http://allthingsd.com/20120502/microsoft-hires-14-yahoo-researchers-to-kickstart-new-nyc-research-lab/
David’s incredibly smart, a really nice guy, and has always been supportive of our work. We wish him the best.
I’m in the process of working on a revised look for our application – probably the 5th or 6th time I’ve done this in the 6 years the application has been in existence.
As I got to yet another page that needed minor tweaks to fit in with the new look I was giving the application, I begun to wonder why I was even bothering to do this in the first place. No one has been complaining, people still applaud us for the “ease of use” of our application, but here I was burning 40-60 hours to work on this. Hours I could have been using to sell, to track our customers better, blog more, or any number of activities that may “move the needle” on our small business more than an application redesign.
But yet here I was obsessing over the border color around an icon.
My wife works at a design firm and she comes home with tales day after day about companies who are going through elaborate redesigns of their sites and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process, not to mention the hundreds of hours their own employees are spending facilitating their work.
Thinking about this a bit more, there seem to be two prevailing reasons why people do redesigns. The first are simply table stakes. You need to have a decent looking site or app to be credible in the marketplace or people are actually going to discount you. Good design brings a certain amount of credibility.
But how about when you have that already? Why do people get so obsessed about redesigning their site when clearly it’s going to contribute little or nothing to the bottom line?
I’ve come to call this the “Front Lawn” theory. There’s a certain satisfaction, a certain security in knowing your front lawn is green and mowed. That the front of your house looks presentable to passer-bys. That your front lawn, as an extension of you and what you represent in the neighborhood, is tidy and well organized. I’ve visited plenty of homes where the outside is immaculate and the inside is a dump.
Ultimately what I think drives a lot of redesigns is basic insecurity, cost and effort be damned. Business sense is thrown out the window for a purely passion driven, irrational decision. When the moment comes for the executive to send the URL to a buddy, or present their company in some fashion, can they personally be proud about what is being shown? Is their front lawn immaculate?
Couch time, here I come. :)
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/12/04/03/2121206/healthcare-reform-act-prediction-market
Here’s an explanation of what they do:
Low cost startups are unleashing millions of inexperienced investors and hundreds of incubators globally. Driven by an urgent search for economic growth, governments are creating angel investor incentives, lower barriers to foreign capital and reducing regulation. With legal crowd funding outlets in the US like Kickstarter becoming more commonplace, a lot of people will get hurt unless ratings like Cdling’s are established.
FICO scores, S&P rating reports and stock markets have long been used to measure and reduce risk and make commerce faster and smoother. Now Cdling is doing the same thing for the startup community.
Cdling rates people in terms of their real world experience at selecting which companies will succeed by analyzing who has invested with who and in what founding teams. Cdling also scores companies by predicting their likelihood to meet their milestones (this is where Inkling comes in.)
Investors can then use this insight to monitor more, smaller deals, catch the best breaking deals when they are ready to be financed, and as an early warning system to make sure they are spending their limited time and attention where it will earn the most return.
Cdling is currently closed to the general public, but you can get added to the pilot and track their progress by following this link. When you do get in, you’ll have an extra CD$5,000 to spend on predictions.
CategoryPredicted WinnerInkling’s Prediction Original Screenplay Midnight in Paris 62% chance Adapted Screenplay The Descendants 78% chance Visual Effects Rise of the Planet of the Apes 69% chance Sound Mixing Hugo 45% chance Sound Editing Hugo 64% chance Best Short Film (Live Action) The Shore 41% chance Best Short Film (Animated) The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris 46% chance Best Original Song Man or Muppet 68% chance Best Original Score The Artist 83% chance Makeup The Iron Lady 74% chance Foreign Language Film A Separation 71% chance Best Film Editing The Artist 48% chance Best Documentary (Short Subject) Saving Face 39% chance Best Documentary (Feature) Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory 33% chance Best Directing The Artist 73% chance Costume Design The Artist 44% chance Art Cinematography The Tree of Life 66% chance Art Direction Hugo 68% chance Animated Feature Film Rango 88% chance Best Supporting Actress Octavia Spencer 82% chance Best Actress Viola Davis 76% chance Best Supporting Actor Christopher Plummer 80% chance Best Actor George Clooney 54% chance Best Picture The Artist 80% chance
The second type of users are familiar with stock market concepts, understand buying and selling shares, and have maybe even participated in a prediction market before like the HSX or Intrade or the Iowa Electronic Markets.
We’ve always worked hard to try and satisfy both camps in one user experience, usually erring on the side of simplification vs. complexity. But that’s a fine line to walk and instead of really making both types of users completely satisfied, we’ve delivered more of an 80/20 experience.
