[nikiscevak]

Honestly, you'll waste your time. They'll see you coming from a mile away.

A fantastic source of market research is from larger public companies. Look up their most recent 10-K (annual report). They are legally obligated to give a fairly detailed market analysis (that synthesizes the research from folks like Gartner etc.) in each annual report. It's a great starting point.

Also, for most startup 'markets' there isn't actually a market. It's completely new. So 'market research' in this sense is not very useful and you should examine the premise that you need to do market research at all (versus say concentrating on whether consumers actually have a problem that you can solve).

[mosburger]

Totally agree w/ nikiscevak. I abandoned one of my ideas for a wireless MVNO after analyzing the 10-K's of some publicly traded wireless companies. Just reading through the summaries will give you good nuggets of information.