Crowdcast Blog

Welcome, Matt Shore

2009-03-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

[This is a re-post from our new blog. To keep up-to-date, please follow us there.]

We are pleased to welcome the newest member of the Crowdcast team — Matt Shore, Director of Product. Previously, he was part of the founding team at Interlace Systems, an upstart in the Integrated Business Planning space. Matt played key roles in product and market definition, IP and product development, early customer acquisition, venture financing, and successful exit via sale to Oracle in 2007. Prior to Interlace, Matt held development and development management positions at Business Intelligence pioneer Arbor Software/Hyperion Solutions and Oracle. Matt received an MBA from Insead and BA in Music and BS in Computer Science from the Florida State University.

We are excited and honored to have Matt aboard.

New Name, New Blog

2009-03-04T14:48:00.001-08:00

We have created a new blog for Crowdcast, which can be found at: blog.crowdcast.com. Please join us over there.

Thanks!

The Economist and the Promise of PM

2009-03-01T23:29:00.000-08:00

This past week, The Economist wrote on the yet-unfulfilled promise of prediction markets. At Crowdcast , we believe prediction markets are not yet mainstream because the current solutions rely on mechanisms designed for the stock market, not for the enterprise.

The stock trading metaphor works for a large, liquid stock market, but is unsuitable for enterprise forecasting. The concept of shorting and covered calls is far from intuitive for your average employee, and the stock mechanism makes it hard to ask the simplest of questions relevant for corporate forecasters. For example, buying or selling a collection of virtual stocks representing probabilities of sales falling in particular ranges is an incredibly obtuse way of asking for a single sales forecast. Finally, the stock mechanism relies on copious liquidity to ensure meaningful metrics, which is often not available with the limited crowds available in the enterprise.

However, innovation moves on and we question the assumption that prediction markets have to rely on the stock market analogy. At Crowdcast, we have been working on a new mechanism, that takes into account participant behavior and aptitude as much as market efficiency. The product we are launching in April will deliver easy, engaging, and expressive information exchanges, without the limitations of traditional notions of stock markets.

When you get the questions, incentives, and mechanism right, a prediction market can be an incredibly powerful management tool. Employees share insights anonymously and are measured and rewarded for their intelligence. Widely deployed, this has the potential to fundamentally change the nature of the organizational contract, moving from information flow based on hierarchy and silos, to enterprise-wide direct communication.

A whole new take on prediction markets; available from Crowdcast in April 2009.

Prediction Market Conference Season

2009-01-14T19:38:00.001-08:00

We have two prediction market conferences / speaking opportunities coming up.

On January 22, from 6:30-8:30 PM, I (Mat) will be speaking at the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum at the Haas School of Business. The title of the talk is "Prediction Markets: Entrepreneurial Opportunities in Fortune Telling"

I'll be with Kay-Yut Chen of HP and Kirill Makharinsky of Younoodle

It will be interesting to hear the latest from HP and also to learn more about Younoodles methods of forecasting start up success (I don't think it uses prediction markets..)

The following day, Leslie will be speaking at the San Francisco Prediction Markets Cluster

Are Collective Intelligence Solutions being Oversold?

2008-11-29T16:42:00.000-08:00

A reply to Chris Masse on Midas Oracle

Chris,

Management struggles to understand and plan for the future. When forecasts are inaccurate, corporations incur huge costs due to inventory write-offs, stock-outs, misallocated resources or cost of capital. Collective intelligence delivers objective, accurate forecasts in real time, thus saving many millions of dollars for our corporate clients. The solution is not being oversold, to the contrary, the potential vastly exceeds current awareness and adoption.

"If foresight is not the whole part of management, at least it is an essential part of it" (Henri Fayol, 1916).

In my 10 years experience as a management accountant and corporate planner, I have witnessed multiple forecasts suffer from inaccuracy due to uncertainty and biases. Whether forecasting a launch date, sales volume or cost of development, it is the systematic biases due to incentive systems, politics and common cognitive errors that contribute more to inaccuracy than the uncertainty. The problem stems from the fact that the owner of a forecast is normally the owner of the business unit / sales team / project, and budgets and bonuses are based on forecasts. This necessitates game playing and politics and makes the development of an objective, accurate forecast near impossible.

Collective intelligence can overcome these problems by incentivising a diverse crowd of knowledgeable employees to share their insight, balancing the resulting estimates, and rewarding accuracy and timeliness.

