Friday, February 22, 2013

Crowdsourced Academy Awards Predictions

This Sunday evening the stars will all come together in Hollywood as they always do once a year for the 2013 Academy Awards.

Every year in our public prediction market someone publishes questions about practically every category rewarded, and this year was no different.

We decided to have a little fun this year though and create a separate site just to showcase Academy Awards predictions. You can see it here:

http://academyawardspredictions.com



After working up the design, building the site was a breeze. We used widgets from the public site to both display the real-time predictions and to allow visitors to make their own predictions. The widgets are also built to allow you to customize their design via CSS so they can match whatever site you're displaying them at.



Because all of the interaction and calculations are handled on the Inkling side, we then just needed to build a "static" site with some HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Instead of hosting it ourselves however, we decided to just host the site at Amazon S3. A recently introduced domain service called Route 53 made this even easier.

This was a fun project to work on and I suspect we'll be doing more of these in the future. March Madness anyone?