Great words of advice and caution for prediction traders

There are few things quite so thrilling and/or anxiety-inducing as placing a bet. That’s why, for the benefit prediction traders around the world, we recently compiled a score of relevant quotes from some of the greatest minds. Some will inspire you to bold action, some will help you think twice before committing to a particular [...]

Obama and the wisdom of the Federal crowd

Americans across the country know that the best ideas often come from workers – not just management. — Barack Obama
Given that “the Crowd” in its infinite wisdom elected him to the coolest job in the World, it’s no surprise that POTUS believes in the wisdom of crowds. But seriously, the White House is putting [...]

Iowa Electronic Health Market – powered by NewsFutures

With everyone hunting for realistic predictions about the swine flu pandemic, there’s no better place to look than the brand new Iowa Electronic Health Market (IEhM), brought to you by the people who have run the famous Iowa Electronic Political Market for more than 20 years.
The IEhM connects health care experts across the globe to [...]

Prediction Markets 101 (video lecture)

These videos were filmed at an international workshop on “Principles and Mechanisms of Collective Wisdom” organized by the eminent philosopher Jon Elster at the Collège de France in Paris on May 22, 2008.
PART 1: EVIDENCE OF PREDICTION MARKET ACCURACY

PART 2: WHY PREDICTION MARKETS ARE ACCURATE

There followed a [...]

Dinner with Paul Krugman

Today’s great news is Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize. Although he received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography, it is hard to escape the idea that the Nobel committee may also have been influenced by Krugman’s prescient, relentless and ultimately successful battle against Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, as well [...]

Wisdom of Crowd Consulting Workshop – NYC 10/27/2008

We’re excited to announce the first Wisdom of Crowds Consulting Workshop, to be held in New York City on October 27th, 2008. It is designed especially for small and medium-size business consultancies who would like to acquire a working knowledge of how to put collective intelligence to work for their clients.

Over the years, we’ve had [...]

Bambi Francisco & friends discuss the NewsFutures Exchange on Vator.tv

Bambi Francisco left CNBC’s MarketWatch last year to start Vator.tv, a highly entertaining video-based website dedicated to vetting pitches from innovator. This week, her show took a deep look at NewsFutures’ public prediction exchange (not our enterprise solutions business). Paul Martino, whose company Aggregate Knowledge is about predicting behavioral outcomes based on the aggregate actions [...]

Financial Times writes about Bet2Give

Over the weekend, the Financial Times published a great article about America’s favorite charity-driven prediction market: our very own Bet2Give. Exploring the intersection between philanthropy and online betting requires dedication and persistence, which is another way of saying that the value proposition isn’t immediately obvious to everyone, but the FT’s article highlights an exciting new [...]

Red Herring in the Mediterranean

I had the honor this week of being a surprise keynote interviewee at the Red Herring Europe 2008 conference in Malta. Alex Vieux, the Herring’s inspirational publisher, made the impromptu decision to bring me on stage to educate the audience, filled with brilliant young entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, about the concept and virtues of [...]

How InterContinental Hotels Group Innovates with NewsFutures

Every business needs to innovate regularly, but betting on new ideas is always risky and the failure rate is high. The New York Times recently ran a detailed article about how companies can better their odds of harnessing and selecting winning new ideas, by turning to prediction markets and the wisdom of crowds.
The InterContinental Hotels [...]

Still crazy bullish after all these years

The growth of interest in prediction markets as decision-making tools continues to accelerate around the world. In the last month alone, we’ve been interviewed on Public Radio (WYPR in Baltimore) about the U.S. presidential primaries, presented at the eFinanceLab conference in Frankfurt, fielded questions from an Executive MBA class in Hong Kong, and spoke at [...]

eFinanceLab Conference in Frankfurt

This week I’m off to Germany to present at the University of Frankfurt’s eFinanceLab Spring Conference (thursday Feb 21). I’m teaming up with the City University of Hong Kong’s Christian Wagner to talk about how prediction markets can be used to manage risk in the financial sector. I’m also looking forward to a private meeting [...]

Bet2Give on CNBC

Norris Clark, NewsFutures VP for North America, was interviewed today on CNBC by Maria Bartiromo, about our innovative Bet2Give prediction market. Note that the caption on the screen shot below is pretty funny, since Bet2Give is rather more about turning vice into virtue than turning vice into profit… But who cares, it was a really [...]

