Director of our North American operation, Kerry Hecht, will be at the Future of Consumer Intelligence conference in San Francisco today and for the next few days. If you’re there and would like to meetup, email kerry@dubishere.com

The conference spans, aggregates and integrates primary research, trend information and behaviour-based data to give a 360 degree view of our industry, so don’t miss out.

More information can be found here at http://www.iirusa.com/consumerintel/homepage.xml#.UZJAnStAQmU

Hello everyone, my name is Rupali Mahida and I’ve just joined the Dub team as an intern. This year, I am graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and plan to pursue a career in market research in the future. As a Psychobiology major, I’ve had the opportunity to explore human thought and behavior from both a psychological and biological perspective. As a part of the requirements of my degree, I completed a large research product testing the effects of emotional valence on human recall and recognition memory. It was through this experience, that I became particularly interested in how qualitative and quantitative information can be used to derive meaningful insights about how people process the world around them. Hence, when I was considering what career path to pursue, I knew that market research would enable me to use this understanding in a productive way in order to drive business strategy.

One of my best experiences in undergraduate was studying abroad at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England where I had the opportunity live in the UK for a few months. Thus, I am even more excited to be a part of Dub given its strong client base in both Europe as well as America. Furthermore, Dub really stood out to me as a company to be a part of because of their focus on providing software that allows qualitative researcher to facilitate insight communities. Given the constantly evolving social and technology environment in which we live, I truly believe that these communities provide a more innovative and progressive way to gage consumer thought patterns. Therefore, I’m eager and excited to advance Dub initiatives in any way I can!

Rupali can be reached at rupali@dubishere.com

We’re delighted to announce that Dub will be sponsoring the Research Community Festival hosted by NewMR, taking place on Friday March 15, 2013.

The event has three sessions with expert speakers from around the world looking at the theory and practice of insight/research communities (including MROCs and Community Panels).

Speakers include:

• Erica Van Lieven, Direction First
• Scott Lee, ABN Impact
• Ray Poynter, Vision Critical University
• Tom De Ruyck, InSites Consulting
• Lisa Clark, Discovery Channel
• Marcel Slavenburg and Hannah Baker Hitzhusen, SKIM
• Leslie Townsend, Kinesis Survey Technologies
• Julie Wittes Schlack, Communispace

You can register and see more details at http://newmr.org/events/2013-0/research-communities/.

It is going to be an inspiring event, with some of the industry’s leading lights sharing stories and helping further the development and standards of research communities. Missing it isn’t an option!

We hope you can make it

We all know, and continually read about, the rapid changes taking place in the market research industry. Clients want insight quicker than ever before, they want to know the what, the why, and what they should do about it in an instant.

There’s a new report by Forrester which sets out some of these current challenges – big and small – very succinctly. It includes a recommendation that professionals and business must invest in the skills and technology, including behavioural insight as well as research data.

We can’t give you access to the report, but our friends over at Qualtrics can. Here’s a link to download the report titled What Needs To Happen In Market Research In 2013.

And if anyone can tell me why Forrester love capitalising their report titles so much, please write on a postcard to us@dubishere.com

Given that ‘in-the-moment’ data capture is a big thing in the MR industry right now, we thought we’d share our team at work, in-the-moment! We had one of the UK’s leading qual trainers, Joanna Chrzanowska,  spend time with the team. Joanna is a brilliant mind and one of the most experienced qual researchers around. She’s doing a great job helping us improve our software.

If you or your team need training, I would highly recommend contacting her. You can get in touch with her here.

In 2011, over 300 research communities were hosted on Dub’s community platform, IdeaStream™. Figures just in show that this number doubled in 2012 to over 600 communities. As you can imagine, we’re quite excited by this growth.

We’ve been working on some exciting revisions of IdeaStream’s review and moderation tools today. Here a sneaky peek of what’s going down…

Every year, the GRIT report (GreenBook Research Industry Trends) is published which looks at the state of the industry and what’s trending in terms of research methodologies. It’s a fantastic read and provides a good read on what’s happening in our industry.

The current report that’s being processed is taking a more general view of on potential future changes within the industry. The question ‘Which of these techniques and approaches do you see ahead in your future’ was posed. A staging 48% of respondents this year plan to already be using online communities in the future.

Naturally, as a provider of research community software we are delighted by this news. It tells us that practitioners are gaining in confidence around the use of the methodology and that techniques are maturing.

The full GRIT report is scheduled for January release, so watch this space.