Poll who? The people, duh!

On my daily job, I share the company’s office with this guy called Glenn Cooper, who used to work for Universal Music, but who’s now a consultant and has just launched his own business, an online startup called “Poll The People” : www.pollthepeople.com.

I’ve been meaning to write about him for a while now but since he was in the beta testing of his website, I thought I’d wait until the official launch date which was last Thursday, April 24th.

His idea is the following: providing Universal (planetary - not Universal Music) polls about any topic that people might be talking about - this goes from films, music, politics, news, etc. Once users have signed up, they can choose their top 5 artists, movies and books (for now, there will be more polls coming) and then find out which other users share the same interests. Pretty cool, huh???

Well, you might think, “OK, I’ve already seen this a milliontimes…” and you might be right. However, Glenn’s idea is to use the current popularity of social networks to make Poll the People a crucial part of any internet media which could potentially use the opinions of users. For example, an artist might want to use the Internet to poll the people about which of his new album’s tracks should become a hit single. If you take this idea further, it might go even as far as deciding who’s gonna be the next participant of Big Brother or who will get fired from the Apprentice. Possibilities are endless!

So there’s huge potential in Poll the People. Of course, being social media, it’s free, and uses money from advertising (for now) to generate revenues. If they manage to nail the current social online trend, they could get blogging widgets, facebook apps, etc. which would surely give them a large share of the market in that specific area.

After all, when was the last time you heard about a reliable, innovative and fun online polling system such as Poll The People? I think it’s worth a try. At least keep an eye out for all those new features Glenn has promised me (and some on which i’ve had the chance of brainstorming with) as there will be more coming soon.

Go ahead and give out your top 5 at www.pollthepeople.com, mine are:

1	Layer Cake (Matthew Vaughn)
why?
2	La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz)
why?
3	Paris Je T’Aime (Alexander Payne/ Wes Craven/ Ethan Coen/ Alfonso Cuarón/ Isabel Coixet)
why?
4	Once (John Carney)
why?
5	300 (Zack Snyder)
why?