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Greetings!
Let me lead off with a huge thank you, to you - our clients, partners and friends - we are truly blessed. I know, I say that every year at this time, but I mean it and appreciate it every day. And, I hope that we express it as a company in our large and small actions with you.
At Sentient Services our mission is to do good, do good work and have some fun along the way.
We try to do this through our choice of clients, employees and local community involvement (which we roughly mark as "the world"). We support several local charities throughout the year including LifeWorks and AustinProBono.org (new site coming soon thanks to BuildASign). Then, at the end of each year, we choose a great charity to partner with to share our good fortune and celebrate with our wonderful clients (we figure you have enough fruit baskets already).
Read below to learn about Season for Caring, our charitable partner this year and how lucky we were to be able to participate in this.
Want to chat, call 512.288.1706 x 101 or reply to this email and we can set up a time. Best,
Paul Janowitz
CEO and Founder
Sentient Services
Market Research + Usability
  
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This year we decided to look for some great ways to make a real impact locally in Austin. We came across the Austin American Statesman's annual Season for Caring program. In this program we found amazing people and families - from those that lost everything in the fires, to refugees, to parents going to school to better their children's opportunities - surviving and working hard to thrive through difficult times.
We here at Sentient Services believe that technology is the great equalizer of our time, allowing people to learn and grow, participate in government and improve their lives and communities. This is our passion - the wisdom of the crowd and the power of technology to make those voices heard. We wanted to provide these opportunities to the families that are part of Season for Caring.
So, we decided to donate 10 brand new Dell Vostro laptops (nicely souped up with 4GB RAM, web cam, full Microsoft Office Suite so they can do schoolwork and more). This seemed like a great way to support these families and empower them from school to business (I started Sentient Services and ran it for an entire year with just a single laptop). Dell kindly gave a nice discount, and we then found out that Time Warner donated in a year's worth of internet for each family as well!
Read about the families HERE. We had no idea it would make this big of an impact to Katie and her education while providing for her son. We are extremely grateful to the Statesman for putting this program together and allowing us to help, thank you!
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 2.0 Release
We have just released 2.0 of icanmakeitbetter - our social innovation and market research platform.
Here are the major new features released:
- Surveys: Now create a quick and easy question-of-the-day or full surveys. This new feature also includes integrated reporting and the unique ability to allow respondents to see how other community members answered - true social research.
- Facebook App: In 30 seconds add our app to your Facebook page and start innovating and conducting research like never before.
- Public Discussions: Town-hall style meetings and open focus groups.
- Private Communities: That's right, create completely private online communities for innovation and research with employees, partners, you name it. Limit by invite, IP or email address.
- New website home page: icanmakeitbetter.com - scroll down and check out the new "how this works" and "key features".
Not using icanmakeitbetter? A few quick questions:
- Are you currently leveraging co-creation (crowdsourcing) and social media to develop the products and services your customers want?
- Do your customers have a way to tell you about their great new ideas?
- Can you conduct fast, valid and inexpensive market research to make better business decisions today?
Don't have an easy to use, scalable and cost effective solution that seamlessly solves these business problems?
We will have you set up in one day - fully hosted, seamless and easy. Even better - an entire year on our platform costs less than a single traditional focus group!
If you do any product development, marketing, innovation, market research or usability this will be game changing - we make it quicker, easier, cheaper, and more accurate than ever before.
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This quarter we are looking at collaboration tools that we use or would like to start using. The very first one that we have just recently discovered is the Snipping Tool that comes with Windows 7 - we love it! An example is the image below. Here is my old scenario for marking up web pages or creative: - Hit "print screen"
- Copy that image into PPT
- Crop it (we all run dual monitors)
- Open PPT text boxes and shapes to call out spots on the image
- Save as image
- Open email and attach and send
With the new Snipping Tool I simply: - Click on Windows Start and select it
- Highlight the section of my screen I want an image of
- Tool grabs it and then gives me all my markup tools needed
- I can then put that directly in an email or save it
This new process has saved a ton of time and made creative review much quicker.
Now some other very interesting tools to look at: - ConceptShare (powerful creative review and markup)
- Unfuddle (what we use to track software tickets and code)
- Snagit (screen markup, similar to Snipping Tool)
- Skitch (our designers use this a lot to share new comp designs via the web and insert as links into Unfuddle tickets)
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We are here to help you with any of the following on a global basis. Please let me know throughout the year as you need these services. With Sentient you will get flawless execution, valid and actionable insights and a team that is fun to work with!
icanmakeitbetter Social innovation and research community platform. We enable companies and communities to create, share, and act upon ideas to drive innovation and make everything, and every day better.
Market Research Full-service worldwide quantitative and qualitative research. We cover branding, customer engagement, market analysis (segmentation, sizing, pricing), product development and usability.
Focus groups | In-depth-interviews | Usability & Eye tracking | Online groups | Web-based surveys | Phone-based surveys | Custom panel development
User Experience We conduct concise, measurable and actionable usability research, covering a range of different media including websites, software, email, packaging, interactive, print and television.
Business definition | Contextual assessment | Heuristic evaluation | Personas | Task analysis | Usability analytics | Reporting (IA, content, wireframe)
Information Design Our Information Design practice provides an unparalleled scientific and customer research driven information platform.
Content strategy | Information architecture | Heuristic design | Interaction layers & dependencies | Wireframes
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Up Next?
A nice Holiday vacation, a new office move, and...lots more, but not sure just yet. But it will be fun, involve social innovation, research and you. So thank you and Happy Holidays! |
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Sentient Services
Sentient Services is a Knowledge StudioŽ - the amalgamation of market research, user experience and information design practices. We leverage these core competencies for our clients in product development, interactive, sales, marketing, advertising and branding.
Please contact us and let us know how we can be of service.
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Let's Talk
We are research and usability people. We like to talk about methodology, software, design, and the best way to cover 4 countries in 6 days with 2 groups in each country - and fitting in a nice dinner overlooking the Blue Mosque.
We travel the globe conducting market research and usability - have a question on a facility (we've probably been there), questions on how Tokyo purchasing differs from Hong Kong and how to control for that in a recruit (yep, we know) - just ask us.
Give us a call - we are always happy to chat about methodology, ideas and research. It is what we do and love!
Paul - 512.288.1706 x101
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