“Most polling places are over-engineered for the average user,” explains Porter Haney, cofounder of Wedgies. Simply enter your question and upload an optional image. The minute you hit create, you can share the real-time Wedgies graph to Facebook, Twitter, or your blog. Say you’re at a large event like a basketball game or a tech conference: there’s even an opportunity to set up a text-to-vote option for the crowds. Click here to see how it works. “People have a lot of questions on social platforms, but have a hard time activating [polling tools],” mentions Haney. Whether you’re taking a poll for an office lunch or collecting opinions on gun control, Wedgies offers a quicker way to get the results you need. For natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, the best raw information came from Instagram and Twitter, where updates spread before traditional news sources. The natural next step is to organize and make useful the buckets of raw information with a tool as responsive as the services where the information comes from.Born in the flourishing tech community of Las Vegas, Wedgies continues to get positive feedback from both users and the surrounding startup scene. This lightweight tool “encourages a lighthearted approach to how people ask a question, hence the name,” explains Haney. With over 100,000 people on the platform asking questions, they have managed to collect thousands of responses from users, driving value for clients like USA TODAY, the NCAA, and Zappos. In the future, Wedgies plans to position itself as a polling place that will include a variety of question structures like multiple choice and more graphic displays, etc. “We’ve got a cool opportunity to create a really interesting brand and polling platform, with an amazing team of folks that are excited to build it,” says Haney. For now, the goal is to wedge more Wedgies in more places. Tech Cocktail worked with Wedgies to conduct a real-time poll of San Francisco’s Hottest Showcasing Startup in early January. Wedgies was also a showcased startup at the Tech Cocktail Week mixer in Las Vegas.
