tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-214066992011-04-22T01:55:12.266-04:00Welcome to the CrowdIQ blog. CrowdIQ is the online Prediction Markets Community. Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making informed predictions. <a href="http://www.crowdiq.com">Create your own CrowdIQ prediction market.</a>Frankhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14949975218162121966noreply@blogger.comBlogger241100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1170654572236287612007-02-05T00:36:00.000-05:002007-02-05T00:49:32.246-05:00

Frank and I are used to the problems of web traffic load. As veterans of ESPN.com and MLB.com, we're used to hauling our butts into the office and watching the site during major events, like the Super Bowl or The All Star Game. Usually, there are massive spikes in traffic and the CTO is running around trying to push more content on Akamai or some sort of caching technology. When you sit down for

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1170084632213329392007-01-29T10:22:00.000-05:002007-01-29T10:30:32.223-05:00

I remember when I was little and I didn't like the way things would happen, either hitting a whiffle ball or playing checkers, I'd simply yell out "do over" and get to do it again. I guess this is the childhood version of a mulligan in golf.We've added the ability to Reset a Market for administrators. Several people have asked for this feature in order to tweak or improve upon their markets. The

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1168555247222645212007-01-11T17:37:00.000-05:002007-01-11T17:40:47.286-05:00

Some quick enhancements and changes to Blablist.1) We added a My Blablist feature to allow people to keep track of their favorite lists.2) Any list that gets more than 250 votes will automatically switch over to a CAPTCHA list that requires human interaction to submit a vote. This should stop spammers from ruining legitimate lists.3) We are allowing the "homepage" list to be randomly selected

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1167729902713361422007-01-02T03:51:00.000-05:002007-01-04T07:50:02.610-05:00

In the past two weeks, I've come across two articles on the question of consciousness or freewill, that is, do we have free will? The more recent one was in the New York Times, the second was a 4-page survey on the brain in the Economist.As a former Philosophy major, I sort of find this debates interesting. It was even more surprising to find the Times more fair and balanced then the Economist. I

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1165619473302000212006-12-08T17:53:00.000-05:002006-12-09T20:16:13.286-05:00

So there are a couple of issues with CrowdIQ that have been a problem since day 1 or didn't pan out as we evolved this year. Hopefully we've made things a bit easier now.Firstly, the IPO Dutch Auction rules. We really didn't think we'd have 0 bids in all of these contract auctions (Hey it's Web 2.0, supposdely you build it and people will come through Buzz). When this did occur, we would dump all

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1160087893542950152006-10-05T18:29:00.000-04:002006-10-05T18:38:13.556-04:00

We were recently contacted by the Wall Street Journal for a quick conversation about CrowdIQ. In my 5 years of working at MLB and Frank's 5 years at ESPN and MTV, we have never been interviewed in the media about our work. As you can tell by Frank's work on MTV Overdrive recently, certainly other people have been before the press to talk about our work, but never ourselves.Though we make only 43

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1158113063223631052006-09-12T20:54:00.000-04:002006-09-14T09:24:29.586-04:00

...you don't update it for months and you can't remember your account or password. Yup, that's what happened to us. We want to just quickly congratulate WSX and David Perry for their recent launch. David Perry was the first to welcome us to the Prediction Markets crowd when we launched earlier this year; the least we could do is offer some HTML advice and our own well wishes. Frank is

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1151596809215676332006-06-29T11:58:00.000-04:002007-01-04T07:48:04.210-05:00

If you are looking at this, then hopefully you can see our simple attempt for a pure Javascript widget for CrowdIQ.

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1150387395154289732006-06-15T11:10:00.000-04:002006-06-29T11:57:55.820-04:00

Today's blog is about web traffic. It will review exactly how we're doing in terms of traffic and our general impression of Alexa, a traffic monitoring site. The first thing you might be thinking is that we are committing business suicide by publishing our statistics. Well we are honest guys and live honest lives; we really don't care what people think. Numbers are numbers. So here they are.Below

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1149684700917618442006-06-07T08:21:00.002-04:002007-01-03T17:24:40.566-05:00

This will be the first of hopefully many blog entries on some of the important lessons we've learned on CrowdIQ. These lessons will cover everything from technology, marketing, business, etc. Hopefully we can offer the same insight and direction that Paul Grahm does in his blog.In our short start-up life, we have built two products, one that we felt people "ought" to use and one product that we

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1148995676722548342006-05-30T09:03:00.000-04:002006-05-30T21:20:08.440-04:00

I just watched this movie with Jim Carrey, "Having Fun with Dick and Jane". It is about a corporate man with a wife and kid who just becomes Vice President of Communications for a big company. He's thrilled that he gets the title, exeutive office, goes to the "51st" floor etc. He buys the 7-series BMW, a pool for his house, etc. Then the company implodes and he loses everything. The comedy starts

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1147414670289755122006-05-12T02:07:00.000-04:002006-07-14T14:08:37.696-04:00