However, we are at an early stage in the development of this opportunity. There is still work ahead of us to develop the ideal mechanism to combine simplicy of UI with richness of information gathering. In addition, we need to further develop the way collective intelligence interfaces with traditional corporate structures, processes and systems. These are Xpree's challenges......stay tuned.

Mat
CEO, Xpree

Blog of note - Anything Worth Doing

2008-09-03T15:21:00.000-07:00

While searching for some design principles for databases, I came across two articles by Thomas Gagne, CTO of InStream Services. The articles are Database Prenuptials and Production rules as easy as 1, 2, 3--but without 2 and 3.

In terms of good, sound advice given with little expectation of return, I rather enjoyed both articles, as they give an insight into what should be important for the technology side of an emerging (or even established) company. Looks like I have some more reading to do!

Andrew McAfee - E2.0 Guru - Joins Xpree Advisory Board

2008-08-28T14:34:00.000-07:00

Reknowned Enterprise 2.0 thought leader, Dr Andrew McAfee has joined Xpree's Board of Advisors.

Andrew is an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School. He joined the faculty of the Technology and Operations Management Unit at HBS in 1998. His research investigates how managers can most effectively select, implement, and use Information Technology (IT) to achieve business goals. He was the recipient of a US Department of Energy Integrated Manufacturing Fellowship for his doctoral research, which focused on the performance impact of enterprise information technologies such as SAP's R/3.

His current research falls into two categories. The first is an exploration of how Web 2.0 technologies can be used within the enterprise, and what their impact is likely to be. The second is a study of IT's impact over time on the structure of US industries and the nature of competition within them.

He launched the first HBS faculty blog, which examines the impact of IT on businesses and their leaders.

He was awarded a Doctorate in Business Administration at HBS in 1999. He also holds dual MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Management from MIT as a Leaders for Manufacturing fellow, and BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and in Humanities from MIT.

Welcome Andrew!

Leslie Fine - HP Prediction Market Expert joins the team

2008-08-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce a new member of the Xpree family. Leslie Fine joins as our VP of Market Design, and comes to us after 8 years at HP Labs, where she was the lead researcher responsible for the BRAIN product.

BRAIN is HP's prediction market solution and is a groundbreaking technology in the field. HP and Caltech pioneered the use of prediction markets in corporations. Prior to joining HP Leslie received her PhD from Caltech in Economics, where she studied mechanism design, particularly inducing liquidity in thin markets and information market design.

Welcome to the team Leslie!

Open Innovations event at the Computer History Museum

2008-08-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

I was asked to attend a conference on Open Innovations, a topic in which we here at Xpree have some interest. The venue for the event could not have been more appropriate: the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Speakers included innovators from Max Mancini from eBay, Rich Friedrich from HP Labs, Roy Levin from Microsoft Research, Roger Meike from Sun, Ike Nassi from SAP, and Marie-Anne Neimat from Oracle.

Unfortunately I missed Max’s presentation (the first of the day), but the next several speakers turned out to be quite interesting; namely, HP’s Rich Friedrich, Microsoft’s Roy Levin, and, most impressively, Sun’s Roger Meike, who went into detail about some of the innovations and innovative techniques used at Sun. Among the innovations he mentioned was Sun’s Black Box (ironically, which is not black), one of which UC Berkeley recently purchased that sits right outside Soda Hall, and the SunSPOT, a rather unique device that lets you design on a high level on embedded devices, which, classically, was a rather difficult proposition.

Visiting Roger’s table after the end of the speaker series, I had an opportunity to chat with Roger as well as play with some of the SunSPOTs. Amusingly, one of Meike’s associates reacted with surprise when he noted that he could run two applications on the same SunSPOT without any problems, something he had apparently never attempted before. As he stated in his presentation (I’m paraphrasing), “We love chasing shiny new objects.” Compared to more structured innovative techniques other companies presented, Sun’s innovation labs seem to allow for more of this freeform growth of technology, which is an exciting thing to see.

For our part, we were interested in seeing how innovations are fostered and dropped by different corporations. It seems to me that most take a sweeping, shotgun-like approach to innovations; throw engineers in the right direction then shake them a little, and good ideas will fall out. In my opinion, greater importance should be given to streamline innovative development to push development forward, not outward. While good ideas do come out of freeform research divisions like Sun’s labs, not everyone is so positioned with the financial security to make such a lab possible. For smaller companies, this is not an option.

