NEW YEAR LUNCH. Merlinco have a tradition of holding a New Year Lunch for staff and consultants. This year (despite freezing weather conditions), the number attending rose to 12, and it was a good opportunity for everyone to meet Matt Long, who had joined our production department three days earlier.

ANOTHER GOSPEL JOINS MERLINCO. We already have Mark and John - now we are pleased to announce that Matthew is joining us! Matt Long will be working with Kathy Abbott in our Production Department, helping to handle the increasing volume of work and, we expect, bringing in still more. Matt has over 20 years experience in market research analysis, working for several well-known companies, and also freelancing. For most of those years, he has been using MERLIN, but is also familiar with several Computer Assisted Interviewing packages, and many aspects of Project Management. In his spare time he sings with two bands.

City University have obtained MERLINPLUS Database for analysing data collected by OpinionPanel Research (who are MERLIN users), and are the 15th university to do so. Merlinco offer two packages for end-users of data - FASTAB and MERLINPLUS Database .

JOB VACANCY IN PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT. Merlinco are looking for someone with 1+ years experience using any survey analysis package (but MERLIN or MERLINPLUS would be an advantage!). Please email your CV to John Tebboth

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS. The Merlinco offices will be closed from December 25th to January 1st inclusive, re-opening as usual on Monday 4th January. Emails will be polled during the holiday period but, if you have an urgent enquiry, call our usual number +44 (0)870 264 6329 where there will be a recorded message giving an alternative contact number.

In a brief ceremony at an ASC meeting this month, Merlinco’s development director Keith Hughes was awarded Lifetime Honorary Membership of the ASC. This elite body of honourees (previously consisting of only eight persons) has the privilege of being able to attend all ASC events entirely free of charge (apart from beer) in perpetuity. In his acceptance speech, Keith referred to the fact that all he had ever done for the ASC was to refuse steadfastly for eighteen years to be nominated for a place on the Committee: it’s thought likely that, on the whole, this is one reason for the organisation’s long survival!

McDonald Research, a Surrey-based consultancy who offer advice and practical help on all aspects of marketing and advertising research, have bought the Questionnaire Definition module of MERLINPLUS to design questionnaires in Microsoft Word. Colin McDonald mastered the program with no training, and commented how easy it was to use. The modular design of MERLINPLUS allows many of the programs (such as Questionnaire Definition) to be purchased independently.

Merlinco exhibited at the Insight Show on 30th June and 1st July - under a very hot glass roof at Olympia! The change of venue for this show, and the fact that three other shows were being held alongside it, brought a record number of attendees, especially on the first day. We were pleased to see many of our clients there, as well as new prospects. We expect to be on the same stand on June 29th-30th 2010!

Fieldwork UK Ltd who provide flexible solutions to research problems, have bought MPE, our data entry product. This product allows fast entry and verification of ASCII or binary data, with loose or tight checking to suit the user's requirement.

Our first new client of 2009 is The Research Unit, who have bought MERLINPLUS and MTW.
The Research Unit specialise in community engagement and complex social research briefs.

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS. The Merlinco offices will be closed from Thursday 25th December 2008 until Friday 2nd January 2009 inclusive, re-opening as usual on Monday 5th January. Emails will be polled during the holiday period but, if you have an urgent enquiry, call our usual number +44 (0)870 264 6329, where there will be a recorded message giving an alternative contact number.

JOB VACANCY IN PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT. Merlinco are looking for someone with 1-2 years experience using any survey analysis package (but MERLIN or MERLINPLUS would be an advantage!). Please post or email your CV to Kathy Abbott, our Production Director.

Merlinco will be exhibiting at Insight 2008. Come and see us at stand 503.
The exhibition is on the 18th and 19th November at Earls Court

QRS Market Research Ltd, who have been a Merlinco client for some years through their use of CONVERSO for CATI, have now bought MERLINPLUS - both to analyse Converso data (exported via the Triple-S standard), and to process non-CATI projects from scratch. QRS offer a range of Quant and Qual data collection methods across business and consumer markets.

A WINNING COMBINATION. Now we have our own Production Department, we are even keener to make life easier for MERLIN analysts! We recently realised that a lot of time can be spent defining and labelling an svar that contains all combinations of an mvar ... so we have written a small program to generate the code automatically. If you use MERLIN, and would like a free copy of this program, just let us know.

Clear Stream Research have joined Merlinco's client list this month, with their purchase of MERLIN, MTW, and MERLINPLUS Database. Clear Stream Research offer telephone and online data collection, design and management of online panels and communities, as well as data processing and multivariate analysis.

KATHY ABBOTT, who joined Merlinco in January this year to head our new Production Department, has been appointed a Merlinco Board Director. The volume of production work has been steadily increasing, but we still have room for more! Please contact Kathy if you want a quote for a job.

MPI-PALM IS NOW A MULTI-MEDIA PRODUCT! MPI-Palm, our interviewing program for PDAs, will now play video and audio files, as well as displaying still pictures. This new addition is especially valuable for surveys involving advertising recall.

MTPP Tutorial. In response to several requests, we have produced a tutorial for MTPP (MERLIN to PowerPoint), which clients can download from the Support page of our website. Anyone interested in buying MTPP may like to look through the tutorial as an introduction to the program - if so, please contact us and we will email you a copy.

VERSION 9.1 of our software has been released. The main addition to MERLIN is the ability to directly read and write Excel files, and in MERLINPLUS there is a new screen that enables you to edit any number of entries at once. There are lots more changes to these, and other programs in our range (including new logos!), all detailed in the release notes which have been sent to our clients. Anyone else interested should contact Merlinco.

In a shuffle in the Merlinco boardroom, John Tebboth replaces Peter Jackling as Managing Director. Peter will continue to be involved with the company as Business Development Director, while Keith Hughes remains in place as Software Development Director.

For more information, see our press release at

www.mrweb.com/drno/news7920.htm

Kathy will also be running our web survey service, to be launched in February. We have completely re-written our web questionnaire software, and the new version is nearly ready to be used. You can see a demo here - please let us know if you would like us to host a survey for you!