I'm going to break with convention today and, in lieu of an April Fool's gag, I'm going to tell you about an actual goof we recently made that yielded some unexpected but interesting results for researchers. As you know, last week on the blog we highlighted findings from an international, multilingual Text Analytics Poll we conducted around culture. This particular poll spanned 10 countries and eight languages, and when we went to field it we accidentally sent the question to our U.S. sample in Portuguese! Shockingly, in many cases, people STILL took the time to answer our question! First, bear in mind that these Text Analytics Polls consist of only one question and it's open-ended, not multiple choice.

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning… Unless you've been living under a rock, chances are you've heard these terms before. Indeed, they seem to have become a must for market researchers. Unfortunately, so many precise terms have never meant so little! For computer scientists these terms entail highly technical algorithms and mathematical frameworks; to the layman they are synonyms; but as far as most of us should be concerned, increasingly, they are meaningless. My engineers would severely chastise me if I used these words incorrectly--an easy mistake to make since there is technically no correct or incorrect way to use these terms, only strict and less strict definitions.

The inspiration for this week's clip in our "Get the Job Done!" series is the big-ticket procurement and implementation process--and all of those folks whose opinions you don't need. We hear all the time from prospective clients who've found themselves bogged down in the painful, protracted process of getting buy-in for enterprise text analytics platforms that offer something for everyone and come with a six-figure price tag. Oftentimes, this procurement process involves people in the organization who have lots of opinions but no research expertise and who, in cases, won't even be using the purchase in question. Worse yet, after everyone has had his/her say and the purchase has finally gone through, the original intended user finds the whole initiative mired in a lengthy, complicated implementation! It's 2017 and the one thing no one can afford to waste is time.

Take 7 Seconds to Support the OdinText Mission: Help Make Data Science Accessible! I'm excited to announce that OdinText will participate in the IIEX2016 Insight Innovation Competition! The competition celebrates innovation in market research and provides a platform for young companies and startups to showcase truly novel products and services with the potential to transform the consumer insights field. Marketing and research are becoming increasingly complex, and the skills needed to thrive in this environment have changed. To that end, OdinText was designed to make advanced data analytics and data science accessible to marketers and researchers.