For more details on the event (and pictures!), visit http://www.djcline.com/2008/08/20/aug-15-2008-sdf-innovation-and-research-fair/

Rational Exuberance

2008-08-12T18:07:00.001-07:00

Back in May I attended a conference organized by the Corporate Executive Board. I was on a panel with Nate from Inkling about using Prediction Markets in corporations. Lots of fun.

After my talk, Mr Greenspan slipped me a few ideas for prediction markets which we are now incorporating into the product. Stay tuned for some laissez faire driven economic wizardry.

Forrester paper on Prediction Markets

2008-08-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

Forrester published a paper on Prediction Markets about 3 weeks ago, well worth a read.

The paper highlights:

The history of PM
Why PM are a useful addition to the "market research toolbox" (I also think that they are a valuable addition to any risk mitigation toolbox
Success factors for a good PM
Some examples of where PMs don't work (one's tongue in cheek, I hope :-) : "Will my wife get pregnant in the next three months?")

Excellent presentation, callouts, graphics as you'd expect from Forrester, and something you definitely want to leave with a customer on a visit.

Trader Tuesday #3: Remember me and little fixes

2008-07-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

Apart from the little fixes that always pop up every now and again, we added two new features: Remember Me functionality and a new report.

The new report allows our administrators to see the trades per day in the last 30 days, the last 7 days, or over all time. This allows for admins to see the activity levels in their markets at a glance, giving them the opportunity to see the trends in trading of the users in the market.

Also, remember me! Seems simple, but now, with the click of a checkbox upon login, users will be remembered for two weeks, so there is no need to log in every time. This should aid users in their quest to become this month’s Top Trader. Have at it, traders!

Happy Birthday Xpree!

2008-07-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

Today marks our one year anniversary of the founding of Xpree! We even got a cake!

Our cake:

Our CTO Alam and our CEO Mat:

The Team!

Trader Tuesday #2: Make me faster!

2008-07-08T16:29:00.000-07:00

This week’s release consists of several fixes of slow code, most notably in the Top Traders list. Look for new features next week in Trader Tuesday #3!

Memcached: Cache early, Cache often

2008-07-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

This morning we took part in a webinar on the subject of Memcached, a caching system that can be used for speeding up all sorts of accesses to data that may originate from a database. Hosted by Sun Microsystems (who now runs the MySQL project), the WebEx conference went quite well from a technical standpoint, and I was quite impressed with the entire notion.

One of their panel members was Jimmy Guererro, from MySQL, who did a good job during the webinar answering questions that users posed, as well as distilling the questions still remaining as the time ran out. The main presenter was Frank, a member of the team over at Fotolog, which apparently is the fourth-largest social network out there that is ranked 15th by web traffic and has over 50 million photos submitted by users.

Besides clarifying several points, including the differences between Memcached and SQL Query Caching, it was quite useful when Frank went through several use cases for Memcached in projects such as Fotolog and their experiences with caching and its effectiveness.

One of the points that I was disappointed in, however, was Frank’s naiveté in regard to security. Memcached, unlike MySQL, provides no provision for securing access to the data in Memcached; in fact, you can just telnet to the Memcached port and get data from it, which may include sensitive data from your database. While Frank explained away this shortcoming by saying that all your servers should be behind a single firewall which controls access to your network (which, ideally, should be the case), those of us who have used datacenters in the past know that this is not often the case; we just get servers with public IPs visible to the entire internet. Not exactly the rosy, secure picture that most people have of their servers, eh?

Trader Tuesday #1: User-generated tabs

2008-07-01T23:30:00.000-07:00

An exciting new feature has been added to the Xpree Prediction Market: user-generated tabs. Administrators can now add their own tabs to the interface, containing any information they want. This includes links to more information or documentation, site-specific FAQs or tutorials, and, most importantly, the prizes! Prizes that users can win for being their marketplace’s Top Trader!

To add your own tabs go to the Marketplaces screen in the administrative tools, click on the “Manage Custom Tabs” button on the bottom of the screen. On the next screen, title your tab, enter your information into the WYSIWYG editor, and click “Save” on the bottom. Go back to your forecasts and you’ll see your new, shiny, custom tab. Enjoy!

Trader Tuesdays!

2008-07-01T11:36:00.001-07:00

As an easy way for our users to anticipate and expect new features to the system, we've decided to introduce Trader Tuesdays, where a new release of the Xpree prediction market will be scheduled to go out on the appropriate Tuesday, with a feature list and explanation of features made available here, on the blog. This way, users can not only mark their calendars (if they enjoy that sort of thing), but they can easily see what changes have been made since the last release.

