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Chris F. Masse March 14th, 2007

About the NewsFutures history:

- Company founded in March 2000.
- French prediction market “la bourse de l’info” launched in September 2000.
- Hungarian version “Hirbörze” launched in April 2001 (first integration of a prediction exchange in a news media)
- US version launched in November 2001 (co-branded by USA Today - first integration of a prediction exchange in a US news media)
- NewsFutures was the first exchange to let people buy or sell contracts for each side of a binary-outcome event. The advantage of this design is that it avoids the need for “shorting”, a notion that tends to confuse novice traders. NewsFutures later extend that approach to deal with n-ary outcome events while implementing automatic arbitrage.
- Their first “corporate” application was for FNAC in 2002.
- Their first US-based corporate application was for Eli Lilly in 2003 (still a client).
- NewsFutures invented “multi-outcome” auto-arbitrage markets (a la Chris Hibbert) in 2004 to power MIT Tech Review’s Innovation Futures.
- First direct experimental comparison of play-money and real-money markets in 2003-2004.
- NewsFutures invented “Competitive Forecasting” in 2005 (first corporate application for MasterFoods).
- NewsFutures introduced prediction markets at Davos (World Economic Forum) in 2006.
- NewsFutures ran their first “real-money” prediction exchange in 2006 for de Volkskrant (Dutch elections).

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