The New York Times has an article by Noam Cohen about betting at Google with Goobles. The bets seem to be on predictions about Google.
Sample topics:
"Will Google open a Russia office?"
"Will Apple release an Intel-based Mac? "
"How many users will Gmail have at the end of the quarter?"
Winnings can be redeemed for prizes. The bets may be analyzed for research on predictions.
One employee wrote a bot to to place bets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/technology/07link.html?ref=business |
actually predicative market /analysis is the hardest space to capitalize on.. so as an experiment , corporate google is leveraging data and predictive trending as a game, but who knows how the true up data is being used to model other products ??
Maybe one day, we will get an email which indicates when to buy and sell and what to buy and sell depending on which stock exchange location collates to the meta data in your google account :)- |
Google's prediction markets are mentioned in Cass Sunstein's book Infotopia from 2006. I wrote a review of it a while ago and noted this:
Google’s internal market, in which employees bet fake money that can be exchanged for prizes, have bet on such things as “Will Google get the WiFi contract in SF?” and “Will Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie get married during 2005?”
That review's here if anyone's interested http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/01/cp_infotopia.html |
And here's the official post on the Google blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/flow-of-information-at-googleplex.html |
