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So, just like flipping a coin, if Inkling told you something has a 15% probability of coming true, you can’-t just look at one outcome (i.e. one coin flip). You need to look at multiple scenarios where Inkling said something would happen 15% of the time. If those things actually come true, 15% of the time, Inkling is doing well at this.
Inkling Markets:
Here are the jobs we’-re currently looking to fill:
Director of Business Development
Take the reigns to plan and direct Inkling’-s ongoing business development efforts. This includes everything from identifying and evaluating new market opportunities, working on public relations initiatives, forging strategic partnerships, initiating proposals, negotiating contracts with our enterprise clients, and helping to manage existing accounts. Our ideal candidate will have demonstrated the ability to sell software as a service to large enterprise clients or has proven to be effective at launching new product lines and developing new strategic initiatives for at least 5+ years.
Customer Support
Inkling provides technical support to all its clients. From the trader who has a question about their balance to a marketplace administrator who has questions about how to run a market properly, we’-re looking for someone to be our interface for these types of questions. It’-s ok if you don’-t have an intimate understanding of prediction markets now, but our ideal applicant will have shown excellent communication skills, both verbal and written, will have effectively managed multiple work threads at once, and will not be afraid of venturing in to other activities going on in the company, i.e. supporting business development efforts, doing customer outreach and blogging, performing research, and even doing application testing when necessary. We’-re particularly interested in recent college graduates [*] for this position.
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But you’-ll notice that he would assign the junior employee (not the business development executive) to blogging.
[*] Yeah, fresh people are cheaper and more flexible.
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Via Daniel Horowitz (Business and Technology Consultant)
Inkling Markets’- Advisory Board (curiously named “-Friends Of Inkling”-):
—- His recently updated website states: *Update:* Beginning in August, 2008, Michael Giberson will be joining the faculty of the Center for Energy Commerce in the Rawls College of Business, Texas Tech University.–
Adam Siegel of Inkling Markets:
Mike,
The context of that discussion was talking about allowing people to create their own markets vs. having them only be run by a central entity or only through recommendations by a consulting firm.
We were also talking about the insights you may get by running prediction markets that are not readily apparent in the market results.
The original point was, by allowing people to ask as many questions as possible, the questions may be a signal themselves pointing to something that you didn’t previously know about. If someone asks a question about the probability of a risk factor occurring that you never even considered before, for example. That would never have been uncovered, otherwise, because the “prediction market administrators” wouldn’t even have known to ask.
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Via Daniel Horowitz (Business and Technology Consultant)
Software taps into the zeitgeist to predict the future.
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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
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Taking his propos and applying them to Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny, you’-d get that:
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Same things could be said of David Perry and Ken Kittlitz, or Emile Servan-Schreiber and Maurice Balick.
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Question.
UPDATE: Rebuttal + More info on Ruby on Rails.
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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
Emile’-s made up a phrase that means nothing (except in his fertile imagination), “-a proprietary prediction market variant“- —-sounds like a red herring to me.
Unlike Consensus Point, Inkling Markets and Xpree, NewsFutures is the only prediction market software vendor not to have adopted Robin Hanson’-s MSR —-a simplified trading technology now in use in most enterprise prediction markets.
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Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google – (PDF file – PDF file) – by Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitwewitz – 2008-01-06
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Bo Cowgill:
[…-] Trade-by-trade data can reveal characteristics of specific working groups: What they know, how they feel, how they process and share information and how all of that changes over time. I didn’-t try to put any of this in the paper because the conclusions would be sensitive, and I thought this application was pretty obvious to anybody who understood our methodology. […-]
Bo Cowgill:
I’-ve also heard that other companies would find it impossible to analyze the interaction between their market and the organization. Why? Lack of data. […-]
Bo Cowgill:
Some more remarks about applications that combine prediction markets and organizational data (org charts, social networks, seating locations). The obstacle to these applications is not a lack of data. Jed mentions privacy concerns —- and if he thinks this is a big obstacle then I’-d be interested in discussing his thoughts.
A bigger problem is that that current prediction market vendors and consultants cannot support these applications. At heart, these vendors are software engineers and salespeople at heart, not statisticians or data miners. They want to write one system that can support lots of clients. At conferences, one hears PM vendors complain about having to do “-customization”- work for clients.
This approach would not work for the applications I describe for two reasons:
- The inputs for different clients won’-t be the same. Each client’-s organizational data will likely take a different structure. This makes it difficult for prediction market vendors to architect a single system that can served many clients (yet another challenge with integrating markets with other corporate IT services).
- The outputs for different clients won’-t be the same. The business relevance and statistical power of each analysis will differ with each client’-s data.
Prediction market vendors may also need to familiarize themselves with the statistical learning methods necessary to fully utilize these rich datasets. So what’-s the solution? First, move to a software-and-consulting model. By ‘-consulting,’- I don’-t mean ‘-consulting on how to implement the market.’- I’-m talking about helping the client solve its problem using a variety of data, including prediction market data.
Second, the vendors also need to pitch prediction markets as more than a forecasting tool. People in the business world commonly identify as data junkies —- probably more so than they identify with the ‘-wisdom of crowds’- ethos. It is unclear how much companies really care about accurate forecasting anyway.
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On a related note, there is something that only the prediction market software vendors could do, at this time, for those who are in capacity to do so: setting up inter-industry prediction markets —-or at least, handing over (with everybody’-s agreement) anonymized prediction market data on industry topics to anyone else in the industry who is a client of that PM firm. I don’-t know about NewsFutures or Inkling Markets, but if you look at Consensus Point’-s list of clients, you’-ll see that David Perry’-s firm is strong in the (consumer) electronic industry —-Motorola, Qualcomm, Siemens, Nokia. Use your imagination, or ask David Perry directly, for more…- (I can’-t talk- otherwise, next thing, I’-m a dead blogger.)…-
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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse: