DEMO: Presenters Bet on Predictive Capabilities
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Hubdub introduces a combination news aggregation and predictive platform at the semi-annual DEMO conference.
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Alexander Linden, a prominent Gartner Research analyst will be talking about the future later this week in Cannes, France. Smart Web was held ahead of this week&#39;s ITXpo symposium, an annual event held to identify the future of technology.
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Blog: Winner will be announced at this year's Black Hat conference.
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The Valley blog mogul Michael Arrington hosted a panel at New York's DigitalLife convention, and it showed promise--if only the setting had been right.
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Do you know how to spot tomorrow's outperformers?
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A new website lets you bet on the outcome of evolving news stories. But it's for bragging rights only -- no real money changes hands.
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Did Motley Fool CAPS players predict the future?
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Are crowds really wise? A growing number of businesses are betting they are. The latest venture is a new incarnation of The Industry Standard, the poster child for the rise ? and precipitous fall ? of the dot-com boom.                                                    Published by International Data Group (InfoWorld?s parent company), the new Industry Standard won?t be the telephone-directory-sized magazine of 1999; in fact, it won?t be a magazine at all. The Industry Standard, which launched this morning, is a Web site featuring editorial content about online business, with social networking components and an online ?casino? where readers make mock-currency bets based on their predictions about trends and events in the world of technology.You might think that bets placed with Monopoly money wouldn?t be meaningful. You?d be wrong. A significant body of academic research supports the idea that predictive markets ? such as Iowa?s Electronic Markets, which features small wagers in real money on national politics ? actually outperform conventional polls, whether or not real money is involved. Moreover, the data generated by those markets has real value.Hewlett-Packard, for example, has been experimenting with an internal predictive market for at least seven years. In one early trial, sales people were encouraged to bet on the number of printers the company would sell. The result? The bettors? predictions were closer to the actual sales numbers than HP?s own internal forecast, said Bernardo Huberman, director of information dynamics at HP Labs.Emile Servan-Schreiber, a cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence engineer who co-founded NewsFutures, a five-year old, online predictive market, says that Google, Microsoft, and perhaps 100 other companies are also experimenting with internal predictive markets. And HP, said Huberman, plans to monetize its work by selling predictive market software and possibly running markets for other companies.Indeed, the global equities markets are, in effect, predictive markets, said Stanford University?s William Sharpe, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. Prices, he said, are very efficient accumulators of information. What about predictive markets for politics and other arenas? ?I?d much rather look at the Iowa market than any of the polls. It?s more accurate,? he said.Betting on the White House ? and more It?s generally illegal in the United States to bet real money in a predictive market. But the Iowa Electronic Markets was granted an exemption because it is widely used for academic research.It works like this: A given candidate ? say, Hillary Clinton ? is represented by shares of virtual stock. In the event that she actually wins the nomination, each share will be worth $1 in real money. If she fails, the stock becomes worthless. Until the day of the actual nomination, traders can buy and sell ? and even short ? her stock.On the evening of Feb. 1, her shares were selling for a bit more than 59 cents, while rival Barack Obama?s were valued at a bit below 48 cents. On the Republican side, shares of John McCain had soared to 82 cents, well above his closest competitor, Mitt Romney, at 12 centsThe money at stake in the Iowa market isn?t large; the maximum investment is just $500. But it attracts legions of savvy political junkies, whose opinions are remarkably prescient. How prescient? The University of Iowa?s business school recently audited the market and found that, since 1988, it beat the conventional polls? accuracy by an average of 74 percent. Bet2give, part of NewsFutures, also uses real money, but any winnings go to the charity of the trader?s choice.Readers of the new Industry Standard will be able to bet fake money on a variety of topics related to online business.? For example, a prediction might state, ?Apple will ship 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008? or ?High-tech venture funding will decrease by 15 percent in Q2 2008.?The predictive market is just one leg of the new publication?s offerings. It will also feature news stories and columns by influential industry thinkers such as Guy Kawasaki, an entrepreneur most famous for his former role as Apple's ?chief evangelist,? and Mark Anderson, CEO of the Strategic News Service.Optimum conditions for wise crowds Remember the old IT dictum ?garbage in, garbage out?? The same applies to predictive markets. After all, ?the problem with the global village is all the global village idiots,? a saying that blogger Paul Ginsparg popularized.The New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki, whose book The Wisdom of Crowds is widely credited with igniting the boom in predictive markets, said crowds can be smart if they address four conditions: diversity, independence, decentralization, and aggregation.Why decentralize? Good decisions (or good bets) are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge. The open source software development process is an example of decentralization in action.Diversity is achieved largely through the absence of hierarchy (markets don?t have vice presidents) which ensures that no single person has too much influence and that diverse viewpoints don?t get shut out, said Surowiecki.That may be why the new Industry Standard won?t have is an editor in chief. ?No single voice will dominate the discussion, which is why we decided to forgo the somewhat print-centric idea of an editor in chief, despite talking to some great people for the position,? said Managing Editor Ian Lamont. ?We want readers to get viewpoints from the widest range of contributors possible, with the common theme being that these contributors are all people who believe that the Web is a major paradigm shift in business.?Turning crowd predictions into revenues HP has refined Surowiecki?s ideas, developing a methodology that may improve the quality of predictions while using a group, instead of a crowd. Assuming that more knowledge equals a better prediction, HP?s Huberman and researchers Leslie Fine and Kay-Ute Chen select participants with knowledge of a specific area ? supply chains, for example ? and then have them play a stock-market-based game.The results of the game let the researchers grade traders on their willingness to take ? or avoid ? risk. They then participate in a market, and their predictions are adjusted by their risk scores. The players win real money, and their predictions are of real use to the company, Huberman said.One of the most successful predictive markets, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, takes play-money bets on weekly movie grosses, Oscar nominations, and the like. Traders? predictions of opening-weekend returns are more accurate than the movie industry?s forecasts, and the exchange has done a good job of foreseeing nominations as well. In 2002, its traders correctly predicted 35 of the 40 Oscar nominees in the top eight categories, Surowiecki wrote in The New Yorker several years ago.The exchange monetizes those predictions by slicing and dicing the data collected on the site and selling (in very real money) it to movie studios and other interested parties, said NewsFutures? Servan-Schreiber. The exchange is private, so there?s no way to estimate how much cash it generates, but it?s successful enough to have been purchased by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a major private equity firm.Taking a leaf from that playbook, the new Industry Standard expects to sell slices of the data it collects on the predictive market via IDC, IDG?s market research arm, said Derek Butcher, The Industry Standard?s vice president and general manager.
