I'm the co-founder of Cultivate Labs (<a href="https://cultivatelabs.com" rel="nofollow">https://cultivatelabs.com</a>), which is based on a lot of the work I did at Inkling Markets (YC06). We’ve been working on prediction markets and other crowdsourced prediction mechanisms for awhile now, but have always just sold a platform to large companies to run internally.<p>TinyCast is a "lite" / free version of the stuff we run with big co's and government agencies where we’ve tried to make it a lot easier to get predictions from your team or even your customers to ascertain not what people WANT to happen or what they think you want to be told, but what they think will ACTUALLY happen.<p>We also track/measure everyone’s predictions (using Brier scores) so you can see who was the most accurate and give people feedback about where they're strong/weak, how they might be biased about certain topics, etc.<p>We’ve been using TinyCast ourselves on our team to predict some of our internal metrics which I blogged about here: <a href="https://www.cultivatelabs.com/posts/have-your-team-predict-your-kpi-s-so-you-can-actually-meet-your-kpi-s" rel="nofollow">https://www.cultivatelabs.com/posts/have-your-team-predict-y...</a><p>Industry trends, competitive intelligence, KPI’s are all fair game and great uses of TinyCast. Would love to get any feedback anyone has, especially areas where you might have gotten tripped up or any questions about how this could be used in your company.
My question to every prediction market startup:<p>"What statistical edge in predicting future events is there simply by asking for consensus?" or<p>"Is prediction market good enough to predict stock ticker prices?" The answer should be an obvious no.<p>If prediction market did outperform simple random guesses, hedge funds would be all over it. Hedge funds are great at claiming to hold the golden chalice but prediction market isn't even on their radar.<p>Tinycast seems to suggest that your employees know the best but what evidence is there to suggest their consensus is an accurate indicator of future events?<p>The only difference with Tinycast seems to be that it's not running on Ethereum. Inside joke there, prediction markets on Ethereum seems dime a dozen with no real adopters but stories of scam and fraud.<p>Best Buy is the only one I know of that were using prediction markets internally...in 2008. I'm not hearing any fanfares about it now. They couldn't predict the fall and merger of Futureshop.