- I like Jed a lot, but he often tweets about his private life. I wouldn’t mind, but the problem is that I follow 70 people, and if they all start tweeting about what they had for breakfast, then it becomes Hell on Earth to use Twitter.

- John Delaney is sometimes interesting, but he re-tweets the InTrade RSS feed, which I am already a subscriber to in Google Reader. That is infernal to see 2 times the same info. To add salt to injury, the InTrade RSS feed always re-publishes a second time their feed items. I don’t know why they do that. It is really annoying. So if you subscribe to John Delaney’s Twitter feed, who re-tweets the InTrade feed, then you get the same thing 4 times in a row. It is the craziest thing I have ever seen on the Web. Plus, John Delaney now uses a script to follow every person who follows him —a standard tactic used by the Twitter spammers. It is a bad thing to do.

Addendum:

- Felix Salmon and Tim O’Reilly make a good usage of Twitter. And Felix Salmon is smart enough to poll his people about his Twitter usage.

- A lot of things have changed on the Internet since the creation of Amazon.com in 1994. The current website is made up of an e-commerce site with reviews built on top. If I had to build Amazon.com from scratch, today, I would have it as a content site with an e-commerce site built on top of it. The reason is that the primary objective of SEO is to get good inbound links, and the easiest way to get those is to create and publish good, original content.

[More on the other blog, devoted to Internet business models and Internet marketing. The second set of ideas comes indirectly from a short exchange with David Pennock, who knows more about the Internet that I do ---or so he thinks.]

1) Create a central, standardized registry of available prediction stocks and contracts from different prediction markets. This open central resource will help demonstrate the wide coverage of available predictions, facilitate search, and make prediction market data more easily available to researchers, the media, and the public at large. Participation will be entirely voluntary, and the program will leave each publisher in complete control of the commercial terms for accessing its data.

2) Offer a directory of its members, a library of core readings, and other such resources enabling newcomers to quickly learn about the field and find their way among the various worldwide offerings.

3) Provide a consensual venue for sharing industry-relevant information and announcements, and organize regular meetings of the industry to discuss common opportunities.

4) Lobby for a clear legal and regulatory environment conducive to the productive adoption of prediction markets by individuals, firms, and governments, and ensuring free access to these markets by traders.

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Reality Check:

1. Null. No central database. The idea sucks, anyway. As for the “standard” prediction markets (a good idea, that one), only InTrade and Reality Markets participate. (NewsFutures is AWOL, even though their CEO heads the PMIA.)
2. Null. The only resources listing both “members” and “core readings” of the field of prediction markets is CFM —as of today.
3. Null. The best “venues” for live discussions on prediction markets are: Koleman Strumpf’s conference(s), the ACM WorkShops on Prediction Markets, Tim O’Reilly’s conferences (Tech:Money, CI Foo Camp, etc.), and the FIA’s conferences. The other conferences are payola conferences set up by mediocre individuals or organizations who really don’t care about prediction markets —but want to make a quick buck riding the prediction market hype.
4. Null. I’m more interested in iMEGA and RGA.

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And the PMIA does not get the key individuals: Adam Siegel and Nigel Eccles —to drop only 2 names.

The Prediction Market Industry Association is an ambulatory joke, so far.

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UPDATE: Deep Throat agrees with me.

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Top-10 reasons why NewsFutures is the ideal partner to harness the wisdom of your crowd

1.) Integrated Solutions

We offer complete solutions, not just great software. This approach delivers a much higher success rate and enables the client organization to fully consider Prediction Markets as a key decision-support tool.

From experience, we know that a successful prediction market project requires a lot more than great software or a cool website. Above all:

- Featuring strategic and well-defined questions;
- Securing a high participation rate;
- Integrating the market into the management and decision-making processes.
- Our project management checklist covers 30+ task components of market design, market implementation, and market administration. To ensure success, NewsFutures offers hands-on management and best-practice advice at every stage, in close contact with the client-side team. And if the client is willing to handle some of those tasks itself, we make sure to transfer the relevant knowledge and skills.

2.) A suite of powerful tools

Our platform offers a full suite of knowledge aggregation tools that are optimized for various forecasting needs and business contexts: prediction markets, and more, much more.

As an early pioneer in the field of enterprise prediction markets, NewsFutures has been among the first to recognize not only the power of this tool, but also its various practical limits in certain situations. We are experienced enough to recognize when other knowledge aggregation mechanisms may offer more practical or productive solutions.

That’s why, in close collaboration with some of our clients (in particular InterContinental Hotels, Eli Lilly, Arcelor Mittal, and Pfizer), we have developed a suite of innovative software tools that enable us to optimally aggregate predictions in a variety of business contexts. All of these tools are currently fielded with various clients.

Our software platform currently includes:

Prediction Markets. A continuous double auction trading engine (with optional market maker) is particularly appropriate for measuring risks and opportunities as event probabilities. It can also be used to forecast continuous variables.

