Poll Everywhere is a hosted SMS voting system for US cellular phone customers. Everyone from a small blogger to a large corporation can sign up for an account and have Poll Everywhere host SMS vote contests. Pricing ranges from free to $370 per month, depending on the number of votes being cast and the number of votes allowed per month. I've created a sample poll and embedded it into my blog below.

This service is nearly identical to LiveVote.ca, which I've covered before on RIApedia. However, LiveVote only works in Canada, and Poll Everywhere only works for US cell phone customers.

The voting display is handled using Flex and the Flex charting components.

LiveVote allows anyone to setup SMS polls for Canadians (and only Canadians for now) at no charge. The application, written in Flex, is easy to use - you sign in, and then set options for your SMS poll - a topic, voting options (including the duration), press Launch, and you're done. Canadian cell phone users can send an SMS message to 868464 (Voting) with their vote, and results will be tallied. The polls can be embedded into a website easily, as shown below, and results will be shown in real time.

When I tested it out, there were a few bugs in the program, but it worked pretty well. The most obvious problem is that you can't use voting options that have been used before. So, if someone setup an earlier poll with the options of "Yes" and "No", you can't re-use those in your poll. (Update: This appears to be fixed?) There's also a problem with people switching their votes and the graph that gets displayed in real time, but that's likely not a problem for most people - only if you're watching the results come in. The final numberes are correct.

At the end of the poll you can export all the votes to a CSV file and then analyze the data however you like.

LiveVote is built by Handi Mobility out of Vancouver, and is a really useful service, if you have mostly visitors from Canada.