Despite using a plethora of flashy graphics and professionally designed templates, many lecturers have to grapple with one common dilemma: PowerPoint presentations are usually pretty boring.
One common way in increase engagement, especially in a large group setting, is to encourage audience participation using a polling service. Unfortunately, many of these systems use proprietary devices and software which make them both inconvenient and unnecessarily expensive.
Poll Everywhere, a Y Combinator company that launched last Fall, is a service that allows presenters to sidestep these obstacles by taking polls with mobile phones. Instead of using a proprietary device, users simply send a SMS message to a specified number. This data can then be displayed on a dynamic PowerPoint slide, allowing users to watch the results change on the fly.
Today the site is announcing beta support for a number of international markets, including Australia and countries in Europe and Asia. Poll Everywhere is also announcing that it will release its own shortcode in the United States next week, which will allow users to manually assign certain keywords to their polls (in the past the service has relied on another company’s shortcode). In order to take advantage of these custom keywords, users will need to be part of a paid service plan, as the free version only offers randomly assigned words.
While Poll Everywhere originally launched last September, the company’s founders say it wasn’t until they secured Y Combinator funding that they began taking the project more seriously (all of them have since quit their jobs or dropped out of school). And while the company will be taking on some well established players in this space, particularly in academic environments, its simplicity and relatively low cost make it a viable alternative (and it’s already profitable).
There are a number of sites that allow users to create their own SMS campaigns, including Mozes and Tagga, which we covered last month. Poll Everywhere differentiates itself by adapting the technology to produce dynamic PowerPoint slides, though these other companies could conceivably integrate this functionality without too much difficulty.
There are like 10-15 polling startups here in LA. It’s ridiculous. It’s like polling widgets never happened 10 years ago.
No one has time for polls. Anybody can tell you that.
There’s a lot of Poles (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pole&defid=28047) in Web2.0 at the moment, so yes, they’re everywhere. LA too.
When was the last time you answered a poll?
A) The birthday party on Diller’s yacht
B) When Fidel Castro died
C) At the 2001 Presidential Election
D) One of the above
“Despite using a plethora of flashy graphics and professionally designed templates, many lecturers have to grapple with one common dilemma: PowerPoint presentations are usually pretty boring.”
A new O’Reilly book (unseen by me) suggests a more fundamental reason for audience boredom, and a possible cure: “Presentations are best when the slides serve as a mnemonic device for the audience to remember the message, not for the presenter to use as a crutch.”
http://fyi.oreilly.com/2008/08.....ology.html
This is actually a great idea. The best all-company meeting I ever went to was one where the entire company got to vote on things (questions like “how do you feel Department X is doing compared to the rest of the industry?”). It was really enlightening and amusing.
Text FAIL to 41441
Totally agree. This is another fail like the rest of the stuff that’s coming out of that fail farm.
Where’s your fail, Dave? Have you ever even tried?
Text “these guys are already profitable, mongoloid” to 41441
“Spicing up”? Polling? Making the disease even worse Instead of simply dumping PowerPoint?
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bbo.....topic_id=1
Two words: Use Keynote
lol
Th US shortcode is already available. I think this is a great idea. Use it creatively and you will make quite an impression during your presentations. I am about to see if I can use it in Keynote considering it supports Power Point slides.
“Text FAIL to 41441″ (i’m snickering out loud to myself) (linkback) Thrive or Fail? Poll Everywhere: Enhances PowerPoint with cell phone SMS polls [VOTE] - http://www.thriveorfail.com/b3a6f
First off please fix the tabbing order. Currently it’s NAME, EMAIL, WEBSITE then it shoots you off to the search text area at the top. That suckeths!
With regards to this discussion??? Go the way of Mr. Appleseed & myself with Keynote! Fork MS’s PP. Under Ubuntu I stick with tried and true OOo mostly 2′ish.
cheers,
macewan
One of my websites sees a very high response rate to polls on the site. Often, greater than 75% would take them. But then, it is a niche area site, with involved and anxious visitors.
The same may probably apply to PollEverywhere.
I think this is fantastic tool. We have already used this at Deloitte Consulting and our clients and practitioners have been very receptive.
It by no means is limited to a boring powerpoint format. It is useful anytime you want to gather survey information. I used it to get real time feedback on a survey rather than tallying up the results from hard copies. Poll Everywhere has a great reporting tools for that too.
