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!

We don’t see a lot of need for prefatory material here.

He [Rami Levy, a technologist with the Motorola's mobile devices business] says the combined revenue from product-based ideas and cost savings from internal innovations is “conservatively” 5 to 10 times TIX administration costs, which largely involve two to three dedicated employees. The cost to purchase and implement prediction-market software — called Foresight Server, from Consensus Point — was “under $100,000,” he says.

CFO.com has an extensive write-up of the customer success we’ve had with Motorola, and we are impressed with Mr. Levy’s ability to concisely identify the bottom line value that our Foresight prediction markets platform is capable of delivering to the enterprise.

Further, the article is an elegant case study of the sort of business scenario that is a perfect opportunity for the use of prediction markets, the path to implementation, and the ultimate value.

What we like best about the article, in fact, and consider a true success for Motorola’s implementation of our solution, is that the value goes beyond raw consideration of the bottom line:

But additional, softer benefits were key goals for the program, too. These have been realized through collaboration forums that allow employees to see and comment on others’ ideas, which are thus improved by the crowd’s input. The forums facilitate people from disparate regions and company organizations forming relationships, working together on ideas, and avoiding duplication of effort, Levy says. Motorola actually introduced the forums in 2005 along with the voting mechanism, but participation spiked after TIX was introduced and continues to rise.

The bottom line, says Levy: “TIX has proved to be an excellent conduit for enabling collaborative innovation and creating new value for Motorola in a fun and enjoyable way that encourages participation at a minimal cost.”

When was the last time you implemented something for the enterprise that not only created cost-effective value but was also fun?

You can read the full CFO.com article here, and you can contact us about Foresight here. We predict customer success if you do.

Industry leaders, academicians, and business representatives leading prediction markets in enterprises recently shared their insights and innovations related to prediction markets, at the Prediction Market Cluster Summit in Chicago on November 6, 2009.

Linda Rebrovick, CEO of Consensus Point, discussed effective uses of prediction markets, based on multiple years of supporting effective enterprise prediction markets in large companies and government organizations.  She explained that effective enterprise markets require 3 key components:  a proven and expert consultant, a solution that targets key business problems, and the right customer environment and implementation plan.  Rebrovick discussed several use cases highlighting customer examples across several industries and business problems. 

Click Here to Download Presentation (PDF)

Rami Levy, Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, Technical Lead and Manager of Motorola’s Open Source Technologies Team, explained how Motorola added the TIX Market, powered by Consensus Point, in 2007 to address the challenges of increasing idea backlog and missed opportunities. Levy explained the evolution of the TIX Market and how, over time, the prediction market has streamlined the innovation process, yielding benefits of 55% decrease in disposition days and 40% increase in idea pursue rates. 

Click here to Download Presentation (PDF)

Robin Hanson, Chief Scientist of Consensus Point, discussed the advantages of prediction markets and how to develop effective markets to efficiently yield meaningful outcomes. 

Click here to Download Presentation (PDF)

Excerpt from Michael J. Mauboussin’s Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

Accurately projecting holiday sales is a crucial task for retailers.  A forecast that is too low leaves shelves bare and profits lost, while too much optimism leads to dusty inventory and pressure on profit margins.  So retailers have come up with a precise sales estimate.  To do so, most merchants rely on experts—individuals in the organization who gather information, study trends, and make predictions. 

                The stakes are especially high for consumer electronics firms because they generate so much of their revenue during the gift-giving season and the value of their inventory depreciates rapidly.  The pressure is really on the internal experts at consumer-electronics giant Best Buy, one of a multitude of retailers that rely on specialists.  So you can imagine the reaction when James Surowiecki, author of the best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds strolled into Best Buy’s headquarters and delivered a startling message: a relatively uninformed crowd could predict better than the firm’s best seers.

                Surowiecki’s message resonated with Jeff Severt’s, an executive then running Best Buy’s gift-card business.  Severts wondered whether the idea would really work in a corporate setting, so he gave a few hundred people in the organization some basic background information and asked them to forecast February 2005 gift-card sales.  When he tallied the results in March, the average of the nearly 200 respondents was 99.5 percent accurate.  His team’s official forecast was off by five percentage points.  The crowd was better, but was it a fluke?

                Later that year, Severts set up a central location for employees to submit and update their estimates of sales from Thanksgiving through year-end.  More than three hundred employees participated and Severts kept track of the crowd’s collective guess.  When the dust settled in early 2006, he revealed that the official forecast of the internal experts was 93 percent accurate, while the presumed amateur crowd was off by only one-tenth of 1 percent. 

                Best Buy subsequently allocated additional resources to its prediction market, called TagTrade.  The market has yielded useful insights for managers through the more than two thousand employees who have made tens of thousands of trades on topics ranging from customer satisfaction scores to store openings to movie sales.  For instance, in Early 2008, TagTrade indicated that sales of a new service package for laptops would be disappointing when compared with the formal forecast.  When early results confirmed the prediction, the company pulled the offering and relaunched it in the fall.  While far from flawless, the prediction market has been more accurate than the experts a majority of the time and has provided management with information it would not have had otherwise.