Friday, August 25, 2006

Casual Observer in the News

CasualObserver.net, an Inkling customer, was featured in an article in the August 25 issue of The Daily Record, entitled: Think You Know Who Will Win in November? Willing to Bet?

Here's a brief excerpt:

Think you know who’s going to win the governor’s race in November? Would you be willing to put money on it? A growing number of political prediction markets — operating on both real and fake money — allow you to do just that. And a Maryland startup hopes to profit from the trend.

Rick Hinton formed his Gaithersburg-based company, Red Hill Group, hoping to profit from the growing interest in prediction markets for everything from politics to the avian flu. He planned this week to launch his first Web site, www.casualobserver.net, a political market allowing players to “invest” fake money (for legal reasons) in gubernatorial and senatorial candidates in the nation’s most competitive races.

Political markets tend to attract users ranging from campaign staffers and insiders to average voters with an interest in politics, Hinton explained.

“The whole key is to aggregate all of these opinions and expertise and knowledge in one place, and what’s typically shown is you get a pretty good result,” he remarked.

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Casual Observer Partners With Inkling to Deliver Prediction Markets for Upcoming U.S. Elections

Today is the beta launch of Casual Observer, a political prediction market site run by a Maryland-based startup, The Red Hill Group.

Casual Observer is using Inkling as the underpinnings of its marketplace but if you visit the site, you wouldn’t know it! That’s because Casual Observer is using our newly minted suite of web services we’ve developed. This means users aren’t asked to visit two sites, they can instead stay at Casual Observer to login, trade, view their balances and portfolio.

Creating these web services was an important step in our ongoing quest to 1) strive to make Inkling the easiest and most powerful prediction market solution to deploy, 2) provide a solution that is completely customizable to fit within an existing brand/site, and 3) let our customers be in control.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Cambrian House Partners With Inkling

The following is a press release by Cambrian House on August 23:

Crowdsourcing software development business partners with YCombinator backed company Inkling Inc. to employ a predictive market engine to find tomorrow’s next great Internet invention.

Calgary, AB (PRWEB) August 23, 2006—Cambrian House Inc., a Calgary-based software company, recently partnered with Inkling Inc, an Internet startup from Chicago, IL. Cambrian House, a software startup with a unique crowdsourcing business model, and Inkling, a product of Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator, are a perfect match.

Inkling’s unique and innovative approach to prediction markets has removed the complexity from what has traditionally been an intimidating and narrow field and made them accessible to “the rest of us.” Inkling also offers a complete “do it yourself” solution where individuals and organizations can easily develop their own markets, enabling the creation of a robust, grass-roots marketplace. “Everyone wants to minimize risk in their organization or figure out where their next innovation is going to come from. Inkling can be a key ingredient to that process,” says Inkling CEO Adam Siegel.

Cambrian House seeks to harness the wisdom of crowds to determine which idea of the thousands of member-submitted ideas may eventually come to development through a process known as IdeaWarz—where the 5000+ members of the Cambrian House community vote in favor of ideas. The partnering of the companies was therefore a natural fit. “Predictive markets, thanks to Inkling, will help refine our idea selection process,” remarks Michael J. Sikorsky, CEO of Cambrian House. “As a tool, it will undoubtedly prove invaluable for us and our community. It may not be something for all our members, but it most assuredly will empower those members who want to buy and sell Royalty Points.”

You can visit Cambrian House’s IdeaWarz at: cambrianhouse.com/idea-warz

About Cambrian House Headquartered in Calgary, Canada – Cambrian House opened its doors on February 1, 2006. Using the internet to harness the wisdom and participation of crowds, Cambrian House seizes creative software ideas from the ether and builds them into real software. With the use of online market testing, Cambrian House then objectively determines if an idea should be built or be terminated at conception. Visit www.cambrianhouse.com for more information.

About Inkling Inkling Inc. is a Chicago-based Internet start-up that helps companies make better decisions by tapping into the collective wisdom of their employees. Inkling’s easy-to-use, innovative, approach to prediction markets is already being leveraged by several corporate customers, academic researchers, and thousands in the general public. Learn more about Inkling at inklingmarkets.com