All companies, large or small, national or international, rely on accurate information to find answers to important business questions. Using the web to facilitate survey research and collect data is a very promising avenue for improving the ways businesses throughout the world conduct research. Businesses that understand their customers are the first to succeed, but getting customer feedback using traditional methods, such as e-mail or paper-based surveys, can be time-consuming, expensive, and unsuccessful.

Although the Internet is a relatively new medium, empirical evidence suggests that people are more likely to respond to a survey using this medium than anything else. According to Market Tools, a leading research ASP, e-research is growing, with online surveys representing 5%-10% of all market research in the US. Customers are increasingly becoming more likely to make suggestions or give feedback when they are visiting a company's web site; therefore, in addition to being fast, accurate, secure and inexpensive to conduct, online surveys can be a vital piece of an overall business strategy. Some companies even see them as a way to improve their relationships with their customers and business partners.

Over the last few years, many products have appeared on the market that help companies create and conduct online surveys. However, they all vary significantly, in terms of functionality, usability and the way they are packaged and made available to the end-users. InViewsion is one of those products that demonstrates Global Reach Internet Productions' experience in web application design, data collection methodologies and innovative use of technologies for delivering fast and accurate results.

Unlike other methods for conducting online surveys, such as e-mail surveys, off-the-shelf survey software packages and downloadable interactive survey applications, InViewsion is unique in that it is an entirely web-based solution. InViewsion does not require the installation of any desktop software or the download of survey applications that are incorporated into an executable file. As a result, concerns about the sophistication of the end-users, their hardware equipment, the time it takes to download the survey or the potential loss of respondent cooperation among those who are concerned about downloading files that may contain viruses, are non-issues.

The Distributed Revolution

Three innovations have recently converged to bring about a fertile climate for the advent of an increasingly popular form of computing. Substantial improvements in bandwidth and processing power, coupled with the recent standardization of non-proprietary web development languages have made true distributed computing possible for the first time.

Because bandwidth is less expensive and a free platform exists for the development of new forms of software, the processing involved in any application can be done in the most optimal location on the network. Moreover, with more powerful processors at the client level, many applications can now take advantage of the computing power at the edge of the network while providing services that are inherently connected.

The InViewsion Revolution

The development of InViewsion was the result of bringing together people experienced in conducting various types of surveys and combining their knowledge with the latest technologies available. The ultimate goal was to develop a robust application that can be distributed in the most efficient way and be used even by the most technologically challenged people. The way we accomplished this goal was by designing an environment that is recognizable, easy to understand and intuitive, all of which are characteristics that enhance the level of comfort of the persons using any of the administrative or public functions of InViewsion. The only other environment that has these characteristics is the traditional windows environment that can be found in almost all popular desktop applications. Since InViewsion functions entirely via the Internet, in order to develop its Windows-based look and feel we used a unique set of software design and development techniques. What makes these techniques even more special is the fact that using InViewsion does not require the installation of any additional plug-ins that usually come hand-in-hand with any advanced web applications.

The combined effect of our software development talent and ability to innovate technologically advanced solutions to every day business problems is really hard to match.

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