Here at Live Talkback we are enjoying the start of the new English football season. As well as having live shows using Live Talkback from our friends at Liverpool FC (you can watch them online too) we’ve been letting people vote on what they hope the outcome of UK football matches will be.

So how did you do for the first week? Unfortunately it seems that things didn’t go the way that people wanted. Of the premiership matches played the games where there was a win only 1 of these games went the way that folks on Live Talkback expected (the Chelsea v West Brom game, where 89% of people expected Chelsea to win)

In every other case the majority of voters were disappointed. A bad opening week of football for Live Talkback fans?

Though it’s not all bad – as there were many people who did predict individual match results correctly – and we’ve run the numbers, and can disclose that just one smart, and happy, individual predicted the outcome of all games with a result correctly.

I only hope they will chose to share their predictions this week using the new Live Talkback application – get it NOW from the Apple App Store - so we can all see what they think for this week’s games.

Written by: Matt Millar

Our friends over at Brightcove recently hosted a Great Debate on online video advertising.  They’ve put up a video which shows how they used the Live Talkback swingometer to get a live reaction from the audience to the two speaker’s points.

All the details here, and the video below

Written by: Malcolm

At the recent M-Publishing event the team put together a series of live debates on topical issues.

Using Live Talkback the team were able to get the audience involved throughout the debate – with two headline speakers for and against the topic the M-Publishing team started by comparing the results of Live Talkback polls done before the event with the opinion in the room, then everyone could watch as the debate continued, and see how the debaters were able to sway the overall opinion of the audience.

Having the Live Talkback animated swingometer updating while the debate was progressing got everyone involved – with polls before the event, and live interaction at the event the M-Publishing team was able to involve over 1,000 people in the voting on their event – with each person interacting on average 3 times. A great result.

Written by: Matt Millar

We’ve updated the console with a couple of neat new features.  You can now select the icon for your event that is displayed on the events list screen, and also preview the event-specific URL for private events.

But the big news for some is that we’ve finally managed to solve the problem some users were seeing with their logins hanging.  We knew this was caused by firewalls and antivirus programs that blocked port 843, but didn’t have a way to not use that port.  Finally we’ve found a way, so now if you’re using Internet Explorer on Windows the console and results screens can avoid port 843 and so you should be unaffected by firewalls.

Other browsers and Macs still need access to port 843 (because of browser/Flash limitations on those platforms), however the console now checks that it has access and provides a much more useful error message.

Written by: Malcolm

As promised here the new versions of the Live Talkback application for iPhone and Blackberry are now available.  You can get them by going to http://m.livetalkback.com on your Blackberry or iPhone and following the links from there.  And of course the iPhone app is available via iTunes App Store.

We’re really excited about these new applications as they should make finding the event you want to vote on much easier, as we get more and more events live.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think of the new apps – drop me a line at boxm (at) livetalkback.com or post a comment here.

Written by: Malcolm

The results are in – and we have a hung parliament. I’ve been looking back at how the live voting at m.livetalkback.com changed through the last two weeks of the campaign.

If we look at the voting activity for a rolling 24 hour period we see the following

Over the last 48 hours of the campaign there was a trend up of people expecting a conservative government – and no significant movement in the people predicting a hung parliament.

Over the course of the full vote 19% of people correctly predicted the outcome – justifying the media claims of one of the most unpredictable elections in modern times.

Written by: Matt Millar

As part of the recent update to the voting clients, we’ve added some new features to the event organiser’s console to make your job just a little easier.

• Events can now have a default skin.  Any poll you then create will default to this skin – saving you from having to remember to set the skin on each poll in turn
• Events can be marked private if you want to limit who can see them.  This is ideal for seeing how your polls will look before your event.
• The Events tab now shows whether the event is public (the little world icon) or private (the person icon)

There’s also some tweaks to the carousel and slide editing:

• Slide Carousels can now have a title line, which is displayed above the slide title in the results screen.  Great for adding context such as a session name to all your slides.
• The carousel editing dialog now gives a small preview of each slide type, to help you pick the right one
• The fade transition is now much prettier

Click on the images to see what I’m talking about!

Written by: Malcolm

The elves have been slaving away in the code pits to bring you a shiny new version of Live Talkback, and I’m pleased to say it’s now here.  The main goals of this version were:

• to make the user experience better when there are lots of events running at once
• allow private polls for those that don’t want everyone to see their questions.

So what’s changed?  Firstly, the look of m.livetalkback.com.  Instead of a flat list of all the polls that are live, you’ll now see a list of events that are relevant, along with a search box.  These are the live public events – simply select one to get voting!

The search box is how the new private polls work.  By searching for a keyword,  users can find private events with that keyword.  So all you need to do as an event organiser or speaker is tell people to “Search for “secret” on Live Talkback”.

To make it even easier, attendees can just go to http://m.livetalkback.com/secret to find events with “secret” in them.  So signage, mailshots and emails can all promote your private event.

We’ve also been busy making sure the right events get shown to the right people.  So now, the events you see depend on what you’ve voted on or searched for in the past – so once you’ve found an event you won’t lose track of it again.

The new look is live on the website http://m.livetalkback.com now  – have a look and let us know what you think.

New clients for iPhone and Blackberry with the new look are coming soon – stay tuned!

Written by: Malcolm

As we are in the final week of the general election campaign – and as well as engaging undecided voters it’s vital that parties get their supporters energised – and active in voting.

The Liberal Democrats had a big push over the bank holiday weekend to get their supporters energised – and we saw this effect in our live voting.

While last week we had reasonably constant levels of activity, we saw a massive spike in traffic between 3pm and 4:30pm on Monday. If we look at the timeline of activity over the last 10 days we now see this picture

Cumulative expressed preferences

Which shows a great surge in activity by Liberal Democrat supporters.

Of course this surge of activity is only valuable if you can sustain it to polling day – so let’s look at how people’s expectation of the outcome has changed over the last 10 days when we look at a rolling 24 hour window.

Rolling 24 hour summary of election outcome expectation

We see from Friday through to late Sunday a trend toward an expectation of a hung parliament. During Monday we see more optimism from Conservative supporters, followed by an extremely effective round of activity by Liberal Democrat supporters.

If you’d like to watch live results – just go here m.livetalkback.com on your phone or PC, and you can watch live activity.

Written by: Matt Millar

We’ve seen most of the UK broadcasters use a limited selection of voters and a live worm to show the changes in opinion during leader debates.

Here at Live Talkback we’ve been running a live poll on what outcome people expect from the election next week – you can vote now and change the result if you think different.

Let’s have a look at how opinion has changed over the last week – between the second and third Leader’s debates

Trend of expected election result

We see a strong trend toward the Conservatives forming the next government – with Liberal Democrats and Labour being the main losers.

Written by: Matt Millar