Quirkos Upgrades, Readies for Cloud Launch

Edinburgh-based text analytics specialist Quirkos Software has added several new features to its platform. Founder Daniel Turner says the upgrade lays the groundwork for 'next-generation' cloud-based services to be introduced next year.

Developed by a team of British qualitative researchers from the academic and market research sectors, and led by Turner (pictured), Quirkos enables users to tag or code relevant sections of text, and collate and compare themes across dozens of different text sources such as interview transcripts, surveys and articles. The tool's interface is based around live visualisations of the themes that develop as researchers work, creating visual reports in the form of an interactive 'bubble graph' to make qual data more engaging and easier to understand. The tool also generates traditional static reports, and exports to other packages including Word, Excel and CAQDAS.

The new Quirkos 2 builds on this foundation with the addition of a refreshed user interface; making the most commonly used features more accessible to new users. Turner says the platform has retained its intuitive nature while adding rich text support, memos and new ways to group and structure coding frameworks.

He adds: 'We are really excited to make this new release publically available. It's the result of months of internal work and feedback from dozens of beta testers and will let us meet the needs of many more qualitative researchers. We are finding more and more users are moving their qualitative research to Quirkos, where they can keep closer to their data and see their results emerge in real-time'.

Web site: www.quirkos.com .