Inkling is a fantasy stock market that predicts outcomes based on the free market. It works like this: users create questions and potential outcomes (”Will it rain tomorrow?”, “At which major technology conference will Bill Gates shed his human skin and reveal his angelic beauty high above Mount Rainier?”) and other users buy and sell shares based on their belief that a particular outcome is true.
We go into a bit more detail about Inkling and gadgets over at CrunchGear, but thus far Inkling has predicted two Apple announcements and made a fairly good showing before Jobs’ September 12th announcement, as we see below.
Inkling’s real strategy, however, is to aid in decision-making. Say, for example, you’re making a widget. The widget should be under budget and on deadline, so you pose a question to a market of your co-workers “Will we complete our widget on time and under budget?” You offer four outcomes and have them anonymously by shares in each of these outcomes. The resulting graphs will plot the most likely outcome because everyone – from marketing to the tech guys – will have a say. The tech guys will say everything will be over and the marketing guys will say everything will be under and the programmers will say it will take quite a while but it will come in under budget. The mix will give you a fairly strong indicator of what you’re up against.
This general concept – creating unique markets out of various outcomes – is already in place over at Cantor Fitzgerald with their Hollywood Stock Exchange although Inkling’s mission to create white label markets for small and medium businesses is quite nice. It’s a great way to get everyone’s opinion by filtering out language, emotion, and human interaction which, we all know, poison the brain.
Sounds like the read “Wisdom of Crowds” and built an app. Pretty cool.
Supply on demand has been very successful. Companies such as Amazon, BN, and eBay are capitalizing on this concept. Unique markets on demand will be quite interesting in the realm of Web 2.0. If companies want to be successful, then they will have to capitalize on the collective intelligence data that users provide.
According to Sergio Zyman:
“The sole purpose of marketing is to get more people to buy more of your
products, more often, for more money.”
—The End of Marketing As we Know It–
He also states that when we respect data then we will be successful.
Web 2.0 is built on user data.
What’s to stop someone from investing all of their money in one market and then creating a new account if they lose?
It’s all play money right now.
Spread Betting sites are fairly good predictors of events, as real people are putting real money on their hunches. Its worth getting an account with one just to see the quoted odds.
Another one that has proven quite good is the BBC’s Celebdaq.
For a “wisdom of crowds” play to work there has to be a fairly large and heterogenous contributor base though, be interesting to see how this might play out here in more specific applications.
TWOCrowds also got the Google Calendar prediction right. It also looks like Apple is going to release a phone!
http://www.twoc...com/popular.php
For those of you want to read more about this, check out the PPTs from this 2005 workshop on Markets as Predictive Devices:
http://dimacs.r...des/slides.html
Another company that’s been running prediction markets for a while is NewsFutures (http://www.newsfutures.com). Disclaimer: my company ran an internal trial with their software and was pleased.
Yahoo Research offers similar functionality through their Buzz Game. Check it out at http://buzz.res...m/bk/index.html.
@Raghu: One could flip this around and say that because Apple sees a lot of people who think it would be a good idea for them to make a phone, Apple makes a phone. Then it’s not a prediction, but free market analysis for Apple.
When does one of these tools make it into the next horrible consultant-produced ‘development methodology’ to come down the pike? (e.g. Scrum)
http://www.controlchaos.com/
We are building a social recommendation engine (like a search engine) at Tall Street (http://www.tallstreet.com) based on this sort of concept and it has been working quite well for us.
There are fantasy stockmarkets and then there are stockmarket simulations such as perfectcompetition.net.
It’s cool to see some of these sites getting publicity. I’ve been developing my own prediction market as a hobby and it’s been interesting to see how people respond to certain topics and also watch how trading patterns develop in certain stocks.
Inkling has some great markets. You can watch highlighted Inkling markets and similar markets from Tradesports, Newsfutures and others like WSX at SMARTCROWD. A neat way to get a digest of key markets and events, and the news that shapes them.
http://www.smar...owd.typepad.com
Won’t the predictions affect the outcomes?
Like if you are using it for a business… the question of “Will the product ship late?” will probably prompt a number of counter measures that may change the end-result. I guess people could also be betting on the effectiveness of the counter-measures… but if they do that, then many people would bet that it will succeed because they will anticipate that most people will bet that it doesn’t and the company will take action. This will then send mix signals to the people trying to make a decision off that data.
I like tall Street, you really dont get the whole feel of the whole site until you start using it, its really cool.
your website is very good….
can you studed me???