure that will include multiple text message short codes from different providers.

As always, we believe the least we can do is be open about any problems that come up at Poll Everywhere and keep you informed.

We want you to be able to rely on our service.  This is the first outage we’ve experienced in a year of SMS service.  

We’ve fixed this morning’s SMS Shortcode outage by switching to a different provider.  Instead of 41411, your polls will direct people to text their CAST #### votes to 66937 (for the time being).  Now that we know this kind of thing can happen, we’ve created a failover system so that service can be switched to a backup shortcode in minutes instead of hours.  Thanks for understanding.

People who tried to purchase a plan from us during this short outage have been refunded and given two months of complimentary service at the plan level that they attempted to subscribe to.  We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.

This morning we have been experiencing intermittent text message service. We’re working with our aggregator (the folks between us and the phone company) to figure out the problem. For now only web voting and smartphone voting are functioning properly.

We will be posting updates on this blog or you can follow us on Twitter.

I was blown away at the usage of technology at the NECC 2008. While I was at EduBloggerCon two Saturday’s ago, everybody had their laptops open or cellphones turned on and were twittering, blogging, or streaming the sessions over the web. While most presenters cringe at the thought of all of this technology and would consider it as “distracting”, everybody was contributing to the sessions and making them more meaningful. I remember looking up at one point to see Steve Dembo video streaming a session from his cellphone!

I finally met with Karen Montgomery. She’s been a huge proponent of Poll Everywhere in education circles and communicating the pedagogical benefits of cell phones in the classroom. Liz Kolb, who is publishing a book about cell phones in the classroom, gave a great talk (I ended up in the “standing-room only” section because she packed the house) on some of the education applications that are available today. It really struck me how few mobile education apps are out there. With the all of the hype around the iPhone, I would expect the tide to turn over the next few months. We’re very happy to be one of the first applications to reign in the use of cellphones in the classroom. I can’t wait to read Liz’s new book to learn more about mobile education technology.

I met a lot of new faces at NECC and learned a tremendous amount about the problems educators face with bringing technology into the classroom (mission accomplished!). Wes Fryer publishes a blog and a series podcasts that discuss these problems as well as the new technologies that are available for educators. I highly recommend adding his blog to your RSS aggregator to learn about the new technologies that are coming out as well as their implications in the classroom.

We’ve improved our embedded web widgets so that people can simply click on the option they wish to choose as opposed to text messaging their results to your poll. This makes it much easier and less confusing for users to cast votes on your website or blog. After all, if you’re already browsing the web, why would you have to send a text message to respond rather than just vote over the web? We though it was more in line with what people have become accustomed to doing over the web and that is web-based polling.

To embed a poll in your blog or website:

1. Login to Poll Everywhere
2. Create or select a poll
3. Towards the bottom click “Embed in Blog or Web Page”
4. Copy and paste the code snippet into your blog or web page
5. Open your poll and let the voting begin!

Try it for yourself! Click on any of the options below to vote for your favorite color: