Sam Winstanley’s Blog

So 6 months passed without a single contribution to my own blog. In response to this here is my summary of the last 6 months.

Widely speaking:-

• Google  (GOOG)keep googling away at everything but I’m sure they haven’t produced a single innovation in 6 months that’s thrown me off my chair. Are they still interesting? I’m taking the position that I’m bored of Google, at least until they wow me with something great, I still like the search engine, I use google IG, I couldn’t live without it etc.
• SPSS (SPSS) Released Dimensions 5, which has got
  • SPSS Author (well I think 4.5 technically did have SPSS Author but 5.0 makes it more real) for building custom surveys.
  • Wizards galore for building (standard) surveys.
  • SPSS Reporter (the not desktop version), think of this as like Desktop Reporter (which is great) but with much more in the way of enterprise features due to the data being stored in a central place, subjected to access restrictions etc. I am yet to see SPSS Reporter but I feel positive about it.
  • More CATI stuff for mrInterview, I now think mrInterview is in real shape to do production CATI with a dialer. Saying all of this, I don’t see much point in traditional CATI, not meaning to be argumentative but the applications are so specialized I wonder if there really is a significant market for this.
  • More CAPI stuff (which came as a surprise to me), however I believe CAPI is going to be a real growth area (shock horror). Although I think the need for traditional CAPI studies will decline, I think more Qual style face to face interviewing will happen and that mrInterview can provide a structured way to record a lot of qualitative responses (eegh Qualiquantive), so I concur the world does need a new CAPI platform, and SPSS Dimensions should make a good one. Its very early days at the moment though. Web based recruitment with CAPI depth interview on the back anyone? Don’t you think that the Web responses might make fairly good conversational prompters for a moderator? If so wouldn’t you probably want to record the data from that in the same place etc…
  • More data formats, specifically the DDF format (which again was really 4.5 but nevermind), this is the file based data format to use for Dimensions data when you are doing end to end work with the system, there is no question. Dimensions SQL is fine for pure server applications but it’s always been much too painful to move the data about. DDF is still out-performed by some traditional formats like SPSS SAV and Quanvert for analysis though. The end of life for Dimensions XML data is coming, hooray is all I can say.
• Microsoft(MSFT) released SQL 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 and these have got some good potential for research systems down the line, there’s more focus on workflow (buzzword for doing things in a pre-set order). No question workflow can help in MR in lots of areas but I’ll mention data protection, quality control and signoff systems  as just a few. Microsoft are hardly the only people jumping on the Workflow bandwagon though, in the end its nothing new they just have done a typically great job of packaging it in WWF (Windows Workflow Foundation) and have managed to reuse an acronym that I’ve only previously heard related to wrestling which seems somewhat fitting. I’m not going to talk about microhoo or Yahsoft at the moment.. maybe in another 6 months
• Facebook started to decline, it may never go away but its growth has slowed and the tide is turning somewhat against it. Privacy and spam are at the heart of it. Its got some potential, but I think its giving an increasing feel of low quality crud due to the amount of “First million people to….” and “I will dye my hamster purple if 100k join this…” along with huge amounts of very low quality, uncreative applications which are really only invented to generate some advertising revenue and offer hardly any value. The “real life” equivelent would be “here is a free magazine full of irrelavent ads, please tell your friends about it too”…. I do not wish facebook to die, I hope it can improve and I wonder if it has to become less organic in order to improve.

Closer to home:

• Forgetdata had a good 6 months, reporting and client deliverables are rapidly becoming the main area of the business but this is purely driven by the requests we’ve had. I think getting your VAT registration sorted and then actually getting your head around how to record VAT is technically much harder than even the most horrible, complicated multi country tracking study that I’ve ever seen. We’ve got an office now (Lonsto House, Princes Lane, London, N10 3LU) and we’ve got a vacancy for a junior developer.

Perhaps the next post is less than 6 months away, I find it hard to predict….