Last year we began the split of the two user groups with two distinct trading interfaces for “simple” and “advanced” users. In a couple days, we’ll be following up this split with the availability of two different dashboards to track predictions. The default will be a “simple” dashboard where you’ll track your investments, but will never come in to contact with the concept of “buying shares.”
Here’s what an entry in the simplified dashboard will look like:
We wanted to make sure the only calculation the user would need to understand is, I spent X to make the crowd prediction Y. We also tell them what their maximum profit or maximum loss would be at any given time. And we let them see the “history” of predictions in any answer, describing in plain language exactly what they did at any given time:
In contrast, a person could choose to use the “advanced dashboard” which simply reveals more about their predictions. They can see how many shares they bought, the concept of short selling is not hidden but is instead made transparent, and there are more liquidation options.
We’ve also built a search function for your dashboard, so those who have more than one page of predictions can easily find them by typing in a word or two associated with the question instead of having to page through them or rely only on various sorting options. Someone told us recently they have over 40 pages of predictions on their dashboard. Search should be a huge timesaver.
I’m sure we still haven’t gotten either experience perfect, but this should lay the foundation for better satisfying both levels of users.
Expect to see the new dashboard introduced some time Thursday or Friday evening.
I drove to the RCN office in Chicago to do the swap. I walked in to find a sparsely furnished lobby and two customer support people sitting behind concrete walls and bullet proof glass.
I know they have a stock of relatively expensive equipment, but that can’t be the only reason for the Western Union style lobby.
The experience got me thinking: how bad does your customer experience have to be before you need to start outfitting your support centers with reinforced steel doors and bullet proof glass? Shouldn’t this be a signal to the company that something is seriously wrong with customer relations, or is this just what a semi-monopoly always looks like (everyone hates you?)
Jeffrey Frankel from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and Director of the Program in International Finance and Macroeconomics at the National Bureau of Economic Research has written a paper entitled: “Over-Optimism in Forecasts by Official Budget Agencies and Its Implications.”
From the digest on the NBER site:
…Overly optimistic official forecasts of future budget balances have facilitated complacency and so have contributed to tax cuts and increases in government spending, and therefore to realized budget deficits, during the last decade.
Analyzing data for 33 countries, Frankel finds that the average upward bias in the official forecast of the budget balance, relative to the realized balance, is 0.2 percent of GDP at the one-year horizon, 0.8 percent at the two-year horizon, and 1.5 percent at the three-year horizon. The longer the horizon, and the more genuine uncertainty there is, the more scope there is for wishful thinking.
A prediction market’s biggest advantage would be to allow a more diverse opinion pool that would hopefully eliminate this bias. One could imagine not only involving officials at the OMB but various staff from Congressional offices, experts from various Departments, and even industry experts. If the government won’t take this on directly, could there be a “shadow” forecasting process with these same people? What would be their incentive to participate? Hmm…
At the funeral, person after person got up to speak about the generosity of this woman. She was a loving grandmother and great-grandmother. She was a teacher and a librarian. She was an elder in her church and she welcomed new community members with open arms, often being the first “node” they met. She served as a starting point to make them feel more comfortable in their new surroundings.
A 23 year old grandchild got up to speak about how she was his life’s exemplar. The career he is pursuing and the values which he lives by are a direct result of his grandmother’s influence.
After the graveside service, I was driving with my Dad and we discussed how we’ve all thought of our own funerals. What will people say about us when we’re gone? When the definition of our lives must be condensed down to a 30 minute memorial service, what are our 5 bullet points going to be?
Everyone has heard the adage “no one wishes at the end of their life they had worked more,” but what does that phrase really mean? For some it means they wished they had spent more time with their family. For others, more time having fun, or more time with their kids, or giving more of themselves to others.
Among people I know, most earnestly want to achieve a balanced lifestyle (isn’t that really what that adage is getting at? A lack of balance?) They want to take care of themselves financially, then they’ll begin donating time and money to others. I know until recently this is the attitude I carried, focusing almost exclusively on work and just trying to be a decent friend and family member. After I’ve “made it” is when I’ll start to truly give back.
But then my attitude(?), maturity level(?), begun to change. In my reading I found myself more attracted to the stories about people giving of themselves vs. those whose companies just got bought or earned investments. Sermons reminding me about “giving back” were resonating more. The plight of others in need begun having a more profound impact on me.
