Will you remember me?

A couple small updates to any Inkling site that is public (including our public site) that were long overdue.

We've added a "remember me" checkbox to the login page. Selecting it means you won't have to login again for a month. Just be sure if you're using Inkling on a public computer to log out!

We've also added some social network buttons to every question so you can "like" the question on Facebook, tweet about it, and email it.

Using the crowd to predict TV show failure

The NYTimes has a nice implementation of a crowdsourced app to try and predict which television shows will get cancelled this season. It reminds me of something Brent Stinski of MediaPredict told me once, that if a show makes it past 5 episodes, it will usually survive but if it's going to get cancelled, it's going to happen before the 5th episode.

Judging from the results so far, his theory seems pretty accurate. Check it out:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/arts/television/2011-fall-tv-cancellations.html

Inkling Now Fully Internationalized

A few months ago we announced that Inkling had gone international and we could support any language. One of our clients immediately took us up on the post and asked for Inkling in two additional languages to support their international rollout of the platform.

We quickly realized the translation work we had done thus far was totally insufficient (we had only internationalized the trading interface) and we needed to bite the bullet and go all the way, giving us the ability to translate absolutely every piece of text on the site.

Thanks to what admittedly was some really tedious work by one of our contract developers Brian Leslie, this U.S. based company has since launched in two more countries and we can finally announce that Inkling is now fully internationalized and the entire application can now be translated in to any language.

For now if you want a language other than English, functionally we need to make the switch for you, but soon we'll make that part of any administrator's settings, and eventually any user can choose the language they want on an individual basis.

Crowdsourced approach to criminal justice analysis

We've been working with some Professors at Seattle University's Department of Criminal Justice for a little while now and wanted to highlight some nice pub they recently got for their project.

Excerpt and link to article:

http://www.jrsa.org/pubs/forum/forum_issues/for29_3.pdf

The Criminal Justice Prediction Market (CJPM; www.cjmarkets.net) was created by professors Matthew J. Hickman and Stephen K. Rice of Seattle University with the following goals: (1) to provide a marketplace in which interested academics, criminal justice practitioners, and others can "trade" (i.e., take positions on) interesting questions/issues in criminology and criminal justice and contribute to collective prediction; (2) to provide a pedagogical tool for criminal justice educators and students who wish to explore the utility of prediction markets with regard to criminal justice topics; and (3) to address the quality and timeliness of crime statistics by exploring the potential for creating market-based incentives for their improvement.

Politics and projects gone bad

Recently I have been re-reading one of my favorite software engineering books, Peopleware, by DeMarco and Lister. They set the stage for the rest of the book with an alarming statistic – 15% of software projects, and they have tracked hundreds since the late 1970’s, never see the light of day. The numbers are even worse for the largest projects. For those over 25 work-years, nearly 25% failed. No one publishes the costs of these failures, let alone all of the projects that finish but take longer and cost more than originally planned. The numbers would be staggering.

What I found interesting was the author's explanation for these failures. Where they could find people to talk about these failed projects, the overwhelming cause was politics. DeMarco's and Lister's interpretation of this was that it was not necessarily office politics in the traditional sense, although there was some of that, but what they called sociology - the management of people and groups. Understanding people and their motivations and finding ways to get people and teams to communicate and work together better is hard. Managers are not good at this generally, and software engineers in particular are pretty bad. They typically start their careers as programmers and, let's face it, technical people, myself included, are not very good at figuring out people. It is much easier to figure out why the router is not talking to the switch than why John is not teaming well with Carol.

So what can we do to get better? Lister and DeMarco have a number of excellent suggestions. I heartily recommend Peopleware and their follow-up publications. What struck me though reading the book this time was that politics , or sociology using their terms, was exactly the problem we set out to solve in building Inkling. We had seen over and over in our previous work experiences where communication and information flow on large projects was broken. No one wanted to stand up and tell the boss the project was a bad idea. The true risks and status of a project got watered down as the information made its way up through layers of management. Politics drove decisions, not data. It was so dis-heartening we knew there had to be a better way.

Which is how we got to prediction markets. We thought the ability of the technology to harness the wisdom of the crowd was a great way to free up critical information within organizations. And this is exactly what our customers have found. They also found an additional benefit we did not anticipate. Customers such as Ford tell us the market gets the crowd talking, and that the collaboration the platform fosters across organizational silos is as valuable as the ability to quantify business questions. We have written about this describing how Inkling has been used to address Project Risk Management. The concepts covered there are just as applicable to project management in general, whether it is software or any large, people intensive project.

Of course prediction markets, like any technology, are not a silver bullet. Ultimately it will take individual and organizational commitments to focus on and get better at people management. Prediction markets can be a catalyst for that organizational change: when information is more transparent and people are allowed to communicate without fear of repercussion, that changes the dynamic of how projects and organizations function.

Let us know what you think. Is it politics, or sociology, that bring down large software projects? Or are there other factors that DeMarco and Lister missed?

Powered by Inkling

For those who have to be a part of EVERYTHING

With several hundred questions going on our public marketplace at any given time, I'm not sure this new feature has that much utility, but for marketplaces that only have a few dozen questions, this will likely come in handy.

We've built a new search filter for questions to show which you are NOT participating in yet. So if you're the kind of person who wants to be involved in every question, we've just made it easier. :)



Enjoy your Labor Day weekend!

Manage your questions

We love to get rid of links off the navigation bar. It just feels so...liberating. :) It's a rare occurrence that we get to do it, but this is one of them. There used to be two links on the right side of the nav: "Manage questions" and "Ask a question."

With the introduction of our new discussion capability, things were getting tight. We also felt like the "manage questions" link was pretty redundant with what's already in the "questions" link - the only thing missing were a couple additional sorts to show you your pending or submitted questions.

So instead of keeping that link around, we've removed it and now if you go to to the questions page, you'll see a new link:



This will now list all your questions and discussions that are currently running or you've submitted. Click on any of them and go to admin/edit to do whatever you want with them.

For administrators, there's still a manage questions link, but it's moved up in to the "admin options" menu item in the top right:

Have a discussion!

In watching companies run a lot of marketplaces, we've noticed that a key success factor is to have a healthy bit of back and forth in the discussion threads associated with each question. While many players are competitive and want to be accurate predictors, most of us are also social animals and like to engage in a good back and forth. We decided to build on this and introduce the ability to JUST start a discussion thread on its own without being associated with a question.



Publishing a discussion is a familiar process. You are asked the topic/question you'd like people to discuss, fill out some details and any background information you'd like to provide and submit for publication. The discussions themselves look just like the discussion threads we already have so they'll be familiar to everyone.

Prediction Markets and Market Research

We are seeing an increasing number of market research professionals and companies exploring how prediction markets can improve market research. While there are still a number of important questions to address, we are seeing some very promising early work, in particular around using the prediction market to narrow down the funnel of new ideas or product features that are then run through more traditional (and expensive) research methods.

But don't take my word for it. Roxana Strohmenger of Forrester wrote about this trend recently on her blog: http://tinyurl.com/3uh9rfk

Enjoy!
Scott

Risk, probability and how our brains are easily misled

Some interesting discussion at The World Science Festival's panel on Probability and Risk that is relevant to how we ask questions in prediction markets and how we might expect a "crowd" to respond given certain uses of language or preconceptions:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/06/risk-probability-and-how-our-brains-are-easily-misled.ars

Inkling and Risk Management - IAFS Webinar

On June 3rd I will be participating in an online webinar sponsored by the Intangible Asset Finance Society on risk management to talk about how prediction markets allow an organization to better identify and more accurately predict the probability of specific risks. This is an open (and free!) seminar, details below. If you can not join us live please check the link for recording and materials.

