Poll Everywhere Blog

Poll Everywhere was the first product to make mobile phone voting and SMS polling easy: You never have to call us or go through a lengthy sign-up process. We’re now introducing mobile web voting. This is a little different from our regular web voting where you distribute a private link to your poll. While you could always use a cell phone’s web browser to vote, traditional “web voting” was best suited for blog and email distribution. Now we have a streamlined interface for people to cast votes or send txt2screen using their mobile phone’s web browser: http://poll4.com

Some customers have asked about the costs of text messaging. Many people have a text messaging plan that costs less than $0.01 per message; those that don’t may pay between $0.05 and $0.20 per message. This can add up over time for frequent users. Mobile web voting uses a cell phone’s web browser to send messages directly to Poll Everywhere, effectively making the per-message cost free for iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and other smartphone users who have a data plan.

Just tell your audience or classroom to use their phone’s web browser and enter poll4.com (think, “Poll For” - we kept the address short because typing on a phone’s keyboard can be a pain). Poll4.com contains a box to submit a vote, just like sending a text message straight to our SMS short code. That’s it! It works for both free text and multiple choice polls.

To learn even more about this great new way to vote, go here.

We’re always improving. And you’re going to see a whole lot of improvements in the coming months.

We’ve made some enhancements to our user interface to allow for more apparent placement of key features and information. We also now offer a download link for PowerPoint 97-2003 files - and there’s a story about how that came about.

We saw a great video of some folks demoing Poll Everywhere at a conference. Everything went well and the audience was impressed. However, towards the end of their demo, they were looking at our PowerPoint functionality and ran into a snag because the computer they were using had an earlier version of PowerPoint. The manual instructions we provided for embedding polls into older versions of PowerPoint were 17 steps long! The presenters simply gave up on that portion of the demo. This really impacted us. We decided that despite the technical challenges, this is too much of a burden for our customers. We put other things on hold and focused on making it easy to download a PowerPoint 97-2003 (.PPT) version of the poll.

As for the user interface changes, we changed the tabbed interface and made the most important related functions a sub-menu.

Each poll now has an icon that indicates the type of poll.

You can now see your account users from the My Account tab.

We hope you find these changes useful. If you have more good ideas for us, let us know about them!

Hosting an audience choice award or talent show audience favorite is easy using Poll Everywhere. We were recently used to power the MIT 100K Business Plan Competition’s $10,000 Audience Choice Awards. You can watch the award ceremony (RealPlayer 220K or 56K), jump to 1:13:40 in, and see how Poll Everywhere was used for secure voting. The winning team was awarded a $10,000 audience choice prize.

Read about Poll Everywhere being used at the MIT Audience choice awards in the Boston Globe.

Or read about how Poll Everywhere won 3rd place in the mobile track.

Our customers asked and we’re happy to deliver.

Every plan, from Free through Max, can now set up free-text polls that allow your audience to express themselves freely. Instead of texting in their vote for a single option in a multiple choice poll, your audience can express themselves with words, phrases, their own names, questions for the presenter - anything you can say with a text message. The answers are displayed on the Poll Everywhere website, and will soon be available as live PowerPoint slides. Here are some potential uses:

• Use it as a tool to moderate anonymous questions from large audiences. You can display audience submissions to the presenter or moderator, allowing them to choose which issues to address.
• Use it as a brainstorming tool to allow everybody to contribute their ideas to the digital projector: “What should our new brand slogan be?”
• Allow students to text in short answers, much easier than with any clicker-based system: “What would be an effective Spanish book title for “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” in Latin America?”
• Create social artwork in public places like an sms2screen or “SMS graffiti” display.
• Use them as ice-breakers before a presentation on stage. Or ask a question that many people commonly answer incorrectly because of a popular myth, right before opening your speech or presentation which dispels it.

Multi-user accounts allow many users to share a single premium plan that is paid for by an organization. For example, a market research company may purchase 70,000 votes in our Max plan and make Poll Everywhere available to all their employees and clients. Entire universities or departments can purchase a plan for all their professors and staff. Each educator will have a separate user account that draws from the institution’s pool of purchased votes.

We’ve got more exciting stuff in the cooker. Visit us again soon!

Sean, Brad, & Jeff

We wanted to share some exciting news about Poll Everywhere. We were recently selected as one of the 35 semi-finalists out of 232 entrants for the MIT 100K Business Plan Competition, the “world leader among university entrepreneurship competitions”.

We’d tell you all about our strategy, but hey, that’s secret.

We have two really great mentors, Bill Frezza from Adams Capital Management and Mike Cavaretta from Morse, Barnes-Brown & Pendleton.

It’s nice to know somebody else sees potential in Brad besides Sean.

At Condense, we’re working hard for our customers on Poll Everywhere to continue to deliver great new features to make everyone more effective presenters, instructors, and religious leaders. While we can’t reveal everything we’re working on just yet, we did want to ask (nay, poll) our customers on things they really, really want to see in future iterations of the product. With that said, I welcome any of those reading our product blog to feel free to reach us at questions@polleverywere.com

We enjoy hearing from our customers, in particular some of the great stories you have to share, such as this quick one from Steve Dembo, Discovery Channel Education Network:

“You guys are kicking some major ass.  Those new pricing plans are dead on.  I’ve been opening up most of my presentations with a Poll from you guys lately :)  Today I’m a featured speaker at MACUL and will be using polls to open up two out of the three sessions.”

