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Tianya Laiba adds a new feature "Forecasts"  (View post)

xujie [PersonRank 5]

Friday, April 4, 2008
16 years ago4,760 views

Today Tianya Laiba adds a new feature called "Forecasts".

It allows you to predict the possibility of an incident.Possibility is changed when people bid for it ,so it can show people's confidence index about something and forecast the future.

http://laiba.tianya.cn/laiba/Forecasts

(Tianya Laiba is powered by Google)

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I remember seeing a photo on Flickr that's showing a presentation saying Google can predict the box office of Hollywood movies.

Some predictions from the "Forecast":
   Who will light the torch at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic?
   1. Yao Ming – 0.96
   2. Liu Xiang – 0.55
   3. Deng Yaping – 0.10
   4. He Zhenliang (IOC official) – 0.11
   5. Others – 0.10
   6. Group (2+ people) – 0.58

   Obama and Hillary, who will receive the Democratic Party nomination?
   1. Obama – 0.98
   2. Hillary – 0.80

   Which country will receive the first gold medal in the Beijing Olympic?
   1.China – 0.79
   2. US – 0.60
   3. Russia – 0.01
   4. Other – 0.40

I can't find the page that talks about the method that they used to "predict" these, probably comes from both analysis of search and the number of people who voted on the choice.

Jérôme Flipo [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Google has conducted researches in the past on prediction market (Googlers betting $$$).
As superstition is very important in the Asian culture, the Chinese market may be a test before a more global forecast product.
I guess it works like intrade.com or any other market.
Based on a google translation of laiba.tianya.cn (so bad...), I've understood that a correct guess credits points that may be change in voucher (Jingcai?).
Here are the explanation: http://laiba.tianya.cn/laiba/CommMsgs?cmm=28526&tid=2592214285149015258
--
Official Google Blog post of the research on prediction market: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/putting-crowd-wisdom-to-work.html
Blogoscoped post: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-01-07-n34.html
Origininal NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/technology/07link.html
Results of the study: http://bocowgill.com/GooglePredictionMarketPaper.pdf

Jérôme Flipo [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I've created a Tianya account in order to test their services and I've discovered some really cool features. But I'm trying to change my username: I've browsed dozens of pages, I've translated hundreds of words, I've tried to guess their meaning in function of their location, and I'm definitely lost. It's such a mess! I've just realized that the Chinese Web is completely inaccessible for non Chinese-speaking users; that doesn't seem to get better (translators suck) while the Chinese Web is exploding. Do some of you surf Chinese websites? I would really like to get some advices.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Jérôme, everyone who doesn't read Chinese is probably completely lost too. One thing that sometimes help is to have Google's auto-translate button from the toolbar on top; at least when clicking its menu item on any page, you don't need to define the "from" and "to" languages, which saves some seconds. Also, it sometimes helps to hover over the menu items to check their URLs in the browser status bar, because those sometimes will have English names in it (say bla.com/register or bla.com/maps). Other times they only have Pinyin in it, though. It also helps of course if you have someone near-by who is fluent in Chinese so you can ask, but that will just work for a single page and not for general browsing. You could also take a Chinese language course; the only thing is that there's so many different characters instead of just a very restricted set of letters. There's also two sets of characters, traditional and simplified, though most web pages are simplified (at least China mainland anyway, in Taiwain – at least in newspapers – people use traditional characters).

Above 5 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

Andy Wong [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

It is very interesting. The scheme is a kind of gambling. The ones who predicted/guessed well will get coupons which can exchange other valuable products. This kind of gaming have been popular in the mainland China for last 2 decades, as conventional gambling is forbidden.

A few subjects in Laiba:
* Will it be raining in Beijing on 5th of April?
* Will Mar YingJiu (the newly elected President of Republic of China) be coming to Olympic Game?
* Which country will win the first gold in the coming Olympic Game?
* What kind of policy from the governing body of the stock market will come out next month?

People in the People Republic of China are particularly interested in this kind of gaming as no conventional gambling is allowed.

This can be a way of improving revenue and awareness.

I just wonder people in Europe and the US would be interested in this kind of gaming of guessing? will there be a web service call Game.Google.com which hosts many gaming gadgets?

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