We hope that Trader Tuesdays becomes something of an event here at Xpree!

Stanford VLAB: Cloud Computing

2008-06-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

Tonight Stanford's VLAB is hosting an event regarding Cloud Computing, a new way to give burgeoning web-based companies a start. Much like the distributed computing idea, made ever popular by SETI@Home and its successor, BOINC, people want to harness the computing power we have out in the world and provide it to those who may leverage their power.

One of the primary concerns, however, with cloud computing is the safety and confidentiality, as well as the integrity, of data that has yet to be adequately explained. Whereas with BOINC, the data is essentially non-confidential, cloud computing will often be dealing with applications that depend on confidential information to be successful. It will be interesting to see the responses of the panel on this topic.

New feature: Schedule IPOs!

2008-06-13T12:54:00.000-07:00

A new feature we have rolling out today is the ability for forecasts to be scheduled as to their release time and suspend time. The IPO (or Initial Public Offering) of a forecast can now be scheduled for a particular date and time, after which it will be available for a market to bet upon.

A natural supplement to this feature is the ability to suspend stocks at a given date and time, so that administrators need not be required to continuously monitor a forecast and close it manually.

With this feature we aim to make the jobs of all our admins all the more easy, and we hope they enjoy it!

Enterprise 2.0 shootout

2008-06-11T19:51:00.000-07:00

Panel of E2.0 companies sponsored by Telligent and Small World Solutions

Question: Why did you start this?

Michael Wilson (Small World): Both parents were deaf and he grew up understanding how much people were reliant on their communities. He wanted to defragment latent communities for corps.

Guy formerly at MS: Wanted to create products that better reached an audience (he spent a long time at MS)

Guy formerly at Fidelity (Now CEO of Telligent): wanted to sold a genuine need that customers had (he said that Fidelity was a hotbed of innovation "not") and present some ROI

Question: What is your least favorite Web 2.0 term?

Candidates:

Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0
Coopertition
Crowdsourcing
Cloud computing

Winner was Cloud computing. Web 2.0 was close second.

Question: Is social networking always a good technology for the corporation

Consensus: no, it depends on the corporation

- If it is right for them, they are already playing with it

- Some companies are "anti comments" and command-and-control

Question: What technology do you use and why?

Small World: LAMP: cost advantage, and highly scalable: Facebook use it

ex-MS guy: .NET/SQL Server/ASP: He knows and loves it, and customers trust this platform, especially as most deployments are inhouse ones

Telligent: Powerpoint! (teasing MS guy)

Jive: Java: big scale enterprise deployments: IT crowd like this as it works well for inhouse deployments.

Question: Which Industry does E2.0 seem to serve best

Consensus: not service companies (law, finance, acct etc) as their demand is file centric, not content centric

More product companies: there's always a product release that has to be on time

Offline companies in declining markets

The most "dangerous" clients are tech-savvy web-based ones who welcome the technology, but think "they can do this themselves"

Question: What about Change Management?

Build it and they will come is a dangerous fallacy

Sales: Fill a need vs create a need

Services group is important

What about Pricing?

Rob published all his pricing:

Free

5k/server

20k/server

Sam (CMO of Jive): Pricing is per seat for internal use, up to 50k

Implementation fee, setup fee, then monthly fee

Some customers (eg Disney) bought more support (ie more moderation)

Small World: Fixed fee, plus capacity fee if they exceed a generous page-view limit. (AK: no customers have exceeded this, according to the BizDev guy)

What's your sales/mktg exp:booked revenue ratio? Also, how long does it take for you to acquire a customer?

Only Jive answered this.

3-6 months on average to acquire new customers, some as short as 1 month, some as long as 15 months.

Cost of acquiring new customers is thousands of dollars each: training, education, travel, webinars etc.

What questions do you hate from prospects?

What if someone says something bad about us?

How can I monetize this thing?

I want this in 24 hours

I want a source code agreement (Small World)

Other snippets:

Forester estimates E2.0 will be a $4bn business by 2013, of which Enterprise Social networking will be half.

Early industry, stovepiped. Customers asking for features, such as:

Interfaces to other systems

Openness

Participation from fellow employees

API

Rationale for development of this space was that most college kids are using facebook now and will demand similar tools when they start working. They can only see this space increasing in size/value.

Comcast are believed to be monitoring twitter for complaints about Comcast, and deploying customer service to deal with these

Eating own dogfood: important for CEOs of E2.0 networking companies to write blogs etc.

