Cavootle - Location Enabled Polling

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.

Floq - A Survey Platform That Has Global, Open, And Shareable Answers

Floq is on a mission "to make all types of questions and answers global, open and shareable" says Jonah Cacioppe. The service has been in development for over a year with Jonah Cacioppe (co-founder and CEO), Michael Kruger (co-founder and CTO), Brinley Ang (developer), Rod Pattison (developer), Chris Cacioppe (designer), and David Jardine (marketing) making up the six person team. Floq is tied to, and partly owned by, Integral Development. ID is primarily owned by Dr. Ron Cacioppe and Jonah and is providing some of the workspace, infrastructure, as well as the initial pool of data.

Update, May 15, 2012, Floq has publicly launched! The core services now include team surveys, mobile customer feedback, and organizational surveys. Many enhancements and updates have been implemented to include QR codes, web embedding, social sharing, and PDF generation.

Floq's web application provides the ability to compare your group's survey results with other similar survey answers within the industry. Doing this provides a benchmark to strive for as well as deeper context to the respondents' answers. Questions and answers are anonymized with the questions being constantly compared to show you if your question has been asked before.

Imagine asking if a person prefers iOS or Android. While setting up your survey the autocomplete feature shows you that the question has been asked before. The previous results divulge that Android is selected more often overall, but the demographics of your team have not been asked. The answers you receive from your survey will benefit you as well as contribute to the community by providing more data for that question. Perhaps your small team prefers iOS but you see more people in general like Android. Another way this could benefit you is if you have a very small team to include their answers with a larger data set to receive a more accurate answer. This type of tool could be immensely beneficial.

Looking ahead they plan on integrating the Q&A with social networks to further expand the platform. A survey library will also be coming so that people can search a repository of pre-made survey templates that anyone can contribute to. The lessons learned and technology platform may also be used for other things such as ratings, polls, and tests.

Floq can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. The user interface and design are very slick! It is in very early private beta testing and has some issues here and there that they are working on.

How to Conduct a Poll on Google+

You can conduct a simple poll on Google+ using this method:

1. Enter your question as your post
2. Provide the possible answers as comments
3. Disable comments
4. 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.

Happy polling!