If you have been a feed subscriber of Midas Oracle for a long time (we started in 2006 here, and in 2003 for CFM), you know that I act as a gadfly. But there is a reason for that. If I were a simple stenographer, re-publishing press releases (and making friends with the prediction market people by doing so), you wouldn’t get the truth. Take the last instance.
- I wrote that 2 EPM software providers (NewsFutures and CrowdCast, representing half of this industry) are turning their back from the trading technology and are opting for the non-trading technologies.
- The NewsFutures CEO insisted to let the world know that, oh no, no, no, NewsFutures haven’t abandoned the trading technology, and that they are proud to be able to propose both to their customers.
- That was a PR point he wanted to make (so as to sound that NewsFutures is the omni-solution provider, wow, you should be so impressed). But the piece of truth that our readers should have in mind is what I am telling them: NewsFutures and CrowdCast don’t believe anymore that EPMs are the right solution to propose to companies.
- While you can have a very interesting conversation, privately, with Emile on that, all of the sudden, when a question is publicly asked to His Majesty, then the PR machine is all silent.
The question was:
NewsFutures does list here 4 tools. Could Emile tell us how popular each of these tools is? I would like a percentage for each of these 4 tools. In other words, could Emile quantify EPMs in the whole collective intelligence solution panorama? Is that inferior to 50% or superior to 50%? Please. Thanks.
Medemi on 
When I followed the link to NewsFutures, I didn’t see any abandonment of trading technology. They still have prediction markets for continuous variables. They have competitive forecasting, which appears to be a prediction market with a different payoff function and a different way of expressing the trader’s opinion. They seem to be gearing this to companies with fewer traders (or less trading savvy ones). Still, it is a prediction market. The idea Futures is really a poll of ideas, leading to a ranking. This is a totally different thing from prediction markets. Again, this doesn’t appear to be a departure from prediction markets. It’s more like an ancillary product. Finally, the Impact Matrix appears to represent something that prediction markets will never be good at – very long term outcome predictions. It isn’t explained on the site, but I’m guessing this is some form of delphi analysis of complex, long-term issues. I haven’t checked CrowdCast’s new methodology, yet.
“When I followed the link to NewsFutures, I didn’t see any abandonment of trading technology.”
Paul, contrary to you, the information on an official website is *not* my only source of information. People talk to moi. All kinds of people.
“They have competitive forecasting, which appears to be a prediction market”
I don’t think so.