Yaron is Writing

Well, it kept getting delayed because of vacations and working on extensions to Discourse DB, but it’s finally time to really release Betocracy. Over the next few days I’m going to be sending out press releases, and maybe doing some advertising, to get the word out.

So, as to Betocracy: I mentioned it a little before, but in full, the site is an attempt to tap the power of prediction markets for a much greater usage than they’ve had up till now. Prediction markets are a slightly more involved form of regular bets, and there’s quite a bit of evidence, both anecdotal and statistical, that, by aggregating the opinions of a large group of people, they’re quite effective at predicting the future; see James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds” for the definitive reference on the subject. What’s been missing up till now is an easy way for people to create their own prediction markets, on subjects too specialized, or classified, to be covered by the large market sites like TradeSports, Intrade or the Iowa Electronic Markets. Yes, a few other create-your-own market sites do exist, but their workings are (to my mind) a little bit overly complex. This site is really about democratizing decision markets; hence the name.

Markets created on Betocracy use only points, not money. So, to answer the first question almost everyone has had when I’ve told them about the site (”how will it make money?”) - I site will use the business model that some people call “freemium”: free usage for people who want just the basic features for the decision markets they create, and some sort of monthly fee for those who want a larger set of features.

So, if you can, please check out the site, use the functionality, and tell others about it. Any feedback you have would also be appreciated. There’s also a special blog I set up for Betocracy here (nothing there yet, but hopefully there will be soon), where probably most future Betocracy-related news will go.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Betocracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.