A few months ago, we posted on our Facebook page about our CEO Linda Rebrovick being honored by being named to CABLE’s 2010 Board Walk of Fame. We were pleasantly surprised to see Linda featured in comprehensive coverage [PDF] of the issue of women on corporate board’s in the July/August edition of Nashville Post.

Earlier this year, Nashville-based health care learning and research company HealthStream announced that Jim Daniell, one of its board members and one of the company’s earliest clients, would not stand for re-election to the board. At press time, HealthStream’s search to replace him was ongoing.

HealthStream has a female board director in Linda Rebrovick, a longtime IBM executive, KPMG partner and currently CEO of Consensus Point, an innovator in enterprise prediction market software serving the red-hot forecasting sector. Rebrovick’s connection to CABLE and other organizations positioned her well to help HealthStream’s board identify qualified female candidates—and she was only too happy to do so. With the new SEC regulations in place requiring that boards disclose efforts to nominate a diverse pool for open board seats, it was no doubt welcome information to the otherwise all male HealthStream board.

HealthStream CEO Bobby Frist expresses a strong desire to increase diversity on his board, in part by citing statistics that show a high correlation between board diversity and the performance of a company.

“We subscribe to that notion as a full board and as individual board members,” Frist says. “The candidate pool we’ve recently created exhibits a diversity of experience and background and thought.”

Frist says there have been “huge advances” in recent times in bringing qualified diverse candidates to the light, in no small part because of organizations like CABLE, ION and others that have ramped up efforts to organize resources in such a way that board searches can achieve greater diversity.

In part due to HealthStream’s success in its current search, Frist scoffs at the notion that there are not enough qualified diverse candidates to sit on boards.

“For me, that perspective also has a lot to do with what companies mean by being quali- fied, because you can be a student of business in many ways. You don’t have to have been involved in a big company. That, to me, doesn’t make you the best-qualified candidate. So there may be some problem in the way people are defining their qualifications that would open up the definition to more candidates if they thought of it slightly differently.”

While Frist agrees that the gears have moved “very slowly” in regard to corporate board diversification, he believes the overlay of increased SEC disclosure requirements, greater awareness and more education will result in a more rapid pace of change in the next three to five years than in the last few.

“With any major push like this, education comes first,” Frist says. “Change will follow.” That’s no guarantee that HealthStream will choose a diverse candidate in its current search. Nor should there be. “The key is to have a good and diverse candidate pool, and I’m confident we have achieved that,” Frist says. “But the number one priority is selecting the most qualified candidate from the broadest qualified pool. Think of it in those two ways, and I’m confident we’ll get the right person.”

There’s also a brief interview with Linda:

What can women do to improve the situation?

Women can make it known that they are interested. Much of it is just putting yourself in the candidate pool. Second, be sure that you have a development plan. Sit on a nonprofit board. A private company board. Work your way up. Attend a corporate board member event. Get a mentor, someone on a corporate board, to guide you through the type of development you need to become more prepared. Try to get in a position in your company where you are managing a P&L, because financial expertise is really important.

What can companies do?

Companies need to decide that diversity is a qualification that is a priority in their searches and then they need to tap into CABLE or ION [or other outlets] and identify candidates. Clearly, they’ll be very impressed if they take the initiative, make it a commitment and go find these resources.

Thanks to Nashville Post for covering this issue, and thanks to Linda for being a great leader!

Our CEO, Linda Rebrovick, recently sat down with Erin Lawley of the well-regarded NashvillePost.com for an interview. Erin summarized the function of our Foresight platform nicely but also got Linda talking about our important role in the Nashville technology corridor.

Erin on what we do:

Consensus Point companies — clients include General Electric, Best Buy and Qualcomm — can post a question to the online market, such as whether a particular project will be completed on time. Participants then can answer the question, betting a certain number of points on an outcome depending on their confidence level. Correct answers return more points, lead to higher standings on the market’s leader board and possibly other rewards or incentives for the participants while helping executives more effectively manage the business.

And an excellent first Q&A:

How do prediction markets differ from other types of forecasting models or decision tools used in business today?

Traditionally, all these prediction models are algorithms that take historical patterns that say this is what happened in the past, and we’re going to extrapolate that this pattern will continue in the future. That’s how forecasting systems have worked forever. And they’re very successful when you have a historical pattern.

What they can’t do is detect early-warning indicators that, while this has always happened in the past, something’s changed. So that’s the power of what we have, the ability to be your eyes and ears on the ground  every minute, minute by minute. So as the leader of a company, I know I’ve got the facts as they stand today as I’m trying to make a decision.

Other good questions:

• What is the user experience like for market participants?
• What incentives do companies use to encourage participation and correct answers?
• Do you have any good examples of how a prediction market has helped one of your customers?

For Linda’s answers, go read the whole interview. But we’ll leave you with her thoughts on our local impact:

We’ve got to get more companies like this in Nashville. This is a traditional California company. The California [venture capitalists] understand these companies and put money behind them. The California companies network the executives and help each other get into other [opportunities]. We don’t yet have that here.

I was chair of the Nashville Technology Council, and I’m on the Nashville Entrepreneurship board. I’m trying to get us to become a hub of some sort as it relates to new and exciting innovative social media and enterprise 2.0 technology. This is the next wave, and we ought to have these companies in Nashville.

It’s fun to be at an exciting technology company with a great CEO! Especially fun because we have great customers. If you’d like to become a great customer, contact us.

Foresight, our enterprise prediction market platform, is a product under constant and steady development, based in large part on customer input and feedback. Between major releases, we frequently provide feature releases to get new developments and requests in the hands of our customers as soon as possible. We’re pleased to announce our June 2010 release of Foresight.

Our goals with this release are:

• continuing to make the user experience flexible to specific business situations and needs, as well as user preferences
• improving management analytics reports by turning data into information for business leadership

And here’s what’s new:

User Interface Updates

New Confidence Interface — For both point and stock metaphor markets, participants will have a new way to increase or decrease confidence in any question or stock, streamlined from the previous process. The entire participant interaction may now be done via a bidirectional slider that allows users to increase or decrease confidence and see the resulting consensus. The interface also dynamically provides feedback to the user on the impact of their vote in addition to their maximum payout or value potential assuming they are moving the consensus in the correct direction.

The Advanced option allows participants to enter a number of units/points directly. For stock metaphor markets, this is also where limit orders may be placed. Once the answer is submitted, the participant has the opportunity to enter a private comment regarding their trade.

Security Enhancements — System security has been enhanced with additional encryptions. As a result, users will no longer be able to retrieve their forgotten password, but rather will be asked to ‘reset’ their password.

Decision Dashboards — As part of additional reporting and analytics capability enhancements in the administrator application, specific users may be granted access to enterprise dashboards. The dashboards provide a snapshot view of the market’s activity, trends, associated business value, and comments.

Administrator Updates

Custom Fields — Administrators may now create and manage custom fields of information for traders, stocks and categories. These custom fields may store additional information beyond what is standard in the application. For example, a ‘Department’ field might be created to track which department the trader belongs to in the organization. The management of custom fields is located under the ‘Settings’ area of the admin application.

The addition of custom fields is important because now business leaders can run a range of reports on aggregated bits of business intelligence.

Reporting enhancements — Additional reports have been added to the reporting section in the admin application. To accommodate the additional reports, the reporting navigation has also been modified. The additional reports include the ability to view the data along several dimensions, including any custom fields that have been defined in the market.

This release is now generally available with the Foresight platform and will be deployed to existing customer markets within 30 days.