Whether you're giving a presentation in a professional or fun setting, it's best to include interactive elements keep your audience engaged. A new service out of Sweden, Mentimeter, does just that by allowing an audience to vote on a topic using their smartphone's browser, and the results show up on the screen in real time.

The service is pretty straightforward to use. You just go to the Mentimeter website and create your question with multiple-choice answers. When you are ready for the polling to begin, you then instruct your audience to go to m.mentimeter.com and type in the "Vote ID" which will take them to your questions. As they vote, the results can be shown on screen in real time or can be hidden until the polling is over.

In a press release, they say that renowned brain scientist Martin Ingvar has been a beta tester, and said, “Opening a lecture with Mentimeter, I found, is a great way to engage my audience straight away. They get more alert and my lectures are very appreciated”.

It seems everyone is carrying a phone that can access the internet these days, and it seems Johnny Warström from Mentimeter has found a painless way for anyone standing in front of a crowd to take advantage of that fact.

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Riku November 25, 2011

Hi!

Surely a very useful service! I had some problems however, tried to create a question and it just refreshed the frontpage with a small "error" text in the upper left corner.

Great to have a free version of pollanywhere.com (which has been useful)

Henrik Fräsén November 25, 2011

Riku, I'm sorry that you experienced some problems. The "error" error is known to us and we're about to fix it. I hope you managed to create your question on the second try.

If you've had more problems, please tweet us (@mentimeter) and we'll try to help you. And of course; All feedback is also highly appreciated.

Henrik from Mentimeter