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Introduction

The goal of CNN Political Market is to combine the opinions of a diverse group of people to try and predict the probability of an event occurring or the value of something. Why is this important? Because more often than not, a diverse group of people or “crowd” will generate a more accurate prediction than an individual or a small group of “like-minded” or “single-discipline” folks.

In business, politics, and culture, this can have big ramifications:
- Predictions often turn out to be more accurate than surveys and polls;
- More accurate forecasts affect how marketing dollars are spent, how many widgets should be built in the first run, etc.;
- Decision making is more democratized, giving everyone input where they may not have had it before;
- Markets can serve as on-going indicators for key performance metrics.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are answers to questions we receive on a regular basis.
Q: What if I forgot my username or password?
A: It’s easy, just click here and new information will be sent to the email address we have for you.

Markets and Trading
Q: How do the prices in a market change?
A: Markets are guided by the forces of supply and demand. Every time a user buys a share in a particular idea or outcome, that demand forces the price up a little. The more people buy, the higher the price becomes. If the price gets too high, people will do the natural, self-interested thing and sell their shares to get a profit (or sell shares that they don’t own on credit). Similarly, each time a user sells a share, the price goes back down some.

Q: My math says I can buy more shares than the system lets me. Why?
A: Remember that for each share you buy, the price goes up some. If you’re buying a lot of shares at once, the last share in your order might cost significantly more than the first.

Q: I sold a block of shares, but I got less money out of it than I thought I would.
A: Just like the market price increases you see when you purchase shares, each share you sell drives the market price for those shares down a little. If you’re selling a lot of shares, the last share you sell be worth much less than the first.

Q: I think the current price in a market is reflective of what the market is trying to predict. What do I do now?
A: The best thing to do is to hold onto your shares. If you try to sell them, the market price will start to go down and you won’t make as much profit as you could if you wait for the market to close.

Balances
Q: What is “on credit?”
A: When you sell shares on credit you are betting that the market price of a stock is going to go down instead of up. The idea is to sell shares you don’t have at a high price, and buy them back later once the market price has fallen. You get to keep the difference as profit.

Because you never know how high a price will go up, we’ve set up specific rules for selling shares on credit so you don’t get yourself in to trouble:
- You can buy back shares you bought on credit with the money in your bank.
- There is a limit on how much stock you can sell on credit. You can figure out what that limit is by adding your available balance to the total value of shares you have bought. For example, if you have $10 available balance, and you also own $10 of stock, you can sell $20 of stock on credit. In other words, we try not to allow you to go in to debt by always protecting you against the worst possible scenario.

Q: How can I tell how much money I have?
A: Your balances are listed in the “total assets” box which you can find on your dashboard/portfolio. Your balance is also listed on each market trade page.

Q: How can I get more money?
A: You can earn money by trading wisely in markets. Look for good ideas that are undervalued, examine market descriptions for interesting things that others might not have noticed, or use your own unique, personal knowledge to make predictions that others can’t.

Q: What is the play money good for?
A: Status in the online trading community is based on how much money you have; just take a look at the “top traders.” The more money you have, the sooner everyone will begin to refer to you as “sage.”

Q: Can I give some of my money to another user?
A: Money is non-transferable – you must earn your own by trading.

Marketplace and Help
Q: The website looks a little funny. Is my computer supported?
A: We support the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Mozilla for Windows XP and 2000. For Mac OS X we support the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, and Mozilla. The application may work in alternate OSes and browsers, but we can’t make any promises.

Q: Didn’t the Internet craze die back in 2001? Why launch an Internet business?
A: The Internet craze didn’t die in 2001. Companies with no path to profitability, no plan, and excessive irrational behavior died in 2001. The possibilities of the Internet in relation to consumer behavior and transforming business are still as potent as ever.

Q: Where did your idea come from?
A: Our idea came from doing consulting for several large companies and working in one for several years. We watched the lack of quality information flow between the hierarchies. We saw how people with relevant knowledge, whose input should be key in strategic decisions, were completely left out of the process, and we saw broken business processes for innovation and coming up with new ideas. We also read a lot about collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds, paired our understanding of those two worlds, and out came the idea to do Inkling. We certainly weren’t the first to say prediction markets should be used by corporations, but we think we’re taking an approach that sets us apart from our predecessors and current competitors. [*]

Q: What is your elevator pitch?
A: Inkling helps you capture the collective wisdom of a diverse group of people to give you insight about what may happen in the future vs. relying solely on high paid consultants or individual experts. This is important because it can help you mitigate risk, make better strategic decisions, spawn innovation and entrepreneurship, and change your corporate culture.

Q: How is your proposition different from earlier generations of online business?
A: Online business services, beyond eCommerce solutions, still usually required an expensive consulting component. There also was not traditionally a focus on ease of use. We’ve tried to address both by creating “do it yourself” tools to allow anyone to manage their own prediction marketplace. We’ve taken something as complex as trading in a stock market mechanism and made it easy enough for our Mom’s to use. Related we’ve obsessed on our user-interface and iterate on it constantly to make sure people can use it. After all, you can’t say you sell software that helps you capture the wisdom of a crowd if the crowd can’t use your software.

Q: How will you make money?
A: We make money by selling service agreements to large and small businesses to set up and maintain prediction marketplaces. We also do a fair amount of customization work for our larger clients.

Q: Why will you succeed? What are your biggest successes so far?
A: In less than a year we have attracted several thousand users to our public marketplace and have about 20 clients. We are working with Abbott Labs here in Chicago, ABC-KGO in San Francisco, the Government of Singapore, AlderTrack, think tanks, a video game maker, and an array array of small businesses and non-profits. We think we will continue to see success because of our well designed product and because we think this is a blue sky market that people are just beginning to think about as a way to changing the way they do business. We also think we’re going to be successful because we are largely self-funded. When the success of your business means you can or cannot pay the mortgage and your bills, it makes you a little hungrier.

Q: What is your age and previous business experience?
A: The two co-founders of Inkling are Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny. We are 33 and 29 respectively. Adam worked at Accenture here in Chicago for 10 years in the Accenture Technology Labs and was a senior manager when he left. Nate worked at Accenture as well in the same group and left as a consultant to work as a senior developer at Digital River.

Q: Have you received funding? If so, how much and from whom?
A: We received a small amount of funding (18k) from yCombinator when we incorporated but have taken no funding since.

SMOCKIN’!!!…

[*] I think that what separates Inkling from the rest of the pack is that they have integrated the “Web 2.0″ factor.

Psstt… I would like so much Inkling to do CDA, too, by the way.