-Scott

To register for the seminar, or access materials later, please go to

http://www.iafinance.org/events.html#event110603

Tweet-able Conference Talks

Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting at the Planning-ness conference - a loosely organized conference geared towards media planners and strategists held this year in Minneapolis.

As has been the norm for quite some time now at conferences, most people in attendance were either tweeting during the sessions or simply lurking and seeing what other people were saying. In the morning sessions I attended, I watched as a steady stream of tweets came through about each session - a talkative - sometimes useful - back channel to the conference.

I've found a good way to get feedback on your own talk is to review the conference hashtag afterwards and see what people said. Often it's simply quotes, but other times it's agreement or disagreement with statements you shared or snippets from your slides. Occasionally I'll respond, connections are made, you know the drill.

The people attending this conference create buzz for a living. They work at ad agencies, design agencies, and marketing and communication firms so I'm expecting a lot of twitter traffic just like everyone else is getting.

On comes the afternoon sessions and I give my talk. When I'm done, I get on twitter. Woah - only 6 or 7 tweets about my talk and about 40 from the other room where another session was going on. Did my talk suck? Did everyone have screen-face with their phones? The after-lunch sleepies? I had roughly half the attendees at the conference in my session and got lots of questions and participation from my audience. Several people came up afterwards and said they found the talk fascinating and wanted to follow up. For all intents and purposes, I qualified the talk as a success. So what happened on twitter?

I realized after taking a second look at tweets about other people's talks and looking back at my own presentation, as opposed to other presentations I saw, I really had no twitter-bites in my presentation. No platitudes that will make the tweeter look insightful to their followers if they repeated them. No controversial proclamations that will raise eyebrows like "X is dead" or the cliche "it's all about the people, not the technology."

Frack! It feels a little like selling out if I start to put this kind of stuff in my presentations just to get twitter love. On the other hand, the value of conferences is spreading the word about what you're doing and twitter is vital in doing that.

Is there a balance to be struck? Looking at my slides, I definitely could work harder to have things that are digestible by the 140-character crowd. For example, when I talk about the accuracy of prediction markets, I simply show a graph. I could have a statement proclaiming how well prediction markets do that is easily quotable. When I cite case studies, they're divided up by business problem, key questions, and lessons learned/value. In other words, dense. I should probably create a headline for each one, like "Ford saved $X million by canceling a project based on feedback from their prediction market."

Also I've given similar talks to this so often that I've taken it for granted I'm conveying my messages clearly. I need to go back with a fresh eye at my slides with presenting 101 in mind. Does each slide make a key point? What are the 3 things I want people to take away from my presentation if nothing else?

I will likely always qualify success at a conference by how many new connections and business leads I generate, but a tangential metric I should be much more aware of is how much chatter my talks generate online. Besides the obvious benefit of more people talking about me and my business, it's an additional signal of how well my presentation is being digested in nice, chewable tweet-bites.

How prediction markets impact risk management programs

MITRE Corporation, working in conjunction with the U.S. Air Force, has published an analysis of the impact their Inkling prediction market had on a particular risk management program they manage on behalf of the Air Force.

While their research is continuing in to this year, MITRE has already proven a direct correlation between activity in the prediction market and:

1) an increase in overall database activity logging and managing risks; and
2) an increase in the rate of newly identified risks

What they hope to analyze in the coming months is to better understand if risks are being identified earlier because of the existence of the prediction market, and do risks get mitigated or closed more quickly?

Here is a link to the report by Jon Schuler that has been made publicly available.

Small company selling to the enterprise? How to pass the initial “smell test"

As a small software company of only a few people that sells a product to multi-billion dollar corporations and governments, we have to make sure we pass what I fondly call the “smell test” when having an initial conversation about our product and services. Smell good and you get another meeting. Smell bad and they don't come anywhere near you again.

Let's assume since they've started to talk to you that they're already interested in your product and think it will do something positive for their company. That's the hardest part, so congratulations, you've gotten past the first part of the smell test. But now you have to help whomever is "sponsoring" you inside the company to convince others that it's ok to be working with a small company and this is the right thing to do.

