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November 30, 2007: Wikis, Blogs and Prediction Markets: Oh My!

Professor Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School recently wrote on the value wikis, blogs, social networking, and prediction markets can bring to organizations and what differentiates them.  In particular, he analyzed their use based on how the can bring people with different levels of “ties” together.

October 31, 2007: New Prediction Site: Predictify.com

Predictify.com launched in early October as an attempt to provide a simpler and more open version of prediction markets such as Intrade.

September 28, 2007: Salesforce.com to add “Crowdsourcing”

While sites such as Flickr, Wikipedia and Digg have become a staple of many people’s day, the idea of opening up business functions traditionally delegated to a small group of people is a foreign concept to many organizations. 

With the Winter ’08 release of Salesforce.com, concepts similar to what drive those and other “Web 2.0” sites are being added to Salesforce Ideas (open submissions and voting) as well as Salesforce Content (open publishing as well as a rating system and tags).

August 24, 2007: How to Win on “Power of 10”

For those of you who haven’t seen Power of 10, it is basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire/Family Feud cross where a contestant attempts to guess the results of a survey. 

What I found interesting about the show is that the contestant gets to poll the audience for their guess on every question.  As many devout fans know, there was similar help available on Millionaire, but only on one of the 15 questions.  This limitation made sense for the show’s producers as the audience was correct 90% of the time.

Perhaps the producers of Power of 10 assumed that with a question where the contestant can never trust their answer, they would be even more confused once they saw the audience’s opinion.  In reality, however, groups of people actually excel at predicting how other will answer and are correct more often than even “experts”.

July 30, 2007: Predicting Potter and Consoles

Two public prediction markets have recently reached their end: June game console sales and the question “Will Harry Potter survive the Deathly Hallows?” 

What makes comparing the results of these two markets interesting is the different type of question they are predicting.  In the case of the console market, they are attempting to predict the buying habits of a large group of people as well as the production capacity and marketing moves of large companies.  On the other hand, the Harry Potter market is attempting to predict the creative whims of a single person (J.K. Rowling).

July 26, 2007: Prediction Market Trials

A recent Mercury Research blog listed three key points to consider when testing out internal prediction markets:

• solving a real problem
• starting with a small, diverse group
• keeping it low-profile

All three are very important to a successful prediction market trial, but I would add one more: a way to measure how well they performed.