...Are The Chosen People of God. This quote was by Thomas Jefferson way back in the days. I speak it now because at the time I read it in American History, it meang to me something very close to what I feel today.I always felt that the quote represented the pride (and culture) of the agrarian South. It was Thomas Jefferson's way of saying there is something noble about working the land, raising

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1146859607159384512006-05-05T15:51:00.000-04:002006-05-05T16:06:47.186-04:00

Its been a while since we've updated our blog. The biggest news is that we have finally stablized our hardware environment. We originally had 2 servers, all beautifully configured and ready to rock. The architecture was ready to be scaled across N servers without ever blinking an eye if we ever required them.However, we didn't quite get the traffic we wanted. We eliminated the second server and

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1145335053834945052006-04-18T00:36:00.000-04:002006-06-03T13:52:18.570-04:00

So what exactly is a Blab List? Its a consensus building tool that combines poll + lists + chat all in real-time. We just created the embedded Blab List so people can add it to their own sites. An example is below:

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1144077216040279692006-04-03T10:58:00.000-04:002006-04-03T15:57:41.766-04:00

The NY Times wrote a great article about startup companies that don't care about making huge profits. These companies are driving commercial competitors crazy. From the NY Times:"These are new-media ventures that leave the competition scratching their heads because they don't really aim to compete in the first place; their creators are merely taking advantage of the economics of the online medium

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1143846434069889202006-03-31T18:03:00.000-05:002006-03-31T18:08:40.836-05:00

Anyone remember that movie Eurotrip when the 4 kids get stuck in some East European country, Brataslavia. They have only 43 cents and they wonder what they can get. They end up in a 5 star hotel with room service, cigars, and massages by hot women.Well CrowdIQ is making a whopping $1 a day in advertising revenue. We've been thinking about moving to Brataslavia to take advantage of the exchange

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1143578342453790292006-03-28T15:23:00.000-05:002006-03-31T18:03:34.226-05:00

We're introducing a prototype of a small new product that we are calling BlabList. The goal was to create a "consensus building" tool but with less intellectual baggage of Prediction Markets. Our idea was to synthesize the best ideas of Digg and Quimble into a more dynamic polling application. Frank and I have both worked with polling applications for the NFL Draft, MLB All-Star Voting, etc, and

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1142700463668572402006-03-18T11:27:00.000-05:002006-03-19T22:13:19.500-05:00

It's been one week since our quiet launch and just as we wanted in our start-up, it has been filled with highs and lows. First the highs:The Prediction Markets community has been absolutely fantastic. Dr. David Pennock of Yahoo! Research, David Perry of Consensus Point, Pete Cashmore of Mashable, and Jed Christiansen of Junto Futures have all reached out to wish us luck and give us helpful advice

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1142395128831600502006-03-14T22:54:00.000-05:002006-03-14T22:58:48.840-05:00

Interesting situation in the early moments of CrowdIQ. Our markets are trading very very thin right now leaving lots of market inefficiencies. However, as with all markets, with each new trader that joins, these inefficiencies are slowly being arbitraged out. What seems to be happening is that new traders are taking advantage of the crowd by making big bets on early contracts, sort of like the

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1142302355058615692006-03-13T21:05:00.000-05:002006-03-13T21:12:35.090-05:00

Today was our quiet launch period, alot quieter than we expected. Our background is Technology, so I guess we're earning our MBAs on-the-fly. We begin our tough task of building the CrowdIQ community through our limited means. Markets require traders, and traders want to see dynamic markets. This will be an interesting community building problem. In a way, we're the Rocky Balboa of Web 2.0 or

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1141953122953870952006-03-09T20:10:00.000-05:002006-03-13T01:27:53.460-05:00

We're going to be launching CrowdIQ.com on Monday. We think now is the right time given recent events in this business-space.

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1141775572419755012006-03-07T18:41:00.000-05:002006-03-12T09:51:10.866-05:00

Today a competitor of ours launched, www.inklingmarkets.com. After a quick look, they are definitely in the same competitive space as us and will be even more so when they launch their open market feature.Of interest was that they were funded by Paul Graham, a sort of Internet start-up guru who has written several influential essays. These essays, on Doing What You Love, How to Start A Start-Up,

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1141097777255052042006-02-27T22:24:00.000-05:002006-03-12T02:29:34.950-05:00

No matter where CrowdIQ ends up, the best $500 I spent was on the Apple Mac Mini I am using as a development server. Since I live in NYC in a 1-BR apartment, space is at a premium. I've already taxed my wife's patience with my dirty mountain bike the past 2 years so when I wanted a dedicated box for my startup aspirations, my choices were as follows:1) Pay $400 for a Dell refurbished computer and

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21406699.post-1140140220303103612006-02-16T19:54:00.000-05:002006-02-16T20:37:00.360-05:00

Since this is the first Blog for CrowdIQ and also the first Blog I have ever written, my feeling is that I should try to keep this short, sweet, and simple.In elementry school, we used to write these current event summaries based on a newspaper article. We were graded on our ability to understand the Who, What, Where, Why, etc of the article. So with my fresh memory of 3rd grade, let's go over

chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03753573271126005217noreply@blogger.com1