The Greek internet survey platform, Pollfish, got the “Big Data & AI: The Art of Possible” award at the Microsoft Summit, on June 19, 2018, in Athens. The platform uses a unique identifier system and artificial intelligence to analyze user groups, identify and suppress the poor quality responses at the question-level as well as predict purchase intent.

Microsoft Hellas, the Greek subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation, recognized the platform’s implementation of Microsoft Cloud to provide data and AI solutions to the decades-old market research industry as an innovative and important use of their software. “We had the honor to be selected as one of the five Microsoft partners to receive this award for our innovation” said co-founder and CTO of Pollfish, Giannis Zaoudis, who attended the conference, along with 1,500 industry leaders, and received the award on behalf of Pollfish.

Pollfish is a survey platform that delivers surveys online and via mobile apps on a global scale. It was founded on January 2013 by John Papadakis, Andreas Vourkos, Giannis Zaoudis and Zissis Bellas. Anyone who uses Pollfish, can create a questionnaire and receive the results of their research, in an easy, understandable and analytical way.

Pollfish made its first steps on the market when there was still no other solution by which application developers could research mobile users. The only available alternative was the transfer of the traditional online surveys to smaller screens. Since everything was around applications then, the founders realized that that was the high growth market and in the near future it would be even greater because of the “simple” internet users. At the same time, application creators were looking for income through their apps and Pollfish offered them a great way to make money while rewarding their users.

The new methodology begins with an unparalleled global network of respondents who are not “impaneled.” Cutting-edge capabilities including randomized and spontaneous invitations delivered programmatically while the respondent is in-app, while advanced machine learning techniques are used to identify and eliminate poor quality respondents at the question level. This combination delivers a level of data quality once found in the early days of random digit dialing

The net result of these operations is that any brand, agency and media company can connect to mobile customers in real time, leading to better data quality, which is provided faster and at a lower cost than traditional research companies.

Every user of one of these apps will not see ads on his or her site, but questionnaires, which he or she will be asked to answer. “A filled-in questionnaire can offer gifts, such as gift vouchers, free apps, or other rewards through draws” CEO Yannis Papadakis said.

“Surveys are not being implemented by us, but we are undertaking all the steps to collect responses that each customer determines. We have complete information about our audience, where it comes from and what is the representativeness of each country. Therefore, every scientist who initiates a market research has every detail at their disposal. We cover all ages and demographics and we are absolutely clear about the audience we can address.”

Today’s marketers and researchers are being challenged with shorter cycle times to get faster, high-quality feedback from their customers to make better business decisions. Traditional survey panels are progressively falling short of being able to deliver both quality respondents and responses in a timely manner to address this new mandate.

Pollfish effectively breaks the course of research with a next-generation sampling approach, coupled with a DIY platform in real time, to address the current problem of lowering the quality of respondents and leveraging new technologies to improve access, quality and speed response to the needs of current dealers and researchers.

Microsoft’s collaboration with the Greek startup Pollfish was announced earlier this year. Throughout the world, millions of users are on the go with a smartphone. “They are everyday users with an important opinion and knowledge, who can help shape the strategy of an organization or a private individual. Pollfish, wishing to create an automated and direct information center, utilized important Microsoft Azure tools and developed a smartphone survey platform where everyone can create a survey, choose the audience they are interested in, get the answers and have real-time feedback.”

With more than 500 million users worldwide, 259 apps and services around the globe, Pollfish, through the cloud global cloud service platform of the US technology giant, will be able to reach even more users across the globe, through the collaborative applications everyone has on their mobile.