Sligo-based electronic marketing provider Infacta has spun out its PollDaddy product into a separate company.
PollDaddy Ltd came into being at the start of the year to manage the online polling and survey tool which has attracted 135,000 registered users and is seen by about 80 million web users a month.
Using the popular widget model, PollDaddy provides free tools that enable web users to create a survey or poll on any topic. Although hosted through PollDaddy, the widget they create can be embedded on a company's own website, blog or social networking page, including those offered by MySpace, Hi5, Blogger and Typepad.
"The 135,000 registered users range from kids on MySpace, a lot of high-profile bloggers, to big media organisations like RTÉ, PC World and Wired.com," said chief executive David Lenehan.
Before Christmas it announced a partnership with Piczo, the social network for 14- to 18-year-olds which has almost 30 million users. Piczo users can now create a poll for their page directly from within the site and Mr Lenehan says an average of 11,000 users a day are doing so.
Mr Lenehan says PollDaddy's tools collect information on the web and provide reports on it - as a result, it plans to create widgets for the creation of forms and running competitions.
The next step for the company, which has two employees including Mr Lenehan, will be to turn the traffic and profile it has built up into money. It is offering business users premium accounts for $20-$99 a month, which removes the PollDaddy branding from the widget and provides advanced reporting options.
They are also building a directory on PollDaddy.com of polls users are creating which should attract enough traffic to start making advertising revenue. "For the moment we are happy to build traffic," says Mr Lenehan.
It has been accepted on to the Enterprise Ireland Transform Programme, which provides a year's basic funding, training, mentoring and free office space.
