Cavootle is a new service to vote on bands, movies, fashion, entertainment, books, restaurants, politicians, and more. What makes it innovative is that unlike a regular poll you can view the answers for a specific geographic region. You can find the favorite beer for people living near Boston, Los Angeles, or wherever by changing the answer location. From there you can expand the area and even take into consideration everyone no matter where they are. Creating a new Cavootle and adding options to existing polls is easy.
The service is new and has room for improvement, but I can already see this being very powerful when you are traveling or doing research. I would like to see an improvement on the location feature so that we know exactly what area "far" covers and the increments between. Perhaps giving a distance radius would do the trick. The other issue that will probably be solved over time is a distinction between a general question and one that involves a location. For example, this question asks what is the "Best Steakhouse in New York City". Using the location feature for that question really is telling you the location of the voter and works differently than a question such as "What is the Best Steakhouse" and setting the location for NYC. It is an interesting dynamic when dealing with location.
Cavootle was founded by Patrick Kling and Brian Kane. You can signup today and follow them on Twitter and Facebook. Adding an API and the ability to embed Cavootles with definable default locations would drive rapid expansion. I can envision them being embedded on travel and business websites to offer readers great insights. I am certainly going to follow their progress.
Mentimeter was created as a tool to interact with and engage an audience. While attending the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden the four founders discovered that they were not being actively engaged by the teachers. After seeing the same thing occur in their professional lives they set out to change how speakers interact with audiences. The solution needed to be simple, fast, and always available. They also didn't want it tied to a classroom; it had be accessible to anyone anywhere.
Steve Jobs and Apple's creations strongly inspired them to design products with "a holistic user experience", says co-founder Johnny Warström. As you use the product you will notice everything from the text entry to the gently animated dynamically resizing chart just works. The other founders are Henrik Fräsén (management and digital marketing), Niklas Ingvar (design and testing) and Kristoffer Renholm (architect and coder); Johnny heads up marketing and customer interaction.
Mentimeter allows you to quickly create custom polls using a web interface. Once the poll is created a unique code is given for the group being polled to enter at vot.rs to access the voting page on their mobile phone, tablet, or any connected device. A QR code is generated as well for anyone that has a reader app. The public results URL is provided for people to see the results while a special administrative one is created for updating, closing, or resetting the pole. Code for embedding the results is provided for easy publication which I have included below the post; be sure to vote over to the right.
The architecture has been built to allow for incremental expansion using a Ruby (Sinatra) REST API hosted on Heroku and a PHP frontend. All content is published from the frontend, but Wordpress is used in the background for their content management system. Raphaël Javascript is used to get the presentation view to scale correctly on all sized devices; AJAX polling updates the view when live votes come in. Finally, Backbone.js syncs the Document Object Model with the API.
Looking to the future they want to maintain Mentimeter's simplicity while adding more interesting features. Some of those features will be user accounts so that people that want to can more easily retrieve questions, saving and comparing historical data is on the horizon, as is additional question controls for professional lecturers. Mentimeter has a blog and is on Twitter.
This video shows how it looks in real-time when numerous votes come in:
You can conduct a simple poll on Google+ using this method:
Enter your question as your post
Provide the possible answers as comments
Disable comments
Go back in and edit your post to provide the perma-link so people can vote when the poll is re-shared.
People then vote by +1'ing their answer. You can see it in action at http://goo.gl/KIim9.
Two things to keep in mind:
You can not close the poll so you will need to grab the results at whatever time you want the poll to "close".
People can vote (+1) more than one answer. It could be good, bad, or indifferent (cancel each other out) depending on what type of poll you are conducting.