Do I still want to “get mine?” Of course. But I’ve already begun altering my schedule in fits and starts the last year through volunteering. And I know by doing so I’ve already had a tangible impact on several people’s lives. And those few hours of volunteering felt damn better than any deal we won or compliment we received for our software. Some might say I should therefore find something else to work on. But I think the answer is instead to give even more.
We work. We make salaries. We live in comfort. In turn we have the ability to help others. I realize it’s all somewhat symbiotic. But when does one shift the balance? Instead of waiting until a magical time when there are seven figures in my bank account which may never come, why not start spending more of my time giving now? Isn’t that simply another way of achieving wealth?
I guess that is why there is so much attention at the end of someone’s life about what they gave of themselves. Because despite the incessant focus on money and achievement in our society, in the end, that’s how we still judge you. What did you give of yourself?
A prediction market, in a sense, is gamification personified. The existence of a virtual currency drives you, just like in real life, to start comparing yourself with others and competing with them. We exacerbate that competition by adding leader boards showing who has made the most money.
Conventional wisdom says you lavish the top money makers with prizes and praise.
Unfortunately prizes and an over-emphasis on certain leader boards can incentivize exactly the type of behavior you don’t want. In most applications, leader boards are simply meant to drive action: add or edit content, check in somewhere, or perform some task. But in a prediction market, we want people’s actions to be more nuanced. We want them to make predictions, but ideally we want the right mindset behind those predictions.
Too much emphasis on leader boards and the virtual currency and you have someone asking themselves: “what prediction is going to make me the most money?” Instead we want people to be asking: “what prediction is going to be right or wrong?”
It’s a fine line to walk which is why we’ve been removing focus from our leader board showing who the top money earners are and emphasizing other activities more focused on participation like making good comments and submitting new questions to be published.
In fact we’ve been redesigning our dashboard where people track their portfolio and in its current iteration we’ve omitted leader board information altogether. Instead we’re trying to draw people more to how their individual predictions are doing and if there is new information that would drive them to change their mind.
TL;DR It’s easy to jump on the band wagon to “gamify” everything but you may inadvertently be incentivizing exactly the type of behavior you don’t want.
A former economist decides to quit his job and start selling bagels on the honor system at a few hundred offices in the Washington, DC area. He leaves a couple dozen bagels and a money box, then comes back at the end of the day to collect.
In the process he learns quite a bit about what kinds of offices are more honest in paying for the bagels than others and what external factors affect payment (weather, holidays, etc.) He collected so much data he can now fairly reliably predict what the payment rate will be for any kind of office he sells his bagels at.
We’ve added a “remember me” checkbox to the login page. Selecting it means you won’t have to login again for a month. Just be sure if you’re using Inkling on a public computer to log out!
We’ve also added some social network buttons to every question so you can “like” the question on Facebook, tweet about it, and email it.
Judging from the results so far, his theory seems pretty accurate. Check it out:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/arts/television/2011-fall-tv-cancellations.html
We quickly realized the translation work we had done thus far was totally insufficient (we had only internationalized the trading interface) and we needed to bite the bullet and go all the way, giving us the ability to translate absolutely every piece of text on the site.
Thanks to what admittedly was some really tedious work by one of our contract developers Brian Leslie, this U.S. based company has since launched in two more countries and we can finally announce that Inkling is now fully internationalized and the entire application can now be translated in to any language.
For now if you want a language other than English, functionally we need to make the switch for you, but soon we’ll make that part of any administrator’s settings, and eventually any user can choose the language they want on an individual basis.
Excerpt and link to article:
http://www.jrsa.org/pubs/forum/forum_issues/for29_3.pdf
The Criminal Justice Prediction Market (CJPM; www.cjmarkets.net) was created by professors Matthew J. Hickman and Stephen K. Rice of Seattle University with the following goals: (1) to provide a marketplace in which interested academics, criminal justice practitioners, and others can “trade” (i.e., take positions on) interesting questions/issues in criminology and criminal justice and contribute to collective prediction; (2) to provide a pedagogical tool for criminal justice educators and students who wish to explore the utility of prediction markets with regard to criminal justice topics; and (3) to address the quality and timeliness of crime statistics by exploring the potential for creating market-based incentives for their improvement.
Recently I have been re-reading one of my favorite software engineering books, Peopleware, by DeMarco and Lister. They set the stage for the rest of the book with an alarming statistic – 15% of software projects, and they have tracked hundreds since the late 1970’s, never see the light of day. The numbers are even worse for the largest projects. For those over 25 work-years, nearly 25% failed. No one publishes the costs of these failures, let alone all of the projects that finish but take longer and cost more than originally planned. The numbers would be staggering.
