Our pick of the SXSW Accelerator finalists

The SXSW Accelerator is now in its fourth year and is designed to showcase the most innovative emerging online technologies – including, this year, a host of data and analytics tools that could be put to use in market research.

The full list of 48 finalists (plus stand-by contestants) is online here, but below are the technologies that caught our eye.

BuzzData

What they say: “The best way to share and collaborate on spreadsheets and other datasets publicly with the world or privately with a team or across an organisation.”

Not only a way of storing data, but a way of sharing it and getting people involved in understanding it and putting it to work. The obvious application is within clientside research teams or within agencies where researchers are collaborating on a project, but the potential for getting public input is intriguing. Anyone up for collaborative data-crunching sessions with consumers?

Scrible

What they say: “Scrible changes how you read, research and share the web by enabling you to annotate web pages right in the browser and share them or save them to a personal library in the cloud.”

A number of research agencies have developed web technology that allows consumers to annotate web pages, adverts and other online content to share their immediate impressions. Scrible puts roughly the same capabilities in the hands of consumers at no cost (although a paid version is expected soon), and as such it seems like it could find a home within the research process both as a desk research app and as a tool respondents can use for pre-tasks. But as with BuzzData before it, our real interest is in the possibility of using Scrible collaboratively.

• For more information on SXSW Accelerator, click here. Judging takes place on 12-13 March