Will The Economist manage its own prediction markets? YES or NO??

Chris F. Masse April 27th, 2007

Mike Linksvayer, how do you read this???

Good news, bad news
April 27th, 2007 by Ludwig

Let’s start with the good news: We’re pretty close to making a decision about what service to bring to market. It took many long, sometimes heated debates, and in the end, Javier, our team coach had to play tiebreaker.

The bad news is that we have also decided, for the moment, not to make the choice public. We are aware, of course, that we are thereby going back on our promise to be open. But going public now would almost certainly kill our idea. The concept will not be easy to pull off in any case, in terms of developing an impressive website. But it also involves building relationships with several constituencies, both within The Economist Group and outside it.

What we can say, however, is that the core of our product will be a social network. It will also feature aspects of other ideas, such as data visualization, mash-ups and, perhaps, some user-generated content. Essentially, we’re bundling several web technologies into an online service that we hope you want to part of.

While we develop something that is presentable, we will blog about the ideas that we considered implementing, but ultimately chose not to (which doesn’t mean that other units of The Economist Group may not themselves decide to take them up). So stay tuned.

Previous: The Economist should set up The Open Institute of Prediction Markets. + WHY THE ECONOMIST SHOULD ADD MARKET-GENERATED PROBABILITIES NEXT TO ITS CONTENT.

External Link: Turning The Economist into an economy = The Red Stripe Project investigating the prediction markets.

Entrepreneurship
Comments(2)

2 Responses to “Will The Economist manage its own prediction markets? YES or NO??”

# Mike Linksvayer on 27 Apr 2007 at 6:06 pm

They couldn’t decide — a social network could be a feature of just about any product.
# Chris. F. Masse on 28 Apr 2007 at 1:56 am

Mike,

I saw in the Wikipedia page about the instances of “social networking websites” that the prediction exchanges (betting exchanges) are not listed. Which also may explain why they decided to publish a blog post on prediction markets (on Friday) BEFORE the competition was officially closed (on the next Sunday).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.....g_websites

I don’t feel they are going to go into prediction market land.

Which in return will beg the question on whether The Financial Times made a good decision in creating a sub-exchange.