What I found interesting was the author’s explanation for these failures. Where they could find people to talk about these failed projects, the overwhelming cause was politics. DeMarco’s and Lister’s interpretation of this was that it was not necessarily office politics in the traditional sense, although there was some of that, but what they called sociology – the management of people and groups. Understanding people and their motivations and finding ways to get people and teams to communicate and work together better is hard. Managers are not good at this generally, and software engineers in particular are pretty bad. They typically start their careers as programmers and, let’s face it, technical people, myself included, are not very good at figuring out people. It is much easier to figure out why the router is not talking to the switch than why John is not teaming well with Carol.
So what can we do to get better? Lister and DeMarco have a number of excellent suggestions. I heartily recommend Peopleware and their follow-up publications. What struck me though reading the book this time was that politics , or sociology using their terms, was exactly the problem we set out to solve in building Inkling. We had seen over and over in our previous work experiences where communication and information flow on large projects was broken. No one wanted to stand up and tell the boss the project was a bad idea. The true risks and status of a project got watered down as the information made its way up through layers of management. Politics drove decisions, not data. It was so dis-heartening we knew there had to be a better way.
Which is how we got to prediction markets. We thought the ability of the technology to harness the wisdom of the crowd was a great way to free up critical information within organizations. And this is exactly what our customers have found. They also found an additional benefit we did not anticipate. Customers such as Ford tell us the market gets the crowd talking, and that the collaboration the platform fosters across organizational silos is as valuable as the ability to quantify business questions. We have written about this describing how Inkling has been used to address Project Risk Management. The concepts covered there are just as applicable to project management in general, whether it is software or any large, people intensive project.
Of course prediction markets, like any technology, are not a silver bullet. Ultimately it will take individual and organizational commitments to focus on and get better at people management. Prediction markets can be a catalyst for that organizational change: when information is more transparent and people are allowed to communicate without fear of repercussion, that changes the dynamic of how projects and organizations function.
Let us know what you think. Is it politics, or sociology, that bring down large software projects? Or are there other factors that DeMarco and Lister missed?
We’ve built a new search filter for questions to show which you are NOT participating in yet. So if you’re the kind of person who wants to be involved in every question, we’ve just made it easier. :)
Enjoy your Labor Day weekend!
With the introduction of our new discussion capability, things were getting tight. We also felt like the “manage questions” link was pretty redundant with what’s already in the “questions” link – the only thing missing were a couple additional sorts to show you your pending or submitted questions.
So instead of keeping that link around, we’ve removed it and now if you go to to the questions page, you’ll see a new link:
This will now list all your questions and discussions that are currently running or you’ve submitted. Click on any of them and go to admin/edit to do whatever you want with them.
For administrators, there’s still a manage questions link, but it’s moved up in to the “admin options” menu item in the top right:
Publishing a discussion is a familiar process. You are asked the topic/question you’d like people to discuss, fill out some details and any background information you’d like to provide and submit for publication. The discussions themselves look just like the discussion threads we already have so they’ll be familiar to everyone.
But don’t take my word for it. Roxana Strohmenger of Forrester wrote about this trend recently on her blog: http://tinyurl.com/3uh9rfk
Enjoy!
Scott
Another related request has been for RSS feeds. It’s been a long time coming but we’re close to rolling those out as well after we get through our final stages of testing.
The article is here.
As far as we know, ABC7 is the first major television outlet in the U.S. to launch a prediction marketplace as a way to interact with their viewership. As opposed to polling, viewers can now participate much more actively in expressing what they think will happen in the news. Regardless of whether ABC7 is our client, we find it very exciting a television station has the foresight to interact with the public in this way and we’re looking forward to working with them in the coming months.
So feel free to visit their marketplace and trade. As with other public marketplaces we host, it may look different, but it all works the same way so you should feel right at home if you’re an Inkling user already.
When we first launched the market publisher back in May/June of ‘06, we were getting emails daily about how things worked, bugs, language being unclear, etc. Now it’s rare for us to get even one email in a week with a question about how something should work even though the number of markets being generated on a daily basis has been increasing steadily on our public marketplace. It seems we’ve finally hit the sweet spot where most people are getting the publisher.
Nevertheless, especially for those trying to run a market for the first time, some things can still be confusing. We will continue to iterate on the interface, but field specific help should be useful as well. And thanks to a little .css and javascript, you don’t have to go to a new page or open a popup to read it.
Just like everything else, we’ll surely iterate to improve our help language, so if you read something and still find it confusing, let us know.
