Entries Tagged 'predictions' ↓

UPDATE: We have 500 Nostradamical invites for Mashable readers. Visit the site and use the code MASHABLE to get access.

Nostradamical, a UK startup that’s currently in private beta, is ironically a little late with its Ruby on Rails-powered, “crowdsourcing”-inspired predictions site.  And predicting its success depends on the site’s ability to plug into other audiences rapidly.

The short, lazy description: it’s “Digg for predictions.”  The long one, courtesy of the Nostradamical site:

- Use collective intelligence to predict future world events.

- Create your own events. Tag and publish your predictions.

- Create lists that group together predictions under one theme (e.g. My Oscar Predictions).

- Rise through 7 levels of status and gain fame as an ‘Oracle’ of the future. Promote your blog or website.

The essence of that: make a prediction, and watch good predictions rise up as other people vote on their likelihood.  Vote correctly and you earn cred.  

Wisdom of What Now?

Incidentally, this is fundamentally not the way the Wisdom of Crowds works. That theory says that the most accurate prediction is made when users vote independently, without having seen the votes of others.  A Digg-like system, as mentioned many times on Mashable before, creates a herd-like mentality where your opinion is influenced by the people who came before you.  

And Yet, Salvageable

Yes, it’s not novel and it’s not technically a Wisdom of Crowds app as the About page claims.  It has a silly name, too.  But, the Nostradamical team sure as heck knows how to build a Web app, and that’s half the battle.  Everything works, it looks good, and it’s fun to play around with.

The secret, I think, will be to plug into other ecosystems to gain a user-base…blog partnerships ala PollDaddy (a polling company that got a great deal of traction by working with blogs like Mashable), Twitter syndication, Facebook apps, an API and the rest.

The Likely Outcome

Alas, most startups don’t get enough runway to achieve that critical mass and figure out the revenue model later.  No, if Nostradamical is to survive, it’ll likely do so by foregoing the consumer market (or at least treating it as a loss leader) and end up building prediction markets for internal use at companies.

Don’t believe me? Go check up on this 2007 list of 20+ Prediction Markets…where are they now?

Spotting of trends is an essential skill for anyone that sits in the fast paced world of technology and has any hopes of staying ahead of the curve. We bloggers try to do it by subscribing to every possible feed we can get our hands on and applying our various memetracking algorithms and aggregation tools to the task. Others will pour through the feeds manually in an attempt to savor every last morsel of information.

The methods and information absorption tactics we are working on honing now will be the norm in a few years, and what will separate the men from the boys, so to speak, is their ability to make sense of the nose.

That’s the point of Richard Laermer’s book 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade. It’s a book about how to find the signal in the noise as well as a few predictions on how media will be forced to change for it to remain useful.

One of the things he talks about in his book (as well as his blog) is the publishing business and their inability to put out books in print while the information is still relevant:

The editing is done exactly how far in advance? If I write a book that is to come out in say December of 08– they have to have it in February. Why? ‘Cause they have a “schedule to follow,” but it would seem with digital technology you should be able to write right up to the deadline (like we do online).

To address this, he was able to somehow convince his publisher to release his book in digital form online - for free. The free part was obviously to make the splash, but he felt pretty solid on the fact that digital book releases would be the future of the book business.

It’s an interesting discussion, definitely one with some good nuggets and news consumption tips and tactics. Watch it via the embed below, or download the MP4.

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A couple of weeks ago we ran an interactive game on the topic of Data Portability. We had a great response, with 680 people playing the game.

Here now are the results, showing how RWW readers think 5 of the major players - Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, and the non-profit Data Portability Project - will play out the future of Data Portability.

To remind you of the background to the game. Recently three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all of these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone's guess. So we created an interactive app from Impact Games that lets you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement, as well as share your opinions about what they should do.

The Results

A reminder that the 'opinion' category is what you hope will happen and 'prediction' is what you think will happen.

Two points were consistent with our expectations:

• The majority hoped Facebook will merge, yet predicted that they won't.
• The majority hoped Microsoft will advocate open standards, yet most expected them to launch a competing platform.

One result that surprised us was that many people didn't expect the Data Portability Project to endorse a specific platform. Given their roadmap, this would not have been our guess.

For more on the topic of the future of Data Portability, see Chris Messina's post today on the battle for the future of the social web and Dave McClure's response.

What do you think of the results? Do you think Facebook and Microsoft will listen to what early adopters think they should do?

tblake writes "Back in 1968, Modern Mechanix mused what life would be like in 40 years. Some things they came pretty close on: 'Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees' accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card's number is fed into the store's computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.' Some things are way off: 'The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city's suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whiz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round.' And some things are sorta right: 'TV screens cover an entire wall in most homes and show most subjects other than straight text matter in color and three dimensions. In addition to programmed TV and the multiplicity of commercial fare, you can see top Broadway shows, hit movies and current nightclub acts for a nominal charge.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?" first published in the November, 1968 issue Mechanix Illustrated, contains many exciting predictions for that far-off, futuristic date.

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated. Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.

Link

Today I gave a presentation at the Media08 event in Sydney, entitled: What’s Next on the Web? Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond. It's an overview of some of the top trends we cover on ReadWriteWeb; such as Websites becoming web services, Semantic Apps, Open Data, Mobile Web, Recommendation Engines. The presentation is available as a slideshow (embedded below). Each slide has links to ReadWriteWeb content, should you wish to drill down on a topic more.

Let us know your feedback / suggestions in the comments - I will continue to add to and tweak this presentation as these Web trends evolve. The Media08 event was run by X|Media|Lab.

Note: click here and then click 'full' (bottom right) to view full screen and enable the links inside the presentation.

Technology Review presents its annual list of the 10 most exciting technologies.

PCWMike writes "PCs may disappear from your desk by 2033. But with digital technology showing up everywhere else — including inside your body — computing will only get more personal, reports Dan Tynan for PC World's 25th Anniversary. While convenience will be increased by leaps and bounds, it will come at a profound loss in our sense of what privacy means. 'Technology will become firmly embedded in advanced devices that deliver information and entertainment to our homes and our hip pockets, in sensors that monitor our environment from within the walls and floors of our homes, and in chips that deliver medicine and augment reality inside our bodies. This shiny happy future world will come at a cost, though: Think security and privacy concerns. So let's hope that our jetpacks come with seat belts, because it's going to be a wild ride.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The excellent Trendsspotting blog has compiled a meta list of 2008 Web trends, by selecting "a group of 10 web/tech influencers suggesting their trends forecast for 2008." ReadWriteWeb is one of the 10 influencers selected - using our 10 Future Web Trends post as our contribution. But see also 10 More Future Web Trends and our 2008 Web Predictions post for more RWW trends.

Below is Trendsspotting's image from our post, which neatly displays our picks:

Note that all the RWW authors contributed to the 10 Future Web Trends post, so they weren't just my ideas.

Trendsspotting came up with a tag cloud that combines the keywords from all of the 10 influencers:

It's very high level, but you can see that mobile, open, video, green, social, and networks are among the most popular tags.

Here is the full report, well worth a browse:

The coming 2008 dot-com crash  —  Early January is the time we see many predictions for 2008.  I have not played this game since 2006, but I want to chime in this year.  —  I am only going to make one prediction, but one with broad impact.  We will see a dot-com crash in 2008.

Source:   Geeking with Greg
Author:   Greg Linden
Link:   http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/01/coming-2008-dot…

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