Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Yahoo is running a simulated market for predicting interest and general sentiment about technology products and trends, such as IE vs Firefox, blogging, etc. There’s even a modest prize (Mac Mini) for the best forecasting performance during March - July 2005.

The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends As a player, your goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search frequency over time.

Predictions are made by buying virtual stock in the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you “put your play money where your mouth is.”

I like market-based approaches like this, although the challenge is in drawing a sufficiently diversified base of participants to draw on different information sources and make the market “liquid” enough, vs getting a lot of people who think the same way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 20th, 2005 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Finance/Investing, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.