Government Futures called us a couple weeks ago after trying unsuccessfully to get a marketplace up with another prediction market company. After getting over our initial pain of not being used in the first place :) we swung in to action and had their new marketplace up in a matter of days.
So far they’ve been wonderful to work with and we look forward to a long and fruitful partnership.
If you have any interest in markets related to the inner workings of the government, head over and register. It works just like our public site so there’s nothing new to learn. And for those of you who have lost all your inkles in our public markets, they have a fresh $5000 waiting for you to spend!
The agenda for the evening can be seen here. There is also a replay of the entire event on video.
In the 10 minutes I had, I mainly focused on what we had learned watching people try to run their own markets, both in the public space and among our client-base. Here were the top 5 reasons markets fail:
- question bias
- asking question with no verifiable outcome to cash out the market
- market description is poor or confusing with lots of loopholes; outcomes are not well defined
- timeframe is unrealistic
- no information is available for traders to make a reasonable judgment
It was great to meet the people we hear so much about, including James Suroweicki himself, who gave away 75 books at the event and was a very down to earth, nice guy.
After the event, I also had an opportunity to meet many of our users and people who are currently running markets on Inkling, along with a few of our clients I had never actually met in person – an added bonus.
As I was thinking more about the conference on my flight back to Chicago, I was thinking about a particular question that was asked where time didn’t warrant enough discussion. The question was in relation to running prediction markets in companies and who should participate in the markets that are set up.
In many of the scenarios presented at the conference and other case studies we’ve all read about, a market has usually been run as an experiment with a control group. And usually when we first talk to potential clients they want to run their markets in a similar fashion: invite a group of people from a particular division, set up a market for them, have them trade, and look at the results. Part of this is because you need to have people with knowledge of the market to make informed trading decisions. But it’s also, I would argue, because that’s how business is already structured: lets give this to the “product group” to play with, or the “finance division.”
But this is constrictive to the confines of old organizational thinking. For one, the diversity of knowledge inherent across the entire employee base is lost. Prediction markets can be a catalyst to break down stovepipes and hierarchy to simply try and get the best answer possible. Second, Suroweicki said in one of his comments that prediction markets have moved too slowly in the corporate space. We completely agree. Running prediction markets at all is a good first step, but hopefully just a baby step towards a much larger role for prediction markets in the workplace.
All companies now have email as a productivity tool given to their employees, along with an internal portal, collaboration software, etc. Prediction market software should be as prevalent and an integral part of the business processes of any organization. Everyone in the company should be a trader. Everyone in the company should have the ability to run a market. It’s why we rant and rave about our “do it yourself” model and stress so much about the usability of our software! This scares a lot of people because of what may be unearthed when people can ask any question they want, but I would encourage anyone to go back and listen to the excellent Microsoft presentation by Todd Proebsting at the confab where knowing that everyone thought a project was going to be late was scary, but also allowed them to actually address the problem and cut features to make the date. No one got fired, no one got yelled at; the problem was identified and the talented professionals there worked to fix it.
Management 101 says you tell your people to let you know about problems as early as possible before they become unmanageable. Risk mitigation is key to successful projects and that’s exactly what one of the roles a robust marketplace should play for a company in addition to making forecasts: serve as an early warning indicator so problems can be solved before they become detrimental to the performance of the business.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, you have to be able to admit to and talk about the problem you have before you solve it. Isn’t this also what companies need to be able to do more of as well to be more successful executing?
We’ll post more when we hear more from Rick, but from the looks of it, the markets were an excellent indicator as to what was going to happen this election.
“Whilst we all know that markets improve with scale as more traders participate, I wanted to discover the lower boundary, the level of participation needed to obtain well-calibrated data. In addition, I was interested in some of the behavioural characteristics of prediction markets.”
Direct download here:
http://www.mercury-rac.com/SmallMarketsResearch.pdf
A popular way today to classify and look for information is to create a “folksonomy” where the creators of the market assign keywords or “tags” to the markets – in essence the card catalog for Inkling is created by the crowd – how apropo :)
So market makers, when you create a market, be sure to put in a few tags for your market. Traders, if you go to the Directory page, you can now view markets “by tag” which will display something called a “tag cloud.” We’re still working on the interface a bit on this as it’s going to get unruly soon, but you’ll get the gist. You can also search for a specific tag and all markets using that tag will be returned in the search results.
Happy tagging and searching!
When you go to a market to trade, you will now see just below the trading wizard a “Discussion” area. The latest comment is always shown on the market page, but if you click “Continue to discussion” you can get to all the comments.
The discussions are open to anyone who has a login. As always, nothing vulgar please! :)