Off to Hong Kong

I am off to Hong Kong tomorrow to deliver the keynote speech at the 9th Asia Pacific Knowledge Management Conference. My presentation about the implementation and benefits of enterprise prediction markets will be followed by an afternoon workshop.
Update: Picture of myself conducting a prediction market workshop at the City University of Hong Kong. Participants traded [...]

The Most Heeded Futurists

Nice quote about prediction markets in The Economist’s current special issue titled The World in 2008. In an article about how futurologists have lost their cachet in the new century – too many new technologies colliding to create kaleïdoscopic uncertainty – the author encourages reliance on collective forecasts rather than individual foresight:
“The most heeded futurists [...]

Which causes do Bet2Give traders champion?

Updated Jan 11, 2008: When we launched the Bet2Give prediction market last fall, one of the things we were most interested in watching was what kinds of charities traders would choose to give their money to. Now, with over $4,500 raised (ie, funded into traders’ accounts) and over $700 already donated by a score of [...]

Enterprise 3.0: new representations, new markets

Later this week, NewsFutures will have another great opportunity to introduce prediction markets into the consciousness of mighty American businessmen and women.
At the invitation of the organizers of the September 2007 DiamondExchange event, CEO Emile Servan-Schreiber will take part in a panel discussion on “technologies to raise your organization’s IQ” led by Chunka Mui, [...]

Introducing Bet2Give : the thrill of betting, the power of giving

This week we released a totally new breed of prediction market, a “mash up” between online betting and online giving.
It’s a simple idea: What if, rather than being reviled as a source of evil, the natural urge to bet on the future could be leveraged to help improve the future? What if you could win [...]

UC Riverside’s eLab eXchange : featuring Competitive Forecasting and Idea Pageants

UC Riverside’s Sloan Center for Internet Retailing has just launched their eLab eXchange, a website for gathering collective predictions about marketing in the digital world. The New York Times had a nice write up about it yesterday.
The eLab eXchange features two of NewsFutures knowledge aggregation mechanisms of which there are precious few public examples: Competitive [...]

Los Angeles conference on collective intelligence networks

We’re proud to co-sponsor the February 22 Conference on Collective Intelligence Networks, in Los Angeles, together with Cisco, Nasa, and the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
NewsFutures’ Norris Clark will present some business world applications of prediction markets, based on our 4 years of experience in this domain.
How time flies! Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds [...]

Washington DC conference on prediction markets

Last january, the AEI-Brookings Joint Center, a joint venture between the famous right and left-leaning policy think tanks in Washington DC, held a one day conference about prediction markets. The host was Robert Hahn, the Center’s Executive Director and co-editor of the recent book: Information Markets: A New Way of Making Decisions.
A complete webcast of [...]

Bird Flu may slash DJIA by over 10%

Today, both the Financial Times and Forbes published the predictions of the Global Risks prediction market that NewsFutures built for Thomson Financial and the World Economic Forum. Here are the links to the stories:
Bird Flu may slash DJIA by over 10% – Forbes
Avian Flu and the perception of risk – Financial Times
Here’s an [...]

Avian Flu vs Dow Jones

The Global Risks prediction market that we built for the World Economic Forum (aka Davos) received some attention in the Financial Times online yesterday. Here’s a link to the story.
The article mentions the brand new markets we set up for Thomson Financial, which is a partner of the WEF’s Global Risks program. These markets, designed [...]

Prediction Market Fever Sweeps Holland

Holland’s premier newspaper de Volkskrant just launched a real-money online political stock market powered by NewsFutures. The “Politieke AandelenMarkt” (PAM – meaning “political stock market”) lets participants invest in the success of various political parties and their leaders in the upcoming November 22 parliamentary election that will produce the country’s next coalition-government.
The PAM has already [...]

NewsFutures introduces prediction markets at the World Economic Forum

NewsFutures CEO Dr. Emile Servan-Schreiber and Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki helped launch the Global Risks Prediction Market at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

Surowiecki and Servan-Schreiber take on the Davos crowd.
In several workshops during the Forum’s three days of intense meetings, Servan-Schreiber and Surowiecki teamed up to introduce the world’s movers [...]