Planned date = Jan 15, Crowd Forecast = Feb 10….. DANG!

The realistic crowd forecast is important for managing the project and shaping customer expectations. However, this sensitive information needs to be handled well otherwise it could cause issues around employee morale or with partners or investors.

This issue around transparency of the results has really restricted the use of prediction markets in the enterprise, but Crowdcast has developed and patented a solution.

We have now enabled 3 transparency settings to allow our admins to share as much as they want with the participants.

Three Settings:

You can share everything, share comments, or share only the question.

Share with your team: This is the default setting and shares the Crowdcast Curve, the comments, the beliefs behind those comments. Use this for metrics which are ok to be shared with your team.

Share comments and anonymous individual bets: With this setting, the Crowdcast curve no longer appears. Use this setting for metrics where the commentary and social side is important, but where the metric may not be shared.

Share the question only: This shows only the question. Payoffs are ‘location invariant’ — a user can’t determine the shape of the Curve by moving their bets around. Comments are hidden. Use this for your most important metrics.

For all the settings, the Admins and the users with “Executive” access can still see the crowd forecasts on the Dashboard page.

But before we get the blog cooking again, I want to take a moment to highlight the great press we’ve enjoyed as a result of our efforts.  The way the world views you is so much more telling than how you view yourself, so here are some great themes that the press pulled from our conversations.

• Robin Wauters at TechCrunch summarized our offering nicely, saying, “Crowdcast’s solutions, composed of a SaaS software platform, consulting and support services – aim to bridge the gap between traditional business intelligence and enterprise social network applications. The idea is for businesses to align their employees with the purpose of the company, bringing all their insights, plans and experience together in one place, all in order to create “insanely accurate” business predictions and outcomes.
• VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha highlighted that “Crowdcast is all about finding the knowledge in your workforce.”
• Jeff Nolan at Enterprise Irregulars zeroed in on one of our key differentiators, saying, “Where Crowdcast appears to have departed from previous efforts to implement crowdsourcing inside the enterprise is that rather than being an ideas-like site where anything can get posted and then promoted/demoted by community members, they are building games that are designed to reveal outcomes. In other words, they form every interaction around a tightly focused question that requires an answer and through virtual currency create competition in the form of betting that narrows the result to what is considered the most probable outcome, which is then measured according to what actually occurs over time.”
• VentureWire’s Ty McMahan really nailed our point-of-view, when he said, “Crowdcast’s vision is for employees to participate in sharing and socializing insight on what’s planned and what the outcome of business activities will be. The company wants to change the sources executives use to make business decisions by mining previously unavailable insight from across the organization.
• Alex Williams at ReadWrite notes that our “$6 million from Menlo Ventures in a deal that bodes well for a new generation of companies with crowdsourcing and business intelligence offerings.“
• Mike Vizard at IT Business Edge was excited by a promising future, where “longer term… an organization can soon start to map out who knows what within their organization.”
• Amanda Coolong over at This Week In had me on for a great interview.  Thanks Amanda!  My favorite quote was from Dave Linthicom, “… the info is there, they know it’s there, they see tidbits of it, but they can’t mine it for it’s value. So, if you’re working on that problem, kudos to you because you’re going to make a billion dollars.”

PEHub, VatorNews, Silicontap, and others helped us spread the message far and wide.  We look forward to talking more as Crowdcast continues to evolve and champion the message that Your People Know.

Thanks, everyone.

This feature was unveiled last week during the keynote at SAP’s GRC 2010 conference in Orlando. The keynote was presented by Narina Sippy, SVP and GM of SAP’s Governance, Risk, and Compliance solutions. The theme of her address was arming yourself for risk in your business. She told a great cautionary tale about Toyota’s recent debacle, interviewed John Hummer of Hummer Winblad, and then introduced Ranga Bodla and our own Mat Fogarty to demo the products. They presented a compelling story about a pharma company managing its risks with GRC, while keeping a finger on the pulse of the organization with Crowdcast. The presentation couldn’t have gone over better.

We took advantage of our bully pulpit at the conference to announce Crowdcast’s formal relationship with SAP. Indeed, this development is hugely validating for our space in general and for Crowdcast in particular. I believe that our charter of supporting decision makers is a big part of the story.

As I mentioned last time, our initial attempt at running the project revolved around a project plan and regularly scheduled meetings. The project plan was standard — milestones, subordinate tasks, dependencies. Task owners came up with costing estimates. Since we were an experienced team, we added fudge factors liberally. Once the plan was in place, the team leads — engineering, product management,qa — agreed to meet weekly to track progress.

The alpha release milestone was critical, but comfortably far away, so the first few meetings were genial. But a week before ship it became ugly. Turned out that the port from our development environment to test (which simulates production) was in trouble. This was one of those on-going tasks. Deal was that as new APIs came on-line, they’d be ported for testing. Somewhere along the way, this stopped.

How could this have happened? How could it have taken us until the last minute to find out?

After the dust settled, we saw that the task reached 85% completion weeks ago and stalled (the problem was a serious bug in some 3rd party code, which was waiting for a patch). The engineer who owned the task, and indeed others, knew that the alpha milestone was at risk, but lacked a good way to give their knowledge voice. Since everything else was tracking well, intentionally or not, the problem that derailed the project was swept under the rug.

On reflection, it wasn’t a problem of scoping, project sponsor buy-in, staffing, or implementation. Rather, it was a problem of communication. That was when we decided to drink the Kool-Aid.

In the first post in this series, I described our experience with using Crowdcast to gain insight into risks around the next important milestone — the beta release — in the new mech project. Recall that the system rewards people for revealing rare and relevant information early. Moreover, since bets are placed anonymously, participants’ incentives are uniform and aligned. As bets come in, the system aggregates them in real-time and generates alerts when new information reduces the likelihood of success.

The first screenshot is of a piece of the console, which shows crowdcast summaries. The second is a part of the detailed view, which shows the distribution of beliefs as well as how they are tracking relative to target.

My bet on the beta crowdcast caused an alert to fire. It was an early warning for Huned, which gave him time to understand the root cause of the problem and make adjustments to keep the project on track. Next time I’ll put all the pieces together and present a complete overview of the platform that the new mech of ours enables.