Prediction Markets and News – On Hubdub
January 29th, 2008It’s now official… HubDub is out of private testing and into public beta as they launch at DEMO 2008! (They were recently covered in both TechCrunch UK and TechCrunch.)
I’m really quite happy for Nigel and his team up in Edinburgh. Taking advantage of Scotland’s cold, dark winter, they created a truly new way of approaching prediction markets. By integrating a news aggregator with a prediction market, users will have a unique opportunity to see how news and events interact.
Part of the reason I’m intrigued by HubDub is because I’m a bit of a news junkie. So much of what I read/scan (or just skip over) day-to-day is regurgitated information used just to fill the pages of the newspaper. It can be difficult to tell what information is actually relevant to an event amidst the daily filler. This is where HubDub gets interesting, and provides a unique solution.
Where other public prediction markets (such as NewsFutures, Inkling Markets, HSX, or the Foresight Exchange) offer lots of contracts to trade, they don’t necessarily link back to any information on those contracts. HubDub not only links to news stories, but through algorithms and voting can show which news stories actually matter on a given contract. Though it’s not fully working right now, eventually we’ll be able to see a Google-Finance-like interface, where key news stories can be traced to changes in a contracts price.
This also makes HubDub a better news aggregator. By tying the news stories back to how relevant they are to questions people have created, it will allow more interesting stories make it to the top of the list.
All of this doesn’t mean that the other public prediction markets mentioned above aren’t good or relevant… they are! But by integrating markets (which feed on news) to the news itself, they will make it much easier and more desirable for users to participate and continue participating.
HubDub is just launching, so there’s quite a bit more to come. (Some features/options have a bit of refinement left to do.) I absolutely encourage you to sign up for an account and play around. And while I’m doing well on the leaderboards right now, I don’t expect that to last for long, though I will be doing my damnedest to keep my spot!
