At Consensus Point, we believe in celebrating our successes, and today, we have an important one. We’d like to congratulate our very own Robert French on his recent academic publication, “Trigonometrically fitted block Numerov type method for y′′ = f(x, y, y′).” According to Robert, TBNM “is a neat method for solving differential equations” faster than what was previously done. Well done, Robert!

If you would like to learn more about TBNM’s, go to: http://www.springerlink.com/content/e674516w43821148/

If you would like to learn more about prediction markets, preference markets, or Consensus Point, go to: www.consensuspoint.com

Consensus Point is pleased to announce the launch of  Huunu, our new research software platform that leverages consumer knowledge by using social gaming techniques to provide insights based on knowledge and judgment rather than social and demographic qualifications.

Huunu provides comprehensive insights by rewarding survey participants based on their accuracy and knowledge of the topic. Gaming elements such as leaderboards and net worth scores offer participants recognition, reward and status as well as an opportunity to compete and collaborate.

These core elements, along with a unique market-maker algorithm, differentiate Huunu from traditional market research methods to deliver faster, clearer and more cost-effective insights for market research companies and their clients.

As our CEO, Linda Rebrovick says, “Huunu eliminates the need for target market and demographic-based sampling, provides answers in hours versus weeks, and measures the intensity of feeling that a respondent has for a topic.  Huunu provides a new way to engage respondents, ask questions and
get answers.”

We worked with Communispace, a well-known market research firm, to test 11 products and messaging concepts for a major CPG company with 250 community members. In only four days, the Huunu results matched those of an externally conducted survey of 3700 target market respondents that took several weeks to complete.

“Our clients rely on us to actively engage customers’ hearts and minds to test concepts and campaigns, so we were curious to see whether Huunu— with its gamification elements—would make this kind of testing a more entertaining and engaging process than a traditional survey,” said Julie Wittes Schlack, Senior Vice President of Communispace. “The results with Huunu were clear and enlightening— 95 percent of our community members would happily participate in the research again.”

About Consensus Point

Consensus Point is a leading social prediction market company providing solutions for market research and market intelligence. The Consensus Point Huunu platform enables companies to aggregate knowledge in a market environment to predict future events and market preferences. For more information, please visit http://www.consensuspoint.com/

About Communispace
About Communispace: The world’s most admired brands turn to Communispace, the leader in generating game-changing insights via private online customer communities. Founded in 1999, the company has created more than 400 customer communities for industry leaders such as Kraft, Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Hallmark, Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline and Hilton Hotels Corporation. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, the company has offices in Atlanta, Chicago, London, New York, San Francisco, as well as Imperia, Italy and Sydney, Australia. For more information, please visit: www.communispace.com.

Consensus Point is very excited to announce we have been selected to the membership of the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO).

CASRO was founded in 1975 to be the “Voice and Values” of the survey research industry. The organization represents over 300 companies and market research organizations in the world and works to promote and champion legitimate market research efforts both inside and outside of the U.S. CASRO membership is granted exclusively to market research companies that adhere to the CASRO Code of Standards and Ethics for Survey Research.

Consensus Point is proud to be a member of CASRO and thrilled to be included among the market research elite! We look forward to being part of the transformation of the world of market research with our new Huunu© for Research prediction market platform.

The Tennessean and Consensus Point have teamed up once again to launch Tennessean Ticker. Tennessean Ticker is a stock market style game that predicts the outcomes of events that cover a wide range of topics, from basketball to politics to Oscar winners and everything in between. Will Romney have the most votes on Super Tuesday?  Who will be presented with the rose on The Bachelor? Will the University of Kentucky make it to the Final Four? These are just a few of the questions that the Tennessean.com audience can expect to answer.

Tennessean Ticker makes the news fun again!

In the game, participants browse categories of questions and choose those questions that they feel the most confident about.  Players receive points that they use to answer questions and express their level of confidence in their answer.  The answers are collected to provide a likelihood that that event will actually occur.

Tennessean Ticker is a follow-up to the Tennessean.com’s successful Football Futures market which brought new users to Tennessean.com and engaged readers in an entirely different way.  The goal of Tennessean Ticker is to reach a broad audience by providing a wider range of questions and to create an interactive relationship with readers. Linda Rebrovick, CEO of Consensus Point believes that this will create a new type of relationship between readers and media outlets, “Our platform provides a new way for media outlets to engage their audience while creating content at the same time.”

