It’s that time again, election time. Prediction markets are back in the spotlight as the political arena heats up for Presidential elections. More and more people from pundits to professors are trying to predict what the future will hold.

Robin Hanson, Consensus Point’s Chief Scientist and the “Father of Prediction Markets,” is speaking today at the University of Western Ontario’s Political Economy Research Group Conference on a panel entitled, “Can Social Science Predict Accurately: the Case of Elections.” Robin will be focusing on what social science can actually predict with accuracy and what is beyond its reach. Robin will, of course, put special emphasis on prediction markets and how they can be utilized as a powerful tool for predicting future events.

Over the coming year, as the final election draws closer, we expect to see many more of these types of conferences. Stay tuned!

Our very own Linda Rebrovick, CEO Consensus Point, recently joined John McGoldrick, Chair, Zimmer Holdings, Inc. Board of Directors, and TK Kerstetter, President, Corporate Board Member (CBM), an NYSE Euronext company, at the New York Stock Exchange for a Corporate Board Member panel. The panel focused on Board Governance and included a distinguished audience of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) from companies, such as KPMG and Spencer Stuart. Panelists and audience members were even surprised by a pop-in visit from Duncan Niederauer, CEO of NYSE Euronext.

TK focused on interesting and timely questions to bring valuable board insight to the CMO audience and leveraged John and Linda’s many years of Board experience in Board Governance:

John McGoldrick:
John is the Non-Executive Chairman of the Board of Zimmer Holdings, Inc. a healthcare company that specializes in medical appliances & equipment. He is also among the early developers of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative that has done a ton of good in Africa, and John still serves as a special advisor to that organization. Previously, he served as EVP and general counsel for the Bristol Myers Squibb Co.

Linda Rebrovick:
Linda serves on the Board and is the Chair of the Nominating and Governance committee of Healthstream, Inc., the leading provider of learning and research solutions for the healthcare industry. Linda previously held the position of Chief Marketing Officer, BearingPoint, Inc. and currently is the CEO for Consensus Point, Inc.

Panel questions on Board Governance included:

• How has the process of serving on a board changed over the last 5 years since Sarbanes Oxley has been in place, board roles are redefined, and the new era of shareholder activists and transparency in the boardroom.
• How are boards more involved today in major strategic, technological, and financial decisions?
• One of the developments over the last 5 years has also been the development of committees, where today a lot of the board work is done, and the need for specific skills and diversity of thought on boards. How do you, as Board Chair and Chair, Governance Committee, go about building the right board with the right skill sets?

Stay tuned for answers and more, coming in an exciting forum next week!

We are very excited to welcome former Apple Online Store architect, Jason Vowell to our team as our lead product architect.

Our CEO, Linda Rebrovick says, “We’re excited to have Jason onboard. His experience and knowledge will enable us to improve our technology and continue our growth into the future. Our next generation software will allow us to deliver accurate answers, quicker and easier than ever before.”

Jason has over 13 years of experience designing and building high-capacity web commerce platforms. He has led strategic business technology initiatives across a diverse group of Fortune 500 companies including IBM, Gap, Macys.com, and Lowe’s. Jason came to us from Apple where he managed a team that was responsible for the architecture, design and implementation of internal tools for the Apple Online Store.

Jason’s primary responsibilities will be to lead the architecture design team to create the next generation of Social Consumer Intelligence products at Consensus Point. We are thrilled that he made the decision to return to Tennessee and are very excited to have him join our team.

Crowdsourcing and gamification are two topics that are gaining more and more traction as ways to solve complicated problems more quickly and cost effectively than ever before. The concepts are still relatively new, but the recent success of of a group of gamers in successfully mapping the protein structure of an AIDS-like protein provides even further evidence that tapping the wisdom of the crowd can yield powerful results. (For the full article)

In the AIDS protein mapping “game,” it took gamers three weeks to solve a problem that had stumped biochemists for a decade. The game posed the problem in a new, different and fun way and provided a conduit for a diverse crowd to provide its knowledge.

Prediction Markets and preference markets provide a similar mechanism for soliciting ideas and tapping into this wisdom using the same gamification and crowdsourcing principles that were used in to map the AIDS protein and could produce similarly amazing results in the business world. We are excited to be at the forefront of such an amazing technological and cultural revolution and are constantly seeking ways to make our software even more fun and engaging.

The Nashville Business Journal has just announced their Power Leaders in Technology, and we were honored that our CEO Linda Rebrovick was named to the group.

Here’s who the Power Leaders in Technology are:

Some are entrepreneurs, and others run large IT departments at major companies in town. Others are venture capitalists and financiers looking to back the next big idea. The common theme is that all are helping grow Nashville’s tech community.

Linda can’t help but be pleased and excited with the recognition she’s been receiving as a leader, but she wants to keep peoples’ focus on the future. With Consensus Point, you can know what’s coming. Just ask us.

We recently unearthed BCG’s 2010 Innovation Report: A Return to Prominence and the Emergence of a New World Order. The report clearly shows that innovation is making a major comeback in the hearts and minds of CEOs and business leaders across the globe, and it’s not hard to see why.

Innovative companies outperform non-innovator companies by 12.4 percentage points. In a global economy, CEOs are facing innovation from all sides.

CEO’s must make innovation a genuine priority if they are to succeed at leading their companies to be true innovators. In order to see real results, they will need to create a culture of innovation and to invest in tools that hasten speed to market times and accentuate their teams’ ability to choose the strongest ideas possible.

Effective innovation relies on a company’s ability to actively evaluate the ideas that it generates. Successful innovators rely on the experts within their organizations to help with this evaluation. Prediction market tools such as Consensus Point’s Foresight platform make it possible to aggregate knowledge from all levels within the organization.

Enterprise 2.0 tools, including prediction markets, are not new. Innovators such as Google and GE have been using them effectively for years to accelerate the innovation process. Consensus Point has helped such companies as GE, Best Buy, and Motorola cut down on their innovation costs.

Consensus Point’s Foresight platform has already been changing the future of innovation in Fortune 500 companies. Our technology is both a prediction market and a social networking obligation that harnesses the collective intelligence of the enterprise to facilitate the innovation process. We work with our clients to increase the ROI of the innovation process.

For more information on prediction markets and on Consensus Point, visit us on the web.

Consensus Point was recently cited in blog post entitled “Fostering Bottom-up Supply Chain Strategy” for Logistics Viewpoints by Steve Banker. In the posting, Banker asserts that utilizing the knowledge of the broader organization will only enhance the process of refining core business strategies. He points out that prediction markets are an excellent way to tap into knowledge that would be difficult for senior management to access otherwise.

We agree wholeheartedly with Banker’s assertion. At the enterprise level, prediction markets directly address and overcome the communication problems that discourage open sharing of ideas and information such as fear of repercussions and bureaucratic frustration. Additionally, they provide a unified platform that offers employees at all levels of the organization an opportunity to be heard and gives management unique access to previously hidden information.

Consensus Point’s Foresight platform is an easy to use yet powerful solution for enterprise users. Its cloud-based program makes it easily access for employees and provides real-time intelligence to decision makers.

Read the whole thing. We can’t thank Steve enough for his mention.

2011 has been an exciting year for Consensus Point, and we are pleased to have received more wonderful news. Our CEO, Linda Rebrovick, has been chosen as one of seven inductees into the 2011 Academy for Women of Achