Governmentfutures.net

We wanted to let everyone know about a new marketplace that has come on the scene that is powered by Inkling: governmentfutures.net is a public site run by Government Futures, a company using collective intelligence to help their clients understand the machinations of the United States Federal Government.

Government Futures called us a couple weeks ago after trying unsuccessfully to get a marketplace up with another provider. 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!

A Brief Note of Thanks

Just wanted to take a quick moment to thank everyone on the Inkling public site who continue to create and manage their own markets. We've been noticing a distinct up-tick in the amount of markets that are being created (or attempted to be created, i.e. "How many licks will it take to get to the tootsie roll pop doesn't make the site :)

So thank you. The positive experience that is the public Inkling site is completely driven by the interesting markets people run and cheesy as it may be, it's a special feeling to know people take a little bit of time out of their day to use the tools we built.

New homepage and the world of tags

As you will clearly notice if you log in to Markets, we have revamped the homepage. While we continue to be able to feature certain markets, we've re-worked the layout so you can get a snapshot view of what is going on in each of them. We also still show newest markets but are also listing those markets that are expiring soon so you can have an opportunity to do some last minute trading.

As anyone who has published a market knows, we've created a "folksonomy" by allowing publishers to assign keywords or "tags" to their individual markets. As many other sites have proven, this becomes an efficient method of categorization as the number of markets continues to increase (had you seen our "by topic" page lately? It was a mess.) So now when you click on "markets" in the upper right, you are presented with a "tag cloud" showing in popularity all tags that have been used to define markets. We've also put the most popular 20 tags in the navbar on the right and of course the entire marketplace is indexed so you can always just search as well.

If anyone has any ideas for enhancing the homepage or our continuing integration of tags in to the marketplace, please let us know.

Apple iPhone Market

Here at Inkling, we are huge Apple fans and Mac users through and through. We were elated to see the announcements about the Apple iPhone and will more than likely be purchasing them come summertime if we can swallow the $499/$599 bill (gulp).

But more importantly, in one of our most heavily traded markets ever, the crowd predicted correctly. Right before MacWorld, Inkling users had put the probability of an iPhone announcement at 91%. This went along with growing indications an announcement was imminent, but there were definitely holdouts who felt it would not happen. In fact, yours truly shorted the iPhone stock, thinking the announcement would come later this summer. :( So much for my prediction abilities when it comes to my second favorite company.

Feet to the fire

At the end of every year, consumers of any newspaper, online magazine, blog, television show, or radio program are inundated with the "year in review" of any number of topics. Then a few days later, we are again inundated with "predictions for the new year."

Well we've decided to hold one magazine's feet to the fire: Wired, to see what "the crowd" thinks of their predictions.

Nate has created several markets containing their 2007 forecasts:

• Entire Beatles collection on iTunes?
  
• Terry Semel leaves Yahoo?
  
• Major newspaper gives up print edition?
  
• Apple's 20% of the U.S. portable market?
  
• Spam doubles?
  
• BitTorrent on Tivo?
  

openDemocracy Prediction Markets

I wanted to point everyone to an Inkling marketplace that went live today. We're really excited to be working with the globally minded openDemocracy who bill themselves as "the leading independent website on global current affairs - free to read, free to participate, free to the world..."

Instead of stealing all their thunder, I'll point you to a post on the site by Tony Curzon Price announcing the markets and their plan to use them for the year:

The wisdom of the openDemocracy crowd