Tennessean Ticker predicts future events using the same Consensus Point technology that research companies, government agencies, Fortune 500 companies such as GE and Motorola utilize.   Consensus Point is a leading prediction market research company providing the next generation of intelligence for research and media markets.  Their new Huunu platform enables companies to aggregate knowledge in a market environment to predict future events and market preferences.

“We are pleased to continue our partnership with the Tennessean through the launch of ‘Tennessean Ticker’.   The Tennessean team continues to set the pace in their industry by leveraging our ‘Huunu’ prediction market platform to engage and entertain their audience while creating real-time, valuable user driven digital content for their media channels. Tennessean fans will enjoy the challenge of predicting the future to prove they are right,” said Linda Rebrovick, CEO of Consensus Point.

To participate in Tennessean Ticker, go to: www.tennessean.com/tennesseanticker.

Consensus Point partner and client, international consulting firm Logica, has just released the results of their latest prediction market research about cloud computing. The experts at Logica are leveraging this market intelligence to assist organizations with the best solutions to maximize cloud computing in their business. Download the Logica FutureScope Cloud Research at http://www.logica.com/we-are-logica/media-centre/factsheets/2012/cloud-research-using-logica-futurescope/.

Over a 6 week period, Logica used Consensus Point’s prediction market platform to engage their employees, their customers, leading academics and key decision makers to better understand and predict the future of the cloud. The market, named “Logica FutureScope”, aggregated the disparate opinions of 100s of cloud and business experts and highlighted the factors that are both driving and inhibiting the growth of cloud today. This valuable market research includes future trends and insights on many critical areas, such as the impact of security events on the demand for cloud services.

Logica was looking for new ways to engage and source the “wisdom of the crowd” in order to better understand the direction of future trends. Consensus Point’s prediction market provides them with an environment that encourages insightful debate and contributes to true thought leadership.

If you’re interested in learning more about how our prediction market software can help put your company’s finger on the pulse of market research, innovation and thought leadership, contact us at sales@consensuspoint.com.

From the Obama campaign’s successful use of Facebook and social media to scale his campaign and support his win in the 2008 election to the advent of the Arab Spring, the way that humans interact has been fundamentally changed by the internet and the rise of social networking. The market research industry has begun to reflect these changes.

Focus groups and surveys have been online for years, but companies have been slow to shift their focus from what researchers are calling “Me” research to “We” research that uses the wisdom of the crowd to gain valuable insights into consumer groups.

At Consensus Point, we see the value that Prediction Markets add to the research process as a way to gain access to collective insights. They represent the next wave of market research innovation focusing on the “We”, but they rely on methods that are vastly different from traditional market research and can be quite a leap initially.

The good news is that Prediction Markets have been proven time and again to be as accurate or even more accurate than traditional research techniques including polls, surveys or monadic concept tests. This is because they rely on people’s judgments of others rather than on people’s understanding of themselves. Academic research has shown that humans, as a rule, are quite brilliant at noticing what others are doing and predicting their behaviors but tend to have blinders on when it comes to understanding their own motivations. Prediction markets harness our innate observational talents by asking respondents not “what they would want or would do”, but by asking them to make a prediction about “what others would want or would do”. This a simple but powerful difference between prediction markets and traditional market research methods and explains how prediction markets can be so accurate with a smaller sample and less target market representation.

The 2009 paper, “Me-to-We Research”*, proves that Prediction Markets are:
1. As accurate as Monadic testing with a correlation of 0.91 versus top quartile Monadic testing
2. More discriminating than Monadic testing with the ability to separate good from average ideas
3. Better at identifying potential breakthrough ideas
4. Comparable across markets and categories

Prediction Markets offer numerous benefits to research because in addition to providing better data, the small sample sizes that they require provide time and cost savings to research companies and their clients. If you are interested in finding out more about how Prediction Markets can help your business, please contact us at info@consensuspoint.com.

*Kearon, John and Earls, Mark. “Me-to-We Research: From Asking Unreliable Witnesses about Themselves to Asking People What They Notice, Believe and Predict about Others.” ESOMAR (2009).

Consensus Point would like to thank all of our customers, partners, and friends for a wonderful 2011, and we are already predicting that 2012 will bring even more exciting opportunities.

