Way back in the ancient days of the Roman Empire, one of the biggest names in said Empire—Julius Caesar, specifically—conceived of a building known as the Saepta Julia, a building designed to give the citizens' assembly to place votes. Dedicated in 26 BC, the building took on several roles throughout its operational life, but often came back to cast votes. Today, however, while the Saepta Julia is currently in ruins, Saepta lives on as a place to provide the purest form of representation thanks to an online connection and giving individual users the vote.

Saepta allows users to pose a question to the great mass of the Internet, and get a collection of responses in response. Users can make a question, add an image, then post the question, either privately or publicly, and offer up a link to the interface where the question can be answered. From there, users can then publish the results of the question and the accompanying responses gathered on a variety of platforms from social networks to blogs, thus adding another layer of engagement with users. Responders' identities remain strictly confidential, thus the opinions expressed therein can be regarded as accurate and unvarnished, and all voters can watch the results as same are tallied, in real time.

Saepta's CEO and co-founder, Bruce Hendrix, offered up some commentary on the Saepta offering, saying “Saepta synthesizes voting with opinions and measurement, to help people learn more about the world around them, express their views, and understand more deeply the issues that affect their lives and how others feel about the events and ideas that are happening. Saepta is a revolutionary platform because it enables anyone, from an individual to a large corporation, to post questions, instantly gather votes and responses, and view the results visually in real time.”

Saepta has a variety of uses, making it valuable in several different fields. Naturally, it's a great tool for blogs and websites that want to build user engagement, allowing same to offer up questions about the site or the blog to keep users interested. Beyond that, however, researchers can put the platform to use in terms of academic matters, and businesses can put it to work to pin down just what it is the customer base wants to see happen, whether it's new policies, new products, or beyond.

From a marketing standpoint, this can be a very powerful tool. Not only does it offer an immediate draw by allowing users to register an opinion on certain matters, but it also allows for a platform for a discount plan if one is so inclined; all a business would need do is to tell the user base to come into the store, tell the clerk on duty how the user voted, and get a 10 percent discount or the like. Under certain circumstances, Saepta can work as a marketing tool with multiple levels of engagement to the user as well as a basic market research system.

A service that has that many uses isn't easy to overlook, and there will likely be plenty of businesses that can put Saepta to work almost immediately. For a fast and easy way to discover just what people think about just about anything, Saepta is the place to go to get that public opinion aggregated without incident.