Mercury’s Blog

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There are now three conferences on prediction markets coming up in the next six weeks! I will be attending and speaking at two of them. (I won’t be traveling to Kansas City, unfortunately.) They are:

New York - Monday, September 24th - ConsensusPoint

London - Thursday/Friday, October 11-12th - Colabria

Kansas City, MO - Thursday, November 1st - University of Kansas

My talk will focus on my experience running and researching prediction markets. I’ll discuss how small a market can be and still work well, the types of behaviours traders exhibit, market manipulation, and in developing a proper incentive scheme. I look forward to seeing many of you at one of the events!

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If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve seen the first videos that I’ve posted to help explain prediction markets to people unfamiliar with the concept. They seem to be quite popular; the first video has been watched over 200 times and the newest video has been watched nearly 50 times in the last 24 hours or so.

I’ve embedded both videos again below. Combined, they explain in less than six minutes what prediction markets are and how they can be used in virtually any business. Please feel free to forward these on to anyone that’s interested.

What is a prediction market? - (direct link)

How can I use a prediction market in my business? - (direct link)

A new video has been posted to YouTube (and embedded below) which explains “How can I use a prediction market in my business?”. As before, the answer is a presentation in three-minutes or less.

The first video in the series, “What is a prediction market?”, has been viewed nearly 200 times on YouTube. I was pleased with the responses I received on this blog and via e-mail. Thank you to those of you who took the time to provide feedback; it was very valuable.

The purpose of the video below was to break down the different types of ways prediction markets can be used in a company. Again, it’s fairly high-level, but approaches it from the perspective of someone that has never encountered prediction markets before.

I look forward to reading your comments and e-mails about this video! As always, click here to e-mail me with any questions about your prediction markets project, or with any feedback.

Cross-posted to Midas Oracle.

For those of you that were trying to get me to upload the video I created to YouTube, please know that doing so was my first choice. It’s the easiest to embed everywhere, and track how many people have seen it. Unfortunately, every time I tried to do it the conversion just dropped the slide builds and transitions.

After hearing more of your comments, I went back and bashed my head around it some more, and finally got it to work. It involved exporting the presentation (with custom settings), importing it into another program, exporting it from there (again, with custom settings), before finally uploading it up to YouTube. It was ugly, but the quality I was looking for made it through YouTube’s conversion process.

You can see the results for yourself below. Please watch it (if you haven’t already), and feel free to click on the video to see it on YouTube, comment on it, and embed it for yourself on your own blog. If you’d like the original Quicktime movie file, it can still be downloaded from the link on the right-hand sidebar. (Click here for a direct link.)

Prediction markets truly harness the “Wisdom of Crowds,” but not that many people really know what they are. They understand the two words individually, but they don’t necessarily “get it.”

I decided to set myself a little bit of a challenge; to create a short video that explained the key concepts of prediction markets in three minutes or less. It took a while to really distill the ideas down to the core, and some of you may criticise that I’ve glossed over some details. But I hope the video below is something that busy executives can take the time to watch and understand. (I’ve created a separate page for it that you will also see on the right-hand sidebar.)

I look forward to reading your comments! (And if you like it, please Digg it!)

RSS readers - if you can’t see the video, please click through to the post on Mercury’s Blog.

UPDATE: Video is now via YouTube.

Cross-posted at Midas Oracle.