On Tuesday, Brooke and I attended the Catalyst Girls in Tech conference. It was a wonderfully organized and star-packed event aimed at supporting the career development of women in the tech industry. Heather Harde, CEO of TechCrunch, keynoted, backed up by an impressive list of speakers and workshop leaders. Two first impressions: You know you’re [...]

Clients often ask us what level of user engagement is reasonable to expect and how that level can be sustained over time. This isn’t a challenge unique to prediction markets – it’s a challenge for all applications that depend on user-generated content. Twitter is incredibly successful, but there is a huge gulf between the number [...]

As the dust settles in the aftermath of the highly-anticipated Black Friday and Cyber Monday madness, retailers are gauging how successful the weekend was and what it means moving beyond this holiday season. So far, the outlook hasn’t been too sunny. Retailers rely on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to make their goals for the [...]

Topic: When Will Our Product REALLY Launch? Using Collective Intelligence to de-risk new product introductions. When: December 8th at 11am PT. Where: Register Today on CFO.com. It’s free to sign up. Does your company rely on new product introductions to drive growth? A single missed launch date for a new product can impact company valuation [...]

I was reading a review of the new Palm Pixi on Gizmodo and I was struck by the classic new product issues that the review highlighted. First off, the product was released at $100 when its more powerful sibling the Pre is available for roughly the same price. So, Palm has likely hurt its sales [...]

Universities represent our collective future. Although universities hand out diplomas to individuals, it’s our future doctors, CEOs and world leaders who toss up their hats at the end of the ceremony, right? A recent CNET article highlighted an exercise at Singularity University’s executive program. Melanie Swan, a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager, had groups of [...]

The anecdotes of prediction market pilots in major organizations are everywhere. Often they are tried in a small, almost clandestine manner within an isolated corner of a company by someone fairly junior. His forecasts tend to take on one of two characteristics – fun forecasts (sports, elections, etc.) or forecasts that are business related. The [...]

In the article Seeking a Shorter Path to New Drugs, Natasha Singer covers innovative methods that drug companies and researchers are using to improve drug discovery and commercialization. One of the projects she highlights is the Pharmer’s Market, our collaboration with MIT and Harvard that we announced last month. To learn more or to sign-up [...]

As we mentioned last week, Crowdcast is teaming up with Susan Scrupski and the 2.0 Adoption Council to launch a new prediction market today at the E 2.0 Conference here in San Francisco. Those attending the conference can submit their bets during the conference for chances to win prizes for the most accurate predictions. Not [...]

The Boeing Dreamliner has been delayed 5 times and is more than 2 years behind schedule, severely denting corporate credibility and profits. Standish reports that 68% of IT projects deliver over budget, are late or missing key features, with 24% of projects being abandoned or canceled. Flyvbjerg et al. (2002) report on how public works [...]