The new community grew out of a project with Nokia to develop a new research programme, which has fed into concepts and designs for upcoming Nokia smartphones.

Job Muscroft (pictured), managing director of Face, said: “The X-Crowd is set up to connect tech lovers with global technology brands to help create new tech products, develop websites, improve communications and test the latest gadgets. As we see the benefits in using a fresh tech-loving consumer community for our research and ideation work with Nokia, especially for better user experiences, we want to grow The X-Crowd on a global scale, opening up a consumer-centric way of working to others.”

Nokia’s director of consumer research and insight Tom Crawford said the topic “introduced a new way of listening and interacting with consumer by treating them as partners rather than just respondents and engaging them in a process from beginning to end”.

Face already runs Mindbubble, a co-creation community aimed at women, and Headbox, a community for young people. It also has a social media monitoring service, Pulsar.