Just to give you a little picture of how certain things are in South America, a Brazilian federal judge has “banned” two very popular video games (Counter-strike and EverQuest) because he is apparently sure that they provoke violence. Apparently moments after the ban came into place thousands of teenagers descended from the favelas and gave […]

For the last few months we spotted an alarming (and somewhat hilarious) trend among the market research crowd, it seems to be mentioned in every conference. We think it started back in April when someone announced the “potential” that the online game Second Life had for the research and advertising industries. At the time we […]

Just found this article on the International Herald Tribune about the difficulties of blogging from Cuba. As we had previously reported, Internet connections in Cuba are restricted to tourists and some government officials. There is however some very brave people that go through a few hurdles in order to update their blogs everyday.
“When Yoani Sanchez, […]

As you may or may not know, the leading social networking site in Brazil is Google owned Orkut. Nobody really knows why, the site was created by a Google employee in the US and I don’t know… Brazilians liked it.
As with any other Google property, ads are pushed whenever possible alongside content. And as often […]

Some time ago we received a request for an online study in Cuba, I couldn’t help laughing at the request. The fact that Cuba is not a threat to anyone anymore maybe makes people forget how bad things are there in general.
I came across this article this morning, it accurately describes the Internet access situation […]

Well, for those of you who were hoping there were any flaws or disadvantages to using Facebook polls… one just popped up.
According to this post, a series of “spammy” polls have been showing up on Facebook, here are some examples:

(This one is particularly funny…)

I’m sure Facebook will find a way of dealing with this. Shouldn’t […]

The ARF (Advertising Research Foundation) is creating a committee to set new standards for online survey research. The increase of “professional respondents” and the lack of their control is a worrying trend for the industry.
The “episodes” that motivated this are basically the following:

Last September, at a roundtable hosted by the Institute for International Research, Kim […]

This is quite interesting, I don’t recall something like this happening before. Kotaku.com is a very popular gaming blog (owned by Gawker Media, best known for Gizmodo, Valleywag, Treehugger, Defamer, and so on..).
Apparently, Greenfield Online was running a survey for Xbox where they showed some concepts to respondents to choose from. One naughty respondent […]