Competitive Forecasting. Designed for collective forecasting of specific business variables, such as quarterly sales, especially under several conditional scenarios, or with a small pool of participants.

Idea Pageant. Ideal for rapid harvesting and filtering of a large number of new ideas that require evaluation and prioritization.

Impact Matrix. Used to collect and gauge the likelihood and business impact of various events in the very long term.

This versatile set of tools enables us to propose and implement the most effective solution in every case.

3.) World-Class Expertise

NewsFutures has the longest record of implementing enterprise prediction markets, the most extensive enterprise client list, and the widest geographical reach.

Our team has been immersed in every aspect of delivering successful enterprise prediction markets since 2002. We have implemented internal markets and external markets of all shapes, durations and sizes, around the world: U.S.A., Brasil, France, U.K., Germany, Holland, Japan, Hong Kong, and as far as New Zealand. We have built the longest-running continuous client relationship in the industry (servicing Eli Lilly since 2003).

Our methodology and technological solutions have been shaped by this rich history of confrontation with reality. We know that implementing a successful enterprise prediction market requires clear goals, significant resources, constant care and monitoring, and we know what it takes to deliver success. No other team is more seasoned.

«NewsFutures has done some of the most innovative work in the area for longer than most. They were in there making it happen for real while others were clueless on the fringes.»
- Ajit Kambil – Gobal Director, Deloitte Research

Notably, we have also built our eponymous public prediction exchange into one of the best known play-money exchanges. The experience of running this market non-stop since the year 2000 gave us deep insights into what it takes to successfully manage a market for the long run.

4.) Creative leadership

NewsFutures is a thought leader and a creative driving force within the industry.

NewsFutures started implementing prediction markets in 2000, years before the buzz words “wisdom of crowds” and “web 2.0″ even surfaced in the brains of James Surowiecki and Tim O’Reilly – and we’ve been at the forefront of innovation ever since: Over the years, we’ve fielded several innovative tools for harvesting the wisdom of crowds in various enterprise contexts, and we even applied for a pending patent on a multi-outcome continuous double auction (CDA) trading engine.

In 2003, NewsFutures led the first field study comparing real-money and play-money markets, publishing the results in a landmark article co-authored with some of the field’s leading academic researchers: Prediction Markets: Does Money Matter? – Electronic Markets, 14 (3), September 2004. This research significantly enhanced the credibility of play-money markets and, as a result, boosted their adoption within enterprise contexts.

In 2007, NewsFutures started experimenting with an innovative business model for real-money public prediction markets: Bet2Give.

NewsFutures work has been covered on television by CBS News (here) and CNBC (here), and in print by prestigious publications in the United States and Europe, including James Surowiecki’s international best-seller The Wisdom of Crowds.

Our CEO, Emile Servan-Schreiber, has lectured on the topic all over the world, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the Wharton Business School.
In recognition of NewsFutures’ practical and throught leadership, Emile was chosen to chair the new Prediction Market Industry Association. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Prediction Markets.

5.) Customized solutions

Our software platform is customization-friendly, enabling us to tailor our solutions to a client’s special needs.

When dealing with high-end demanding customers, one size cannot fit all. The NewsFutures philosophy is to tailor a market solution to the problem at hand, rather than force-fit the problem to a pre-existing market template. That usually means, in addition to choosing the most appropriate tool and market design, customizing the user interface to optimize the integration with the client’s IT infrastructure and the navigation among various markets.

It also means being responsive to customer requests for additional features that extend the platform’s capabilities, and sometimes even developing completely new tools. (Indeed, this is how we came to develop and integrate into the platform a whole suite of original tools in addition to prediction markets.)

In contrast to the one-size-fits-all market and navigation templates provided by others, the NewsFutures software platform offers the flexibility needed to address the unique needs of demanding customers.

6.) Industrial-strength software

NewsFutures software satisfies the highest professional standards and demanding environments.

Internet giant Yahoo!, who knows a thing or two about quality software, chose to acquire the source code of our prediction market engine to power its own Yahoo! Tech Buzz Game.

Our platform is so reliable that it has been used to operate high-stakes real-money political markets for Holland’s leading daily de Volkskrant (see this report), and we currently use it to operate our own real-money prediction exchange Bet2Give.

7.) Military-grade security and confidentiality

We offer a range of access, backup, encryption, integration and hosting options that satisfies the most demanding customers.

NewsFutures has been vetted by customers who put a premium on data security and confidentiality, such as the U.S. Military, pharmaceutical clients, and others in the super-competitive IT industry.

While most clients are satisfied to host their applications on our servers, located in a high-security facility, others have had us ship fully configured hardware that they can install behind their own firewall, or had us install the prediction market application directly on one of their own servers within their existing IT infrastructure.

8.) Multilingual applications

In a global world, English is not enough.