2011 has been an amazing year for us at Consensus Point. We were excited to expand our team, including the addition of three outstanding managers and VPs, Lead Software Architect, Jason Vowell from Apple, VP of Development Brian Evans from FanLab and Ashton Brand Group, and Marketing Manager, Hayley Hovious from E.J. Gallo Winery. And we launched a sports public market, Football Futures, with Gannett and the Tennessean. This public facing market successfully predicted the Heisman Trophy winner days before it was announced and has successfully provided a new way for Tennessean readers to engage with the paper.

Additionally, Consensus Point won numerous awards in 2011. Of notable recognition was being named to the Nashville Post “Tech Top 25!” Our CEO Linda Rebrovick was also recognized as a Nashville Business Journal “Technology Power Leader”, one of Nashville’s most powerful women by the Nashville Post, and as a YWCA Woman of Achievement, and still found the time to do numerous interviews, including an interview on board governance with Corporate Board Member.

And our clients continue to do amazing work with prediction markets as well. We are proud to highlight the work of Logica, a leading global, UK- based consulting firm, for the 2011 results of LogicaFuturescope. This public market generated some valuable and insightful insights about the future of Cloud Computing for their clients and consultants! Please let us know if you are interested in the latest LogicaFutureScope Cloud Computing predictions.

We can truly say that 2011 has been memorable, and all of our predictions indicate that 2012 will be even better. Happy New Year!

Consensus Point has done it again! On Monday, we blogged about Football Futures accurately predicting that RGIII would win the Heisman trophy four days before the announcement. Today, we’d like to share some of the other predictions that we have made lately using consumer market research panel groups. In early November, our research markets accurately predicted both Black Friday sales increases as well as Thanksgiving holiday travel increases from 2010 to 2011.

We are never surprised when our markets make accurate predictions, but we love to share our results with those who might not be as familiar with the power of prediction markets as we are.

Whether determining consumer preferences or predicting the probability of a future outcome, prediction markets source information from the crowd both efficiently and accurately. Because prediction markets rely on respondents making judgments rather than on a representative sample giving their opinions, they can provide real-time answers much more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional surveys.

Our research clients are finding more and more to appreciate about the flexibility and timeliness of prediction markets in helping them provide their clients with information. If you’re interested in learning more about our consumer research markets, please go to our website: www.consensuspoint.com.

Consensus Point and Gannett’s Football Futures market is proving the power of prediction markets once again. Days before the announcement was made that Robert Griffin III had won the 2011 Heisman Trophy, Football Futures was clearly predicting RGIII would be taking home the prestigious award. We were thrilled when our friends at The Tennessean felt that the prediction provided by the Football Futures market were interesting enough to appear in the Saturday, December 10, edition of the Tennessean’s sports section. See the chart they used below.

For those of us in the business of predicting the future, results such as these are not surprising at all. Prediction markets have been proven time and again to be more accurate than polls or surveys. Their ability to uncover information and aggregate the knowledge that is dispersed within the crowd is unparalleled. Because those in the market are asked to invest in predictions where they feel most confident, the collected information is not only much richer than that produced by surveys or polls but is also available in real-time when used for forecasting or business intelligence.

We are excited to be working with Gannett and the Tennessean to produce a public prediction market that is raising prediction market awareness among a much wider audience. If you are interested in learning more about prediction markets and their application in either the enterprise or research space, go to our website. If you want to see a market in action or if you just want to see how good you are at predicting the future, take a look at Football Futures.

Do you think you know who will win the the Big 10 Championship game? Are you positive you know who will be the new coach at Ole Miss?

Consensus Point is getting into the football spirit this season. We’re teaming up with multimedia company Gannett, and The Tennessean, to host a new kind of game. Football Futures launches today and will let football fans put their football knowledge to the test by giving them the opportunity to make predictions throughout the college and NFL playoff and bowl seasons.

We are thrilled that when Gannett needed a new way to “inform, inspire, and entertain,” they turned to Consensus Point. Football Futures will not only provide a new opportunity for Tennessean readers to engage with the publication online but will also introduce prediction markets to a much wider audience.

The Football Futures market will focus exclusively on college and NFL games and will offer players the chance to win great prizes and show off their predictive powers. The competition is sure to be heated. We can’t think of a more fun use for a prediction market.

Want to show them what you know and win great prizes? Just sign up and start predicting. It’s easy to register and free to play.