Enterprise 2.0 Reality Check

2008-06-11T12:15:00.001-07:00

This was a panel chaired by Andrew McAfee, from HBS.

The panel included reps from Wachovia, the CIA, Sony Computer Entertainment, Pfizer.

Andrew asked the panel

a number of questions

1. Has E2.0 taken off?

General consensus was: not very fast. The management typically are not very web savvy and have a set of tools they know and trust. They are not so keen to try new things. Gen Y employees are typically more receptive, and feel they have a choice of new tools. Gen X employees will typically show resistance to using more tools

2. How about adoption in business process depts (HR, Legal, Accounting etc):

Low, generally 1% of people are active, 10% of people comment once

Again, a problem of new process, with benefits that would need to be demonstrated.

3. Cultural changes necessary?

Very disruptive technology. He said/She said vs editable, collaborative records. Culture of praising in public, blaming in private needs to change. Management is afraid but need not be. Andrew said that as a first-time professor, he was told to "trust his students" and this never failed.

Questions from audience:

1. Incentives?

- Competitions for best Wiki page - trinkets

- Best incentive is to make it easier than the previous process and therefore prove the value

2. Elevator pitch for E2.0?

Wachovia: Connecting people to derive business value

3. What was a tipping point for E2.0?

Pfizer: The admin writing a wiki, going on holiday, then seeing that the wiki was being written for him. ie wide adoption

4. What metrics can be used to show success?

Wachovia: Anecdotes are more important than metrics!

5. What network effects are there outside the firewall?

- Not many

Parting thoughts from panel

JFDI (just f**ing do it): Pfizer

Go big and deploy widely

Find the right projects where this will work

Get management to give up control

Use the network effects of better info

Andrew McAfee: Best resource is Wikipedia, but it needs work. Currently called "Enterprise Social Software" . Call to arms to get this fixed.

Enterprise 2.0: Tagging, Mashups, RSS

2008-06-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

A big theme in E2.0 is harnessing the information that your people already have. Every single presenter has, as well as the obvious benefits of User-Generated content, mentioned that locating subtle, hard to find information is very important. Especially when the community is disparate and not used to working together. Oracle, Wachovia and Pfizer all mentioned the importance of Tagging, Mashups and RSS in extracting data and presenting it in one place, on demand.

Oracle's Peter Heller coined (or maybe Oracle did) the term "contextual wiring" - ie interconnecting business processes so that they all communicate. eg: all processes in the workflow should be aware of and able to notify each other. He mentioned that Web 2.0 has been a wild success, but the challenge of bringing this to the enterprise, as well as a change-management problem, is also a process-management problem. Processes that have been in place previously (hire-fire, order-cash etc) are oversimplified in an E2.0 context, and need to be very flexible to accommodate the way things are done in a collaborative environment (eg consensus, delay, escalation, revising idea etc)

Live from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston

2008-06-11T09:16:00.001-07:00

The Enterprise 2.0 conference is a happening place: over 1000 delegates, 100 exhibitors, 100 sessions, some of them free. Most valuably, many large companies are describing their experiences with E2.0

Amongst them:
Oracle, who have developed a Social Networking Engine for its CRM products (mainly to help sales staff make recommendations, manage intelligence in one place, etc), Wachovia Bank - who have spent a lot of money on E2.0 as a self-contained project, Pfizer, who use more of an internal Wikipedia approach (they now have 10k user-generated pages), Sony Computer Entertainment (they had an interesting list of requirements as far as Sony are concerned, most importantly security - this has to interface with LDAP hierarchies) etc.

Interesting panel discussion led by Andrew McAfee, who begun by asking "Is E2.0 working?"
Consensus that E2.0 was good, but middle management was afraid of it, there has to be something in it for users who have to learn yet another tool, it needs built in incentives. Generally a paradigm shift away from a hierarchical approach to a community approach is necessary.

Audience member asked for an E2.0 elevator pitch. Rep from Wachovia summed up nicely: "Connecting people to derive business value".

Strong demand for value across firewall and network effects (member of audience brought this up)

McAfee issued a call to arms: update the Wikipedia page on E2.0!

More soon...

Welcome to the Xpree Prediction Market blog!

2008-06-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is the blog for the team members at Xpree, a Redwood City-based company working to harness the wisdom of the crowds in the form of prediction markets. Welcome!

For more information, or to try out a demo, please visit us at http://www.xpree.com!