Friday, October 29, 2010

Inkling's German Partner Predicat Launches a Marketplace on eMobility

Our partner in Germany, Predicat, has launched a prediction market on a pressing subject for the world auto industry: electric mobility. You only need to watch a Tesla blow by you on the freeway to know that having volts instead of oil under the hood can still be a lot of fun apart from being ecologically sensible.

Before we can call electric cars our future however, there are some key problems to solve. Predicat is working with the auto industry in Germany to help address these issues and is gathering the input of auto industry insiders, enthusiasts, engineers, and casual drivers alike to predict the outcome of key questions.

You can go now to e-mobility.predict.net to get your fantasy €5000 and begin making predictions.

And it's not just a one way street (no pun intended.) Predicat and the auto industry are sponsoring this initiative with prizes. Background on the initiative and more information about Predicat's prediction marketplace are available in this video:

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Get famous for predicting the toss up races in the 2010 elections

A friend of ours at the Huffington Post, Keith Thomson, has written an article about polls and prediction markets and the never ending argument about which are better.

We'll stay out of that fight in this post and just say that in support of the article we've agreed to stand up a separate marketplace and chose a few close races to let people trade in. Keith said whoever does the best money-wise after the elections are over, he'll interview and try to get them featured in another article. Just think, you can brag to your kids about how you were in the "papers" for your skills.

Sounds like a decent incentive to get over there and see what you're made of: http://elections2010.inklingmarkets.com.

Inkling Public Prediction Market Projections on U.S. Senate Races

On our public marketplace, there are a series of questions running about the 2010 Congressional elections. All the Senate races are running, the Governor's races, and a smattering of House races. I pulled the numbers for all the Senate races this evening to see what our traders were saying about each race. Here's a summary:

Inkling projects the Democrats to hold the Senate with 54 seats (52 Democrats + 2 Independents who caucus with the D's) while the Republicans will have 44 seats + 2 Independents who will caucus with the R's.

The way to read the chart below is different than reading poll numbers. We're predicting the likelihood of someone winning, not the actual percentage of the vote they'll receive. So if a candidate is at 85, that means Inkling thinks there is an 85% chance they'll win and a 15% chance the other candidate will win, not that they'll receive 85% of the vote. And unlike polls, people can change their mind or add to the predictions at any time based on new information they have or their opinions changing, so these numbers will be changing right up until election time. For the latest Senate predictions, go here.



Tomorrow we'll cover the projections for all Governor races.