Mobile Commons

Recently, we released a new and improved version of our mData Service. Simply: mData is the easiest way to share searchable information on every mobile phone. You can power mData by uploading a simple spreadsheet or by tying it into an existing web service. Users can then perform queries on that database by sending simple SMS messages with query parameters.

Watch a short, 3-minute screencast on the new mData.

In our new release, we focused on improving the reporting and making it easy for our customers to contextualize the results from their users and constituents. Search is a powerful tool and the data from search queries helps our customers learn a lot about their constituency’s priorities.

For example, if an organization only publishes static web pages, wallet cards, or PDF files, they’ll never learn which information their audience responds to—users will only get static information. Using mData, queries can be compared against each other.

The other thing we realized is that people are used to querying the entire web, where there is plenty of information, though much of it isn’t very good. By contrast, many of our customers are established and trusted sources of information and giving them a way to publish and easily maintain their own search benefits consumers and them. However, one of the tough things about maintaining a searchable database is telling people that you don’t have any results for their search. With our new mData, we’re ranking the top missed queries for our customers and contextualizing them so that they have a roadmap for doing new research and adding new results to their database, creating increasingly better resources for their audiences.

The new mData is a big step forward in taking the research of an organization and turning it into an easily maintainable consumer utility. It’s easy to use for organizations, easy to use for consumers—and with the new release, the quality of information will only get better with time.