Every poll of yours will have the following new menu link showing up on the left hand side.

You will be shown a screen with all the freely available APIs which we have provided.  The help icon on the screen will take you to the API documentation of the individual apis.

In summary here is the list of API’s that we have rolled out.  For more detailed api documenation you can go here.

1. Vote API
Allows voting on a specific option on your poll .

2. Get Votes count API
This API lets you know the votes recieved for a particular poll and the individual votes for the poll options.

3. Get Poll Results URL API
This API will let you get the result URL for the poll. This is the URL to our famous results dashboard.

4. Get Poll Embed Code API
This API will let you get the embedded code for your poll. You can use this code script in your website or blog or wherever you want to display your poll.

5. Get Polls API
This API will return all the polls which are there in your account. You can then use the poll information wherever you wish.

6. Get All Votes API
This API will return you all the vote results for all your polls.

So HAPI APIing!

UPDATE: There is a good example of how a customer of ours uses the poll api on their home page to get customer feedback on which content (coloring pages) to publish here.

We are planning to roll out a couple of Micropoll apis within a month.  The key api which we want to roll out is the Vote api – which we think is going to be the coolest one.

Why APIs ?

Before I get into the why,  for those who don’t know let me quickly explain what an API is,  API stands for Application Programming Interface. Basically an API is a way for other people to write code to access your application or your website.

The funny thing is that when I explain this to people they tend to immediately ask me: “Why would I want that??”. Well, let us start with a small website that exploded in popularity almost overnight: Twitter.

The main thing – and to me, the most powerful – is that your customers may want to interact with you in ways that you’d never thought of.   It’s fairly unlikely that we have realized all possible ways that the customers want to use Micropoll’s powerful polling engine.

Stay tuned folks – we are releasing some free apis very soon..  Hopefully we don’t give you too much control that we shut it down .

Another interesting viewpoint from CNN’s poll director was – “Will Moammar Gadhafi’s death help Barack Obama’s re-election chances in 2012? If it does, the effect may be muted simply because there aren’t a lot of Americans right now who say that foreign policy will be important to their vote for president next year,”

Teachers should be allowed to be tougher when it comes to classroom discipline, according to a survey.

A poll, commissioned by the Times Education Supplement (U.K), of more than 2,000 parents revealed that 49 per cent of them wanted to see a return to the days when smacking and caning were allowed in schools.

And, unexpectedly 20 per cent of secondary school children agreed with them.

Sending children out of the class was the most popular method of dealing with indiscipline, chosen by 89% of parents and 79% of children. Other popular ways of cracking down on bad behaviour were lunchtime or after school detentions and writing lines.

TES editor Gerard Kelly said: “These results show that parents want today’s teachers to have more authority in the classroom. It’s not about making school life miserable but about showing children that sanctions will be enforced and that their actions will have consequences.”

The survey comes just a week after Prime Minister David Cameron pledged to restore order and respect in schools. In a speech he warned that parents must take responsibility for their child’s behaviour and that those whose children constantly play truant could see their benefits cut.

According to latest poll results from KDNuggets , salaries of analytic professionals have gone up in 2011.  

The analysis was based on about 250 respondents, from which 78% worked for a company, 18% for a University, and about 4% were self-employed.

The average US salary was estimated as $113,000, up about 10% from 2010.

This article was cited in ReadWriteWeb last week. Even though enterprises are investing in analytics type software, the key ability is to find the resources who can help in the process of funnelling relevant information through the software, analyze the results and produce relevant reports.

On the customer analytics front, it is gettting more interesting. The world has gone social. Conversations are happening all around us at lightning speed. People are making connections. Sharing their stories. And they’re waiting for businesses to listen to them. We enable that dialog, collaboration, and knowledge sharing across the enterprise. We know that “business as usual” is a foreign concept in the social world. And different platforms are revolutionizing how we communicate at work by harnessing the power of our social networks.  The ‘analytic geeks’ now have to make sense out of these complex interactions.

Game Day Mobile Usage

Last year the internet played an important role in the Super Bowl Sunday festivities, with two-thirds of those who watched the game indicating that they went online at some point during game day. Approximately 41% of respondents say they used the internet during the actual game and 30% used their mobile phones for texting and browsing. 9% of respondents said they voted for the Super Bowl MVP via text messaging.

With the increase of smart phone penetration year over year we expect the mobile participation percentages to increase as well.

This Sunday — SUPER BOWL SUNDAY — four research firms are doing the first ever mobile ethnographic study of Super Bowl watchers.  And they are using SurveySwipe to do it.

How to Participate

1. Download the SurveySwipe mobile App.  If you’ve already downloaded the app, you don’t have to download it again, just be sure to update the app if and when it gives you the option.
2. iPhone users will get a push notice after half time.
3. Respond to the surveys that will test ad recall as well as ask you to take pictures of your location and the brand you’re interacting with.

Participate in your Super Bowl !

Value Research is a company that follows methodologies which include heavy data analysis and ratings. They started using Micropoll with their primary goal of understanding audience investing habits.

Because of their strategy to provide relevant investing content to their loyal investing audience, the type of content had to be relevant to their investing behaviour. 

Download the case study by clicking on the image above or click here to understand how Micropoll helped Value Research understand their investor audience better.

More info:

• Value Research : http://www.valueresearchonline.com/
  

1.  Polls for Bottom up research for Startups

2. How often do you stretch?

3. 4 Tips to reduce Power Imbalances in your Poll Results

4. Is your offline marketing working?

5. Hick’s law – Why polls should have less options

As we look back in 2010, we have noticed that one of the biggest impacts to polling participation has been the influence of social media. Facebook and twitter has led to more participation in polls. Companies are using polls to quickly get feedback from their online visitors. We will see these trends to continue upwards in 2011.

GlobeScan on behalf of BBC World Service, showed corruption was particularly likely to have been discussed by developing-world citizens, including respondents in Kenya (63%), Nigeria (49%), Indonesia (45%), and India (30%).

The findings show that more than one in five (21%) of those polled said they had discussed corruption and greed with friends and family over the past month, making it the most talked about global problem, ahead of climate change (20%), extreme poverty and hunger (18%), unemployment (16%), and the rising cost of food and energy (15%).

So when we head into the Christmas Season, let us all make an attempt so that our goodness and generousity gets highlighted more in the media than the corruption which seems to be more prevailing.