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Watch video of some the brighter ideas to stream through the DemoFall conference in San Diego. Also: HP in the hot seat.
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The annual Demo conference, where startups vie for the attention of VCs and established technology firms with fat wallets and a yen to buy something, is once again a reflection of what's hot in the high-tech industry.
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David Wheeler presents an introduction to the Bricolage content management system (CMS).
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With the new year comes new products, and, as it is every year, many of them will be showed off at the semi-annual Demo conference, this year being held in Palm Desert, California.Twice a year, Demo witnesses a gathering of VCs and corporate high-tech investors who watch as demonstrators are given six minutes each to present what they hope will be evaluated as breakthrough technology worth investing in.Every instance of Demo seems to bring with it a new product focus, and at Demo 2008, the hands-down winner is video products.Visible Measures has a technology, Visible Suite, that leverages the phenomenal growth of Internet video and attempts to make sense of audience behavior while watching videos. The on-demand service integrates with an Internet site's video player. Matt Cutler, vice president of marketing at Visible Measures says "view counts alone are not enough." Rather, the VisibleSuite captures all video interactions, including play, pause, rewind, fast forward, and forward to a friend.One unique feature of the technology is its ability to capture what Cutler calls "hot spots," places in the video where users keep returning to. "The hot spots are reflective of the interest of the audience," said Cutler.While Visible Measures captures the data, sometimes it is up to the client to understand why a particular hot spot is of high interest. For example, at StreetFire.net, users kept returning to a car that was only revving its engine. To the uninitiated, there may be nothing unusual to the sound of a revving engine, but an enthusiast will notice where "a guy blows a header," said Cutler.While delivering stats on viewers is in the first roll-out of the product, Cutler said Visible Measures will be also partnering with demographics companies to add more data about viewers.Meanwhile, Vidyo introduces VidyoConferencing, which has the unique differentiator of being able to broadcast high-definition video over standard IP networks. In each instance of a broadcast, each end point will display the highest quality video it is capable of handling. The ability to scale video performance based on the end point is achieved through a relatively new technology called H.264/SVC (Scalable Video Coding) that compresses and distributes the video stream.BitGravity also claims to send broadcast-quality video over the Internet. BG LiveBroadcast is based on Flash and is a streaming service that will be marketed to video content providers. According to Perry Wu, CEO and co-founder, BitGravity built a network for delivery of content that will rival cable and satellite and help make the Internet the most powerful medium of all for content delivery.Three months ago, the company launched BitGravity CDN [Content Delivery Network] to delivery video. Now it is introducing BG LiveBroadcast for delivery of live video content. The system is able to encode video in real time, get it on the network, broadcast, and deliver it to desktops with clear, crisp video at a high data rate, said Wu. "Performance will rival the quality of content on TV, giving the user video that is responsive when a user switches between videos, plays back video, or rewinds," said WuVideo provider Tube Mogul takes its name from a play on YouTube, but there's a twist to this video content distribution company. TubeMogul users can upload any video to its site and leave the distribution of the video to TubeMogul, which will distribute it to as many video sites as the user designates. Like Visible Measures, the company also uses analytics technology to compile video viewing data from the video publishing sites.While the TubeMogul site freely distributes video, Liquidus' niche is distribution of commercial advertising video. The company also offers production and placement services on everything from digital cable to standard TV and IPTV. Demo officials called Liquidus "a liferaft" for smaller advertisers who would otherwise have trouble competing with the high-quality production values available to major advertisers.On a more private front, VideoIQ iCVR offers a surveillance camera along with intelligent software that can send alerts to security personnel when the camera identifies unusual behavior. The system also reduces bandwidth usage, said officials.In all, Demo 2008 will see 78 presenters come on stage in seven separate categories: business hardware, consumer devices, small business software and services, consumer software and services, IT management and services, enterprise software and services, and enabling technology.
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InfoWorld - SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.,-- Blogging got its share of attention at Demo@15, as the conference that highlights future products brought to its stage companies that are taking blogging in new directions.
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SAN DIEGO -- Here at the DemoMobile 2004 conference, about 40 vendors had six minutes each to demonstrate their wireless technology invention to the crowd. Some products, although amazing in description, don't translate very well on the live screen and in such a tight time constraint. Some demonstrations, however, entirely captivate the audience and leave in their wake an audible buzz of excited voices.
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Blog: Online betting site lets people wager on tech-related things, like which company Google will acquire next.
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Play Steve Jobs Keynote Bingo while at MacWorld.
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You can find tomorrow's winners today.