Your home phone rings, but because you don't recognize the number that flashes on your caller ID, you don't pick up. Or maybe you abandoned your land line months ago since it's more economical to make all your business and personal calls from your cell phone.

You are precisely the type of person John Dick is betting on: someone who won't bother with traditional telephone polls but is likely to respond to political or consumer questions while browsing the Internet.

"With caller ID, cell phones and do-not-call lists, huge segments of the population are missed," said Mr. Dick, who founded South Side-based Civic Science to develop online polls.

Launching the company the year before a presidential election has provided some ready-made clients for Mr. Dick: Civic Science created polls that began running this month on the party Web sites of the Pennsylvania Republicans and Democrats. It also has developed online polls for private customers the founder declined to name.

Though the timing was ripe for a political polling business, Mr. Dick didn't plan it that way.

Just a year ago, he sold his interest in another local startup, GSP Consulting, that he co-founded in 2001. GSP Consulting -- which provides lobbying services primarily for high-tech and nonprofit clients -- has grown to 30 people in five offices in Pittsburgh and elsewhere since he helped to hatch it.

"I was going to take six months off after I sold my share of GSP," said Mr. Dick, 32, who worked on the staff of former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and for Mr. Santorum's 2000 election campaign before he started GSP.

But while researching ideas last summer for his next venture, he applied for and won $200,000 worth of business resources including office space from Managed Development Services, to develop a consumer polling and market research company. Managed Development Services works with startup companies including startups from Carnegie Mellon University. The Heinz Endowments sponsored Carnegie Mellon University's participation in MDS programs.

He used the money to set up shop in the River Walk Corporate Centre on East Carson Street and raised another $200,000 from individual investors including the former chief executive of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Kevin McClatchy; Pittsburgh-based insurance and financial advisers Sam Zacharias and David Malone; and Indianapolis venture capitalist Kevin Sheehan.

Besides Mr. Dick, Civic Science has two full-time employees and the founder is actively seeking programmers to add to his staff. "I can't find them fast enough; it's very competitive in this town."

Mr. Dick estimates that only 13 percent of all polling is conducted online, so there is a huge market for Civic Science to tap. And he has assembled a team of scientific advisers from a range of universities including Duke, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard to do that in a way that will protect respondents' privacy and ensure their personal data is kept secure.

"Privacy and security is very important in our business model," said Mr. Dick. "We don't care about names and e-mail addresses. People won't share candid opinions if they're not assured about privacy."

Civic Science's current model is a concise, three-question box poll that can be customized for political groups or consumer marketing surveys. A poll running on the Pennsylvania Republicans' Web site, www.pagop.org/blog, this week, for instance, asks viewers that if they were the Republican nominee, which candidate would they rather run against -- Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or "don't know"; what they believe is the greatest issue facing the nation -- threat of a terrorist attack, the economy or illegal immigration; and their gender, male or female.

The poll can be completed in seconds and as soon as respondents click an answer to the last question, they see the results of all those who have participated.

While that poll might generate quick answers for the state's Republican Committee about the leanings of its members and other political buffs who view the site, Mr. Dick concedes it falls short of polls that include wide samples of the population.

"Internet polling is not as diverse. Its respondents are typically younger, more educated than the population as a whole."

But he argues it's a way to augment phone polls for the time being and that eventually the Internet will account for a much larger percentage of all polling.

"We aren't going to supplant phone polling."

Tim Vercellotti, director of polling at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, said current Internet polling "is not a good methodology" because its samples such small fractions of the population.

"They're only capturing people who go [to a particular Web site]. They can't make any inferences about a larger population …. If someone was trying to make conclusions about what the larger population thought about these questions, they could not."

Dr. Vercellotti does see a market for online polling when participants are recruited over the phone during random sampling. One Silicon Valley company, Knowledge Networks, is doing that successfully, he said, by providing Internet access to low-income and elderly people who would not otherwise use computer technology. "So it stacks up well to more conventional sampling like telephone surveys."

But he credited Civic Science with being "absolutely right that we as an industry have to think of ways to get to the cell-phone-only crowd."

One pollster who has already embraced online methods is John Zogby, whose Zogby International conducts prominent political polls as well as telemarketing and marketing research.

Of about $7 million in revenues his company generated last year, roughly a third came from online polls, he said.

"At some point, sooner rather than later, [online polls] will supplant phone polls. We anticipate always having a call center. Don't get me wrong, the telephone poll is not at a crisis stage. But it will be supplanted. To this new company in Pittsburgh, tell them not to get too good at it."