Thanks, Steve, we hope we continue to be able to help you get awesome responses from your audiences.

The Condense team is pleased to present our customers with a host of new features to make using Poll Everywhere even more enjoyable, and a new subscription model that gives everyone more votes for less!

Subscriptions

Based on your feedback, we’re moving from prepaid vote packages to a monthly subscription model. We’ve made sure that everyone who paid for votes now receives at least that many votes every month!

Due to strong demand, we’re introducing an exciting free plan for anyone who wants to try Poll Everywhere. Instead of 100 free votes for signing up, our free package now includes 1,000 free votes per month! You can stick with the free plan as long as you like and easily upgrade if you need to accept more than 30 votes per poll. You can also downgrade to a lesser plan at any time, without any hassle.

PowerPoint 2007 Slide Downloads

We love being able to embed polls into PowerPoint without installing anything, but the old way was a little clunky. So we’ve created the ability to download a PowerPoint 2007 file pre-loaded with your poll. This means that if you’re using PowerPoint 2007, you don’t have to follow the 17 steps listed on the old instructions page to get a poll into PowerPoint!

This saves time and makes it easy for you to take the embedded poll and copy-paste it into another presentation. As always, you can copy it into multiple slides or resize it in order to display prompts and figures on the same slide. If you’re working with many polls in the same presentation, the old method of copy-pasting the poll URL still works fine.

Gizmos (or widgets) for Web Pages and Blogs

Our tech-savvy customers were already embedding polls in their blogs and websites. We’ve now made this easy for anyone. Look for the Share section on the right-hand navigation when editing/viewing your polls. You can copy-paste some simple code into any web page that supports HTML such as blogs, wikis, Course Management Systems, or discussion forums.

Graphical Chart Updates

You may notice some subtle enhancements to our charts which make them look better at different sizes and resolutions. This will help our customers who are displaying the graphical polls in smaller spaces, such as a blog or mobile device.

Enjoy!

Meet the guys behind Poll Everywhere! For our fellow Chicagonians, Sean and I will be demoing Poll Everywhere tonight at TECH Cocktail 7. Please stop by and tell us what you hate or love about Poll Everywhere!

Here are a few photos from TECH Cocktail 5 where we officially launched Poll Everywhere into Beta.

Rod Monje with Hapax Labs is on the left and that’s me to the right.

Ah, a trip down memory lane. Does anybody remember the “party” look on our website?

We hope we see you there!

We are very sorry for some recent frustrations our customers have been having when trying to embed Poll Everywhere polls into PowerPoint slides. Customers have reported that after following the instructions for embedding a poll, they see only a blank screen when viewing the slideshow.  The reason for this is due to differing revisions of the Adobe Flash 9 Player. Adobe has released several fixes and revisions since they released the first version of the Adobe Flash 9 player. For polls in Poll Everywhere to display correctly, we now require v9.0.45.0 of the Adobe Flash player to be installed.

Additionally, what is frustrating about this is that versions of the player can be installed independently for Firefox and Internet Explorer. This is because Firefox has its own plug-in formats and Internet Explorer uses ActiveX-based plug-ins. Therefore, if you have the latest version reported in Firefox and are still scratching your head as to why the polls don’t work in PowerPoint, it’s because the ActiveX control is likely not up-to-date. Since PowerPoint relies on the ActiveX version of the Adobe Flash Player, it too must be updated.

If you want to see what version of the Adobe Flash plug-in you are currently using, go here: http://www.mediacollege.com/adobe/flash/player/version/show.html * Note that the version shown is the version installed for the plug-in of the current web browser you are using. Switch over to Internet Explorer to see the version installed for ActiveX.

If you want to update to the latest player from Adobe, go here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash * Note that the latest version is 9,0,115,0 as of the date/time of this blogpost.

Since we have issues with users viewing polls with outdated revisions of the Adobe Flash player, we have now enforced the version required into our poll. If you do not have the correct version of the plug-in installed, your Flash player will indicate that you need to upgrade. Once you upgrade, you’ll be able to view our polls correctly and, more importantly, be able to embed your polls into PowerPoint again. We hope this solves many of the headaches that some of our customers have been experiencing. We’re very sorry for any of the inconvenience.

If you haven’t noticed, Poll Everywhere has undergone some major changes. First and foremost is the new Poll management interface. While our old interface was working just fine we came to the realization that it would start crumbling when we started adding some of the exciting features that we have planned.

While our new user interface is the star of the show; we added other notable features including:

XML Results

Now you can download your Poll Everywhere results as XML! This allows even tighter integration between your applications and Poll Everywhere. For developers, this means you can now access results through our XML Poll API.

Time Zones

Did you ever wonder why the time stamp of your results didn’t seem quite right? We fixed that problem by adding time zones to Poll Everywhere. If you’re an existing user, you can click on “My Info” and change your time zone to your locale.

User Information Management

Ok, we should have had this from the start but we finally rolled it into Poll Everywhere.

Now you can change your password, email address, time zone, and other user information from the “My Info” tab.

While most of these features are small; we did a tremendous amount of plumbing work that is going to let us roll a lot of your feedback into our product. You will be able to see the fruits of this labor early in 2008.

We thank our early adopters for helping us make Poll Everywhere even better! To show our appreciation we have given 200 free votes to our existing accounts. Keep the feedback coming and Happy New Year!