Confirmit coders hack together geolocation survey app

Chief strategy officer Pat Molloy said the app could be setup to deliver surveys to anyone within a radius of a given location using a phone’s GPS data. Also, the company’s coders designed it so that surveys could be presented to panellists based on their ‘check-in’ status using the Foursquare API.

Survey invites would be visible via a “mobile portal”, a key feature of the application.

Development occured during an 18-hour ‘hackathon’ organised at the company’s headquarters in Oslo, which saw three teams of programmers attempt to develop three ideas as far as possible in the allotted time.

The Android app was crowned the winner, and Molloy said the company sees “mileage” in the idea, perhaps for future updates of the Confirmit survey and panel management platform – though inclusion in version 16, due out next year, has been ruled out.

Other ideas that were developed during the hackathon included a data visualisation app that integrated Confirmit with Google Earth to display real-time survey activity around the globe; and Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter integration to enable authors of public surveys to advertise the surveys via their social network accounts, while allowing respondents who had completed the survey to share the survey link with their friends or followers.