So with that in mind, here’s our list of stuff we’ve developed over time to help us pass the smell test.

Business Stuff

• Ability to competently facilitate an initial conference call and demo. Send an agenda ahead of time. Don’t be afraid to write an email before the meeting and ask some questions about what they want to cover and what their problem is that has led them to begin this dialogue. Know your demo well. If it’s easy, create some custom content for your demos that really give them the understanding of how your product would be used in their context. If you’ve got a little spare cash, get a subscription to gotomeeting or adobe connect or webex. If you don’t have money, use one of the free services. And try to have these conversations from a landline. A conference call they’ve gotten 7 people on their side to join and you keep dropping the call because your cell service is spotty from your house gets old fast.


• A mutual NDA that you can send. Typically they’ll want to use their own, but sometimes it’s just quicker to use yours and having one at the ready makes it feel like you've been here before.


• A well thought out and easy to understand price list for your business model. Having to talk through pricing or having a wordy email describing it will make it seem like this is the first time your product has ever been bought. Having a price list feels more professional.


• A 7-10 page slide powerpoint deck giving an overview of your company and product offering. Most companies typically ask for “follow-up” information to send to other people to get approval for your project and they want to be able to email something. For whatever reason just sending along a URL is usually not sufficient.


• Case studies: even if they are very general, it goes a long way towards making them feel like they aren’t the first to try your product. If you don’t have any yet, write up a generic one for a fictitious company and call it a "sample use case."


• The ability to offer up references at other well-known companies they've heard of. Don’t have any yet? Can you put out a public demo of your software for people to try out?


• White papers – anyone at any universities do any related research to what you’re selling that you can send as more background? If not, could you write a 3-5 pager that sounds relatively academic about the benefit your product is providing?


• A security FAQ. How will you manage their data? What precautions do you take against various types of exploits? What steps will you take if you’re hacked?


• Templates for service level agreements their lawyers or procurement teams can start to review.


• Well-defined and documented customer support process. An email inbox for all inquiries. A phone number to leave voicemail inquiries. Live chat. A knowledge base with a ton of information on it. A ticketing system. Just make sure it’s easy to understand how they get support. And keep it simple. No pay per request or anything that limits their ability to get help. If you have a well-built product, there won’t be a lot of support requests anyway but psychologically they’ll feel better.

Technical Stuff

• Application hosted at a reputable datacenter that is SAS70/II audited. We’re at Rackspace. Corporate IT has heard of Rackspace and knows they run a quality shop. The premium we pay to be there saves a lot of heartache. Corporate IT can be assured Rackspace is doing a whole lot of things process-wise, probably in an even more diligent fashion than at their own datacenter.


• SAML compliance or token services for use with their Single Sign-On credentialing system. Managing new usernames/passwords for a 3rd party app is like poison for lots of employees and just serves as an excuse for them not to use your stuff. 1Password and other localized credential management systems are not part of standard builds in large companies.


• An API: usage may vary, but knowing it’s there makes people feel more comfortable they will be able to expand and customize and integrate if/when the time is right.


• Well rehearsed answers to whatever negative conventional wisdom is out there about your underlying framework. We still get people telling us they’ve heard “Ruby doesn’t scale.”


• Ability to host a “sandbox” for them to try out before making any commitments. They love demos, but they also want to be able to try things out for themselves. Make this seamless and easy.

I’m sure some of this sounds old school and arcane, but that’s just the price of doing business with large companies. Some things can be mind numbing, but remember they’re not asking for this stuff purely to be pains, they’re asking because their procurement processes are designed to mitigate risk. The more you can do right from the beginning to assuage any irrational fears generated because you're a small company, the better. And besides, when it’s all said and done, hopefully you’re raising your glasses in triumph after winning that nice contract.

Getting Inspiration

I loved this quote:

"The advice I like to give to young artists, or really anybody, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens."

