Ask.com Launches New Visual Q&A App “Pollroll”

It seems like there are a million apps launching or promoting themselves in connection with the upcoming SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. Among them is Pollroll a new Q&A mobile app from Ask.com.

Pollroll, according to Ask, “is designed to facilitate the creation, distribution and sharing of poll questions and results.” In addition to answering polls users many annotate their responses with comments. And polls can be shared on Facebook and Twitter.

There is a location element here (“Where’s the best Austin BBQ spot?”) as well as the ability to ask more general questions that don’t pertain to Austin or SXSW. Below are a couple of screens from the app, which can be downloaded here.

Last year for SXSW Ask released a “local conversations” app called Ask Around, which was ultimately shuttered. This time Ask seems to be using the conference as a kind of lab with more modest ambitions.

Accordingly, Ask explains what lead to the creation of Pollroll and that SXSW is really a testing ground to see how people interact with polling:

Why Pollroll? We saw our users leveraging the Ask Q&A community as a polling mechanism and thought, why not make it easier to set up a quick poll, survey others about anything— from favored restaurants to the best apps—and then share those results? SXSW is a great testing ground for Ask to play with this polling functionality, leveraging things like social connections and location, and we plan to use these learnings to better integrate polling into our flagship mobile app and site.

Below is a promotional video for Pollroll that demonstrates some of the functionality and use cases.

LocalMind is a location-specific Q&A app that has updated with broader functionality in time for SXSW. There are several other, local presence apps debuting or promoting themselves at SXSW. The most hyped of those is friend-finder Highlight. However, many of these friend-finder apps strike me as the reinvention of Loopt.

SXSW has become a hot spot to launch new products, especially location-based apps. Foursquare had its debut at SXSW in 2009. The associated buzz and momentum helped propel the company with early adopters.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He researches and writes about the connections between digital and offline commerce. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.