Hubdub is a startup news forecaster that allows users to track news stories, predict their outcomes and compete with other news junkies. In theory, this predicting process turns you from being a passive news consumer into an active news participant. Think a fantasy sports league for news. Although an Edinburgh (Scotland, UK) startup, the site will be targeted at US news initially because of the size of the market. And apparently there is also an election going on or something? HubDub is currently in private beta, but aims to go into a public beta in late January. Funded by some seed angel capital right now, HubDub could well move into a real fantasy league model, assuming people really are as passionate about news as they are about sports, which is, well, debatable. [TechCrunch UK has more on this].
by Mike Butcher on January 28, 2008
#1
Hey, just so I could….
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How is this different from Newsfutures or any of the other prediction market games out there?
JCarny,
HubDub is indeed a play-money prediction exchange, just like NewsFutures. Two key differences:
1. NewsFutures uses CDA as its trading mechanism (the same mechanism used at the NYSE or CME), without an automated market maker —while HudBud uses MSR, another market design (where the trader doesn’t have the choice to submit a precise sell/buy price), which makes use of an automated market maker.
2. HubDub is coupled with a news aggregator —while NewsFutures is a pure exchange.
Voila.
More on my site.
It’s got a very “digg-esque” style to it. It will be interesting to see how popular this gets. As for myself, I’d rather spend time reading actual news instead of trying to predict it.
Allen Vartazarian
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It’ll be interesting to see how they fair in such a broad category. Fafarazzi.com created the first Fantasy League for Celebrity Gossip and they’ve done really well, but it’s also a controlled set of news sources and people.
Obviously as Chris Masse said above, theirs seems to be more a stock market model where Fafarazzi is more like Fantasy Football.
It is a complement of digg? By the way, we are confronting problems with digg (login).
Ever tried Bragster.com? That’s really about bragging rights. You can test yourself on predicting the news (not in the same format as hubdub though), but to make it much more personal and in true bragging spirit, you can also dare your friends to do anything they bragged about, and then invite all your other friends to bet on whether the deed will be done.
To Chris:
Yes, HubDub is in fact an event derivative exchange (like NewsFutures, which also uses play money, or like InTrade, TradeSports, and BetFair, which use real money). The trading engine allows to buy or sell a bet, and this is traded on a market. As I said, HubDub uses a simplified trading engine, called Market Scoring Rule (invented by Robin Hanson), which Inkling Markets also uses.
Issues will surely be low liquidity and wide bid/ask spreads. Intrade is the prediction markets commonly quoted by the financial media, but Intrade is far from an efficient market. That said, inefficient markets can provide great opportunities for traders. What they tend not to provide are good predictions. In the case of the election contracts, people appear to be betting based on the latest poll numbers. These markets also seem to overreact to large events even more than other markets and are prone to momentum moves that can appear unwarranted. But these markets are fun and, at least for me, a lot easier to trade than, say, crude oil.
Seems like a fun concept if you’re into that sort of thing. I personally don’t care enough to get that engaged with news stories.
Huh? Why is this getting any coverage?
margueron,
As I said, HubDub (like Inkling Markets and WSX) uses MSR, which is both a new market design (mixing up CDA and Scoring Rules) and an automated market maker. It was invented by Professor Robin Hanson for DARPA in 2003 with the aim of tackling the liquidity problem that you’re talking about.
With MSR, you trade against a bot, so there is always liquidity.
InTrade uses real money and CDA, so it is indeed in a different league than HubDub.
Plus, HubDub associates a news aggregator to an exchange, which is unique, as of today.
One more point, with Inkling Markets and HubDub, one can create his/her own prediction market, which may be fun and/or useful (if one wants to harness the “wisdom of crowds” on one tricky issue).
Mike B - it is odd that whilst TC has moved away from reviewing startups, it then decides for reviews of me-too’s like these.
I would be happy to see more of what TC used to be about, but if you’re going to be limiting your startups reviews to as few as you do, I’d like to see the startups be more interesting/innovative than this.
Although, perhaps this just epitomizes the current state of the web 2.0 world, in that the only startups left to review are me-too’s
Chris Masse, thanks for the clearing things up for me. The automated market maker is very interesting. Cheers.
I don’t see HubDub as a “fantasy league” for news at all. As I’ve written on my blog, a lot of news day-to-day is just filler and regurgitation to sell newspapers and to have something “fresh” on a homepage. The problem is that much of the time little has actually changed!
By integrating a prediction market and a news aggregator, they can both feed off of each other. The market will recognise true “news” and these stories will be more prominent, thus making the news aggregator more effective. The prediction market will also be more effective as it’s always tied into a wide spectrum of news stories about a topic.
I’m a bit of a news junkie, and I think this could certainly help me focus on what’s _actually_ going on in the world on any given day, instead of what’s filling up newspaper column-inches.
Cheers,
Jed
Trendio is another one doing this. They had a slick system and I was getting pretty good at it, and then one day they just put in a new UI and all the “money” I had accumulated vanished. Textbook case of how to piss off your biggest fans.
Another important difference with NewsFutures (where people have been “trading news” in 2000) is that hubdub doesn’t give away any prizes to performers. That, perhaps, is a direct consequence of the false good idea of letting people create their own markets. This not only creates many opportunities for fraud (if, for instance, the creator of the market also controls the outcome), but it also encourages incoherent outcome definitions, unverifiable outcomes, and duplicate or junkyard markets. Same problems that Inkling’s public markets suffer from.
Also, the mere idea of a Web 2.0 makeover of prediction markets is laughable. To paraphrase a good ol’ song from the 90’s, prediction markets were web 2.0 before web 2.0 was cool.
I have acknowledged and responded to Emile Servan-Schreiber.
http://www.midasoracle.org/200.....y-traders/
Basically, his criticism is pertinent, but event derivative management by traders is so great that I hope that reputation systems will solve one day the issues that EJSS describe.
Any website these days has to deal with spamming and low quality stuff. We should fight that. We should not give up. There will be ways.