What do Facebook, Wrigley and Motorola Mobility have in common? This startup

These days companies have plenty of ways to get consumer feedback, from random telephone surveys to monitoring social media comments. Michael Winnick has another he thinks can be even more useful: a cyberspace focus group.

His startup, Dscout, is helping corporate customers such as Facebook, Wm. Wrigley Jr. and Trek Bicycle get real-time input and updates from an army of consumers via their smartphones. Google's Motorola Mobility subsidiary has used the Dscout app to gather a virtual focus group of 50,000 people in 130 countries for Project Ara, which aims to build the next generation of mobile phones. “We allow clients to gather a lot of information with a greater level of precision than they could get before and to do it quickly and cheaply,” the 40-year-old CEO says.