Our software platform is designed to operate in multi-language mode, with a user interface that can offer several languages simultaneously. English, French, Dutch and German versions are already implemented. Other languages can easily be added on request. This feature is important for multinational companies that want to tap the collective intelligence of a linguistically diverse population.

9.) Round-the-clock support

Present on two continents, NewsFutures offers rapid response across many time-zones.

The NewsFutures enterprise team operates the world over from New Jersey, USA, and Paris, France. This enables rapid response in many different time zones and continuous availability from 08:00 to 01:00 GMT. We are currently servicing clients in the United States (from coast to coast), France, Holland, and as far as New Zealand. Our multi-cultural team is well suited to operate in a global world while being attuned to the importance of local differences.

10.) Team players

Although NewsFutures is equiped to deliver integrated solutions, we also have significant experience in partnering with consultancies to service their clients.

We find such partnerships rewarding and productive, and we are very comfortable with them, especially because they help implant the solutions deeper into the host organization. Over the years, we have teamed up with consultancies large and small. Among the largest are SAIC (on a U.S. Military project), Accenture (on a MIT Technology Review project), and the RAND Corporation (on a Texas DOT project).

If you are a consultancy and you would like to deliver wisdom of crowds solutions to your clients, please contact us for details of our partnership program.

Prediction markets and elections, run by Eric Zitzewitz of Dartmouth. Eric ran though a slew of data looking at sports and financial prediction markets and compared it to election prediction markets. Bottom line, sports and financial prediction markets are highly efficient and closely track actual outcomes, while election prediction markets tend to systematically underprice favorites. This is the way it is in the US. In the UK, where election prediction markets have existed for over a century, they are much more efficient. Two explanations for the US election markets’ relative inefficiency are low repetition vs. high repetition domains (sports and financials have large numbers of contests while elections have far fewer contexts), and that bettors in the US have far less collective experience betting on elections than their UK counterparts. Interesting stuff.

Greg Linden’s post (from which I lifted the sentence posted in the title above)

Inkling Markets’ Adam Siegel

Collective Intelligence Foo Camp

List of attendees.

Prediction markets came up as topic of interest #1 —at least online.

Wiki participation was low, though.

I was invited, but couldn’t make it, due to time pressure. From the e-mail they [*] sent me at the time:

CI Foo is, by design, far from a typical conference. The participants are the presenters–so be prepared to demo or speak. We’ll schedule some sessions ahead of time, and set up a process for participants to announce sessions they want to offer. Expect the kind of exchange that happens at the best conferences during breaks and late into the night, plus time for fun at Google’s legendary campus [the "GooglePlex"]. The result will be an informal but intense and eye-opening couple of days.

[*]

1. Gary Flake, Microsoft Live Labs;
2. Tom Malone, Director, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence;
3. Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media;
4. Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist.

1. The CO-AUTHORS plugin, which does what it says. One specific post or page can be assigned two or more co-author(s) by the blog editor. Very interesting. (I don’t get why the plugin developer forbids the co-authors to “edit” the post/page, though. Mystery, which I will try to clear up with the software architect of this plugin.)
2. The ROLE MANAGER plugin (not listed in the official WordPress plugin directory), which changes the standard WordPress matrix of roles and capabilities. It can redefine the capabilities of one category of users (i.e., one “role”), and can change the capabilities of one individual, but won’t assign common capabilities on a post/page-by-post/page basis (unlike the CO-AUTHORS plugin). To put it in another way, the ROLE MANAGER plugin can be used to extend (or restrict) the capabilities of the blog authors. Right now, they can only publish a post, not a page. In this instance, they would be allowed to write and edit pages —without the need for the blog administrator to promote these authors as full editors (which would be tricky since those multiple editors could then edit their peers’ posts –not acceptable in a big group blog with 71 blog posters).

Very interesting.

On Midas Oracle, one could have:

• Authors Mike Giberson and Adam Siegel writing together a post on “How Great An Exchange Inkling Markets Is“.
• Authors Chris Masse, Mike Giberson, David Pennock and Jason Ruspini writing together a page on “The Ultimate Prediction Market Definition“.
• Etc., etc., etc.
• If plenty of co-authors collaborate on a post/page, then my hope is that Midas Oracle could become more than just a “blog”, and be also a vertical encyclopedia on prediction markets. (Of course, participation inequality remains an issue.)

[External Reading: For the life of you, don't miss this blog post by Tim O'Reilly on Wikipedia.]

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UPDATE: The creator of the CO-AUTHORS plugin writes back to me:

Not allowing all of the co-authors the ability to edit a page is not by design; I just have to do more research on WordPress permissions to find out how to do so, if even it is possible.

I wonder whether using the two plugins together is the solution…

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UPDATE: My current thought is to give each Midas Oracle author the capability to create, write up and edit his/her own page(s). And then to assign co-authors to some post(s) and page(s), on a case-by-case basis.