Some friends of mine are launching a new business in town called The Salt Room. It’s a new salt therapy treatment center which will be located in Orlando where folks with a variety of respiratory and skin diseases can come for relief of their symptoms. Basically, they have three rooms which are filled with salt — there is salt on the walls, on the floor, and in the air. And when you breathe it you get a concentrated feeling much like what you get when you breathe the salt air on the beach or in a deep salt cave.

Visit the Salt Room Orlando web site.

The founders/employees of QuestionPro maintain an interesting company blog that, in addition to describing specific features of their service, also includes a variety of more useful, general information that anyone can theoretically use with any survey service. It’s always nice to see a company that isn’t just focused on getting more clients but is also willing to add to the general knowledge available online. (more…)

San Francisco-based MarketTools announced today that their survey software product, zTelligence has been given a variety of new features designed to make the product easier to use including several new advanced capabilities. New features include interactive video tutorials, frequently asked questions, a regular live training sessions; new authoring features designed to make survey development go faster; and new reporting features that improve flexibility. (more…)

SPSS announced recently to its Mac-based customers that SPSS 17.0 for Mac would not be released for the PowerPC based Mac, effectively discontinuing SPSS development for the PowerPC. PowerPC Mac users presently represent about 3% of all online computer users, down from 4.2% back in 2006 when the Intel based Mac was released. This based on the following letter which was recently e-mailed to SPSS for Mac users: (more…)

Lake Superior College recently collected data for its 4th Priorities Survey for Online Learners, a standardized-ish survey from Noel-Levitz that helps schools measure the satisfaction of their online programs.  What’s neat (from my perspective) is that this year they offered their survey pool of over 2000 potential respondents the chance to win one of 40 2 GB USB drives for participating in their PSOL survey and got a responses rate of 23%. When they last did the survey in 2006 without offering an incentive they only got a 17% response rate. That’s a 23% increase in the response rate. (more…)

Vovici (formerly Perseus SurveySolutions and WebSurveyor) announced today that they were acquiring EZSurvey and EZReport from another survey software provider, Raosoft Inc. Vovici will take over all EZSurvey maintenance contracts and will provide customer service and support.

According to the press release, the acquisition will will:

…strengthens Vovici’s ability to move new clients onto its Web-based survey and Enterprise Feedback Management platforms, as the majority of Raosoft’s clients are now using desktop software to develop and conduct online surveys. Additionally, this acquisition reinforces Vovici’s position within the government market leveraging Raosoft’s Federal government client base, which includes the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security and Department of the Treasury.

Government clients of Raosoft included the Department of Agriculture, Commerice, Defense, Energy, Interior, Justice, Labor, Treasury, EPA, FAA, FBI, IRS, FDA, and various other agencies and offices. Corporate clients include AARP, ACNielsen, American College Testing, the America Red Cross, AT&T, Deloitte & Touche, Costco, McDonald’s, Time Warner Cable, and educational facilities including Emory University, U-Mass Boston, and Penn State.

I came across a post on comp.soft-sys.stat.spss in which the purchaser of a new Dell system with Vista Home Premium edition was unable to install SPSS 13, 14, or 15. They indicate that they spoke to SPSS support, who told them that none of the versions which require activation will install on Vista.

In a follow up message, it was noted that SPSS was working on a patch and that the estimated date of release is the end of April, 2007.

• Read the thread of messages at comp.soft-sys.stat.spss
• SPSS product support matrix

Followup: SPSS has released a hotfix to address the problem. It can be downloaded from the SPSS Support Website (login required — you can use user: guest/password: guest). In addition to the hotfix, the page also identifies the procedure for installing SPSS 15 on Visita.

The N, MTV/Nickelodeon’s evening network for teens, has announced an alliance with mobile community provider mbuzzy.com to create a teen wireless research panel using the mbuzzy technology platform beginning in January. The program, to be called "Teens Everywhere" will allow the alliance to conduct research with 10,000 teen panel members via their mobile phones on a variety of topics, ranging from network programming to advertising to events and other information.

Read the full press release at Yahoo.

Last week 30 of the top executives in market research met for a rountable at the Research Industry Summit for Improving Respondent Cooperation. It would appear that response rates of less than 10 percent are becoming more common, with reports from NOP Research indicating that just 0.25% of the population is supplying 32% of the responses to online surveys, and another report from Cambiar citing a recent ComScore Networks study indicating that 50% of all survey responses come from less than 5% of the population.

"It’s like the holein the ozone layer," said Shari Morwood, VP-worldwide market research at IBM. "Everyone knows it’s a growing problem. But they just ignore it and go on to the next project."

Although online research wasn’t particularly blamed for the problem, it was noted that while the internet channel makes it easier for respondents to complete surveys, there are now so many surveys out there that more and more consumers are tuning them out.

Read the full article at AdvertisingAge.

Los Angeles based HotelSurvey has announced a new tool to help hotels and other hospitality related businesses to quickly capture customer feedback and resolve complaints before they result in defection using their new web-based survey platform.

Features of the HotelSurvey system include: ability to collect data from e-mail surveys or the hotel call center; immediate response from guest (the system sends out surveys right after they check out of the hotel); seamless integration with Lodging Management System; integration with multiple lodging, gaming, Food & Beverage, and entertainment systems; multi-property management tool (on one centralized site); auto-emailing of customer issues to specific departments and more.

Read the full press release at CRM Today.

Grapevine Surveys announced today the release of a new version of Employee Evaluator, a 360 degree feedback web-based software package specifically designed for performing HR evaluations of all types, including employee evaluations, team assessments, performance appraisals, job reviews and multi-rater feedback.

The new version features a number of enhancements, including a start-to-finish Wizard-based system to guide and manage the entire process, a comprehensive survey approval process, and a totally revamped graphic interface. Grapevine Employee Evaluator continues to include in-depth multi-level reporting and distribution control, an extensive selection of professionally-designed survey templates, automated system distribution and collection of evaluations, custom branding and control over evaluation variables.

Grapevine is offering a free trial package to the frist 500 Corporate users who try the service. Sign up here.

Read more at the Grapevine Surveys web site.

Zoomerang recently announced the creation of a new "Education Resource Center" which will provide practical tips and best practices to educators interested in revitalizing their academic initiatives. The program, which is closely integrated with Zoomerang’s online survey service, is designed to give educators the tools they need to use survey research to drive curriculum decisions and increase student performance; incorporate faculty imput into the decision-making process while increasing teacher satisfaction; and eliminate cumbersome paper processing allowing educators to spend more time on classrom development.

Visit the Zoomerang Education Research Center

Read the full press release at Yahoo Business

Amae Software has updated their post-call IVR survey system, Amae CI Suite to include a massive library of survey questions across a number of industry boundaries.

"We’ve completed an extensive set of questions across many industries that can be copied or customized to any desired business objective," noted Gerald Wluka, co-founder of Amae Software, "our customers receive all of the required professional assistance for successful survey/question design and deployment as a part of system implementation."

Read more at the Amae Software web site.

Better Business Blogging discusses a recent BusinessWeek article about the trend among high profile companies such as GSK, Kraft and Hewlett Packard of using online communities to research the perception of thier brands and the development of new products.

Read the full post at Better Business Blogging.

Germany-based MediaAnalyzer, whose unique AttentionTracking methodology combines survey research and eye tracking to monitor and understand the effectiveness of print advertising creative, web-page design and online ad effectiveness (as well as advertising via TV, direct mail, outdoor and other communications vehicles) announced Thursday that thy would be opening a New York office under the leadership of Charles Boyar.

For the full press release, visit PRWeb.