-- Chuck Close (artist)

A nice collection of failed predictions

In an office building I used to work in they had quotes like this all over the place as inspiration. Here is a nice collection of outrageously wrong predictions made by the seminal experts of the time:

It'll Never Work!

Are famous people too media savvy today to make these kinds of proclamations anymore in public?

Cityposh, our second company

Nate and I "soft" launched a second company a couple weeks ago called Cityposh.

On Cityposh we'll be offering up products, services, and experiences to be auctioned off in a "penny auction" format. Winners of auctions we've been running are typically saving 70-90%+ on the items being auctioned.

Here's how it works:

1. Signup with an email address and you'll be sent an email when an auction is beginning.


2. To participate, you'll first buy some bids. Bids cost 50¢ each.


3. Use a bid to move yourself in to first place to win the auction.


4. Each time someone bids, the price of the auctioned item goes up 1¢


5. If you're in first place when time runs out, you win the auction!

There are other sites doing a similar auction format, but they mostly focus on selling products like iPads, watches, sunglasses, etc. After our "soft launch period" of the next couple months, our focus will turn to auctioning "experiences" that you can do in your local area (we'll be starting with Chicago, our hometown.)

For example, we recently auctioned off a gift certificate at Rick Bayless' restaurants here in Chicago that someone got for less than $1 plus the cost of their bids. We've auctioned off a "movie and dessert night" in a local Chicago neighborhood, and we've auctioned off gift certificates from national brands like Whole Foods and Target. Today in fact we're auctioning $50 at Banana Republic.

We've only told a small network of people and they've been really excited about it and having a lot of fun. But we think we're ready to start to grow. And if you sign up and buy some bids (you can spend as little as $5 to get started) you can then refer other people and start to build up a war chest of free bids. Each friend you get to sign up we'll put 5 free bids in their account.

And what does this mean for Inkling? Nothing! Like other projects outside of Inkling we've worked on in the past, we've built something quickly to test to see if it sticks. This is no different, and our dedication to Inkling is unwavering.

Anyways, we look forward to you trying out Cityposh and letting us know what you think!

Good Luck, Javan

Some sad news to report today. Javan Makhmali, the first developer we ever hired, is leaving us to go work for 37signals.

Javan has been an amazing help to us over the past 2 years. There isn't a single aspect of our application he has not touched at some point and he has taught us all quite a bit. He has been a pleasure to work with and always brought some wit and humor to our chat room conversations, starting off with a simple "Morning" each and every day. It's a testament to Javan's skillset and character that he's going to work for 37signals. We know they only hire the very best.

We're looking forward to staying in touch with Javan for years to come. He wasn't just an employee to us. We think of him as a friend.

Now as my mother used to say when people quit my Dad's department at the University of Illinois to go work someplace else, "may fruit flies infest his home!"

Seriously - good luck Javan, you'll be missed.

Inkling now supporting multiple languages (German done, more to come)

Some good news for those who want to run an Inkling marketplace in a language other than English.

In preparation for working with one of our German consulting partners on delivering Inkling to one of their clients, we've just completed the grunt work of "internationalizing" a vast majority of the Inkling experience. While we just have the German translation complete, it's trivial for us to now introduce new languages.

If you are running a pilot site or are thinking about introducing Inkling to your company or community in your native language, we should be able to work with you to quickly get a translation done. Just contact us to get started and we'll continue to update this blog as we get more languages complete.

New trading interface is live

At 5pm CT today we took Inkling down for 2 minutes to push out our new simple and advanced trading interface. Everything seemed to go smoothly as we witnessed trading immediately start again as soon as we came back online. All hosted marketplaces are now running the new capability and we're anxious to begin hearing what you think. Even more importantly, if you find any oddities, let us know and we'll investigate them right away.

We'll also be updating our "on-premise" version and pushing out these changes to those running Inkling in their own corporate datacenter within the next few weeks.