Here’s an old comment from Adam Siegel of Inkling Markets I have found out in my e-mail archives:
- The Chicago Sun-Times is responsible for chicago.inklingmarkets.com. They contacted us last week about putting something up and it rolled out today.
- The perception we don’t do any consulting/project management is not quite true. We certainly do not go about things as a typical consulting engagement, i.e. formal workplans, a program manager, etc. but we do set up and work towards specific goals and timeframes, provide guidance along the way, look at markets when our clients want us to to see if they have been set up correctly, provide customer support, do custom development when necessary, etc. Our goal though is to make the tools easy enough that people can indeed do this stuff themselves; we don’t want to be in the middle of setting up lots and lots of markets in people’s marketplace; it may be a way to make more money in the short term, but that business model is not compatible with our vision for where all of this is headed in the longer term in corporations and it doesn’t make sense for when someone wants to run a public marketplace – they know their business and customers better than we do and if we can, we’d like to stay out of the way of that interaction and just provide the tools to facilitate it.
- We had always been doing a few things to look for fraudulent behavior, but I’m not going to lie and say watching the Chicago politics site didn’t teach us a few lessons about how people try to manipulate the marketplace. In fact, we’ve already taken what we learned and incorporated additional capabilities in to the application. Of course this is much more relevant for public exchanges – inside a corporation someone can’t have 50 official email addresses, and we’re never going to be under the illusion that there are many hackers out there smarter than we are, but we’ll do what we can to keep this kind of stuff to a minimum.
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