HubDub launches with a bang
February 3rd, 2008As I mentioned in my last post, HubDub went into a public beta last week by officially announcing at the DEMO 2008 conference. All I have to say now is a big “Well Done” to Nigel and the HubDub team.
When I first thought about it, I wasn’t sure how HubDub would be received by the “tech elite” that attend the DEMO conference. Would it be seen as a bit of a toy, or would attendees understand how news and forecasting could work together. (Perhaps more importantly, could they see how HubDub could make money, which Alex Kirtland talks about in his post here.)
Well, it looks like they certainly made an impression. One blog put them #3 (out of 72 demo companies there) for “the best venture capital investment candidates” there. This is certainly a step in the right direction for HubDub.
Does this mean anything for the prediction market industry? Perhaps. It means that prediction markets have yet another great broad-based, public and high-profile example. (The Hollywood Stock Exchange being the most prominent up to now, though the Foresight Exchange, NewsFutures, Media Predict and Inkling could also be included.) HubDub has prediction markets based on news events, where HSX is based on media, films, and stars. While for media buffs HubDub will never surpass the HSX, I think HubDub will be popular with a broader range of potential users.
HubDub should develop into a great example of a prediction market, and make people more and more familiar with how forecasting and current news fit together. I think that any attention like this will be positive for the industry in general. How HubDub currently allows any user to create any question does seem to be a bit risky to me, and we’ll see how that works out as the community of users grows. Overall, it’s great to see another strong example of a prediction market
Embedded here is Nigel’s actual demo. I was pleased to see that the market he used to demo that day was one I created!