Mercury's Blog

It might not be the most ground-breaking innovation out there, but I really like what Inkling has done recently with their trading widgets. They recently demonstrated how your employees and partners can predict project management milestones within Basecamp, a very popular web application for project management.

Basecamp is used a lot in small and medium businesses, and I’ve heard that it’s becoming more common in niches of larger businesses. (It’s easy to put the relatively small monthly bills on corporate purchase cards.) It’s popularity means there’s a great population of potential customers that can start taking advantage of this new source of information.

(Inkling’s full post on how to implement prediction markets within Basecamp can be seen by clicking here.)

I’ve written before that I think there is a LOT of value in using prediction markets to forecast project milestones. (It’s generally done poorly, if it’s done at all.) One of my more popular posts according to Google Analytics is “RAG status – people lie, prediction markets don’t“. I dreamt of a day where prediction markets would be run on all project milestones, and the results of those markets would drive a project’s “RAG status”. That is now easily done with Inkling’s Basecamp widget.

There are probably still a few details to be ironed out with the actual implementation, but this is a great step forward for businesses that want better intelligence from their employees and partners. I look forward to hearing more from Inkling about how customers have taken advantage of this and if/how it’s worked for them.

From their blog post, here are two screenshots of what the screens look like before and after you trade:

The “trading” screen:

The results screen:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under General, Play-money Markets, Software.