Is your market research costly and time-consuming to gather? And is it collecting the right information? Be inspired by two firms that use technology to take marketplace analysis to new heights.

For our Britain’s Digital Elite awards, Real Business partnered with Microsoft to scour the land looking for firms who are using technology to gain a competitive edge over their rivals and become masters of execution.

We spent months looking for companies who stand out – not because of what they do, but the way that they do it. Four judges – including two entrepreneurs who made their names using technology to shake up industries – sifted through the deluge of entries in ten different categories.

Last week, we announced that Thomson Intermedia's pioneering media technology had been crowned the winner of the Marketplace Analysis category. Here we reveal the two other finalists...

Highly Commended: BrainJuicer

John Kearon spent 15 years as a market researcher at Unilever lamenting the cost, speed and inaccuracy of market information. So he started his own firm.

The result, BrainJuicer, founded in 2000, relies on the internet to gather responses to open-ended questions. BrainJuicer then crunches the results with powerful proprietary analytics software to provide the most insightful information possible to clients.

Kearon has recently pioneered the use of webcams to capture users’ responses to stimuli. The resulting product, FaceTrace, is used by Shell, Pepsi and, fittingly, Unilever. Floated on AIM last year, BrainJuicer is valued at £23m, though Kearon is confident his young firm can power past the £100m mark in the next few years.

Highly Commended: Sciemus

Insuring satellites is a risky business. If one goes missing, you’re looking at a bill of $100m or more. Which is why Sciemus’s number crunching is so valued. Their algorithms help the insurers calculate a premium for each satellite. So far, the company has helped insure 80 satellites, one tenth of the total in existence.

Founded by former cybernetics lecturer Andre Finn and ministry of defence mathematician Neil Fleming, Sciemus’s Space RAT programme uses ten Java packages, 230 modules, 3,500 lines of HTML and 59,000 lines of code. The result is the industry’s largest dataset.

In partnership with insurer Liberty Syndicates, Sciemus can provide insurance of up to $225m, compared to the market average of $20m. Amazingly, none of the satellites it has insured have required a pay-out, making it one of the few satellite insurers to have made a net profit.

To read more on how Microsoft's technology can help you cut out the competition and to see the rest of the winners, visit our Focus-On Britain's Digital Elite.

Related tags: microsoft, media technology, market research, sciemus, ministry of defense, britains digital elite, brainjuicer, thomson intermedia, technology in business, satellite, unilever, entrepreneur, marketplace analysis,