Y Combinator-backed Posmetrics, a new tool to help brick-and-mortar businesses collect customer feedback via the iPad, is today making its public debut. The company has designed its online surveys to run on the tablet form factor, and be simple and fast enough that a customer could complete a survey while at a business’s point-of-sale or checkout. Initially, the startup is targeting hotels, but says its platform would also work in retail, at restaurants, airlines, or any where else where there’s interaction between the business and the consumer.

Posmetrics began as a computer science project from two Harvard underclassman, Merrill Lutsky (CEO) and Erik Schluntz (CFO), who felt that the current methods businesses use to collect customer feedback were broken.

“The two of us noticed that every time we would stay in a hotel, get off a flight, go to a store or restaurant, we would get an email or URL printed on our receipts asking us go online and fill out a survey,” explains Lutsky. “Some businesses were even using a comment card.” He says that, like most people, neither of them would take the time to respond to these calls-to-action, mainly because they required a lot of effort on the customer’s part.

People don’t want to take a 20-minute long online survey, Lutsky says. So with Posmetrics, the interface has been customized to be very quick and easy something that a customer can tap their way through in about 20 seconds.

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