It really couldn’t be easier to use. Those stupid hardware things always break. I think this helps us in Corporate America where presentations, surveys, and feedback are a necessary evil.
you guys from polleverywhere could use our vote method. so it would be free for poll participants! just let it ring once at a specific number and you have got the results real time too.
Another way we use to engage people in PowerPoint Presentations is Papershow: annotation and real time interaction. See http://tinyurl.com/5txtvo
Implementation is very nicely done and intuitive.
Problem with SMS’s polls are that they cost money to people participating the poll.
MobiVote has chosen another path, free for the users : they give their cell phone number, and then the MobiVote server calls then. It is much faster and reliable than SMS receiving… and 100% free for the participants…
See http://www.mobivote.com
Nice service, Jerome! We hate that participants could be charged up to $.20 per vote. In the US, our carriers don’t universally support FTEU (Free To End User) text messaging unfortunately, so we can’t even bear the messaging fees if we wanted to. Our solution so far has been to make the interface available at poll4.com as well, so at least it’s free to people with a data plan.
The one advantage I can see to Poll Everywhere compared to MobiVote’s creative solution is that the attendee’s phone number is still private when they text a Poll Everywhere poll.
I’m surprised they are the dominant player, having just started.
No one did this before?
Well, at least you can always present this startup really well
QUESTION THOUGH — what are the barriers to entry? What’s to prevent me from making the same service in 2 weeks?
We were surprised nobody had done this too. The existing players 1) didn’t have PowerPoint widgets, and 2) it was always “call for special pricing” where they size you up on the phone and it inevitably comes out to several thousand dollars.
Barriers to entry is a topic we’ve thought about a lot. We’ve already had a few close imitators. Without saying too much, I think we’re looking to go fast, and try to lead in innovation and customer service.
How many think the logo looks like they’re giving the middle finger?
I’ve had a few courses in which the professors polled the class using proprietary clickers. The technique was certainly an improvement over the typical PowerPoint presentation, and I think Poll Everywhere is taking a step in the right direction by making it much easier to implement. Probably less expensive, too, because it seems like most people (definitely college students) have unlimited text plans.
Another tool that is out there is SMSpoll.net (http://www.smspollnet). It appears to have many of the same features as Poll Everywhere. For more on the convergence of technology and presentations see my blog PPT - Powerful Presentation Techniques (http;//www.connectingdots.typepad.com/ppt).
It looks like SMSPoll copied most of their features from Poll Everywhere. If you read their website close enough, they even lifted quite a bit of their marketing material!
Hi Paul -
We’re aware of SMSPoll and have spoken to the AU-based founders. Without pointing fingers, let’s just say that you can trace back the original development of our features for about a year by looking back through our blog. SMSPoll launched July 1 according to their blog. Our plans and pricing, comparisons to traditional ARS systems, and other web content have been quite constant since far before July 1.
Hi Jeff,
That just isn’t true. Our UI is far superior to yours and the pricing is streets ahead. Whilst ours was hardly a new idea, I don’t believe you can say yours was either!
I like your roll-over buttons! Did you make those on Dreamweaver or Frontpage?
OK, I’m Charles Barkley and I’m going to settle this dispute after I finish my cheeseburger. Alright I just looked at both the sites and started loading them at the same time. SMS took forever, but we’ll call it even I guess - it really just gave me time to finish eating.
SMS, what’s your actual domain - it’s not the .net correct? .Net’s are for get rich quick schemes, selling used car batteries and penis pills. Christ.
Turrible!
What about your pricing is streets ahead? Who says “streets ahead” anyways? @Charles Barkley, that’s a little rough, but the .net domain shit is funny.
The SMS site is definitely slow for me, too.
As a UI designer, I think SMSPoll’s site does look better. But If table-based layout and wickedly invalid HTML makes for good UI, then I guess SMSPoll qualifies as “far superior”.
And what’s up with the “streets ahead” pricing claim? For a big audience, SMSPoll comes out to $167 per 1000 voters - but Poll Everywhere seems to be $37 per 1000 voters. I guess the other plans are cheaper per voter, but that’s what you pay for half the functionality (no reports, PowerPoint download, keywords) and it only works in Australia and the UK.
Anil - You said, “That just isn’t true.” What part of what I wrote isn’t true? That you can trace our features and content back via our blog for the past year? That you only launched in July? What are you even talking about? And as for the originality of mobile-phone based ARS at a fraction of the cost of hardware ARS - we were definitely the first. Even the hardware ARS companies agree on that.