Survey Analytics Innovates for Obama Address

US firm SurveyAnalytics rolled out a new method of surveying public opinion in real-time during President Obama's State of the Union address last night - combining smartphone-based feedback with comment from social media sites.

Seattle-based SurveyAnalytics offers surveys, crowdsourcing, panel management and polls, and in 2009 was awarded a White House contract to develop a new 'open government brainstorming' web site for President Obama's administration.

For last night's State of the Union survey, the firm combined its 'SurveySwipe' smartphone mobile research technology with UMass Professor Stu Shulman's DiscoverText research tool, in order to analyze the real-time data from both sources.

All data collected was 'open-sourced' (no singular partner has exclusive rights to the data) and available to the public.

'Everyone who created a community for the State of the Union will have access to their own data, as well as an aggregate view of data across all communities,' explains SurveyAnalytics' President and CEO Vivek Bhaskaran (pictured). 'Instead of the results being generated by a small sample of a few hundred people, the results reflect a sample of thousands more.'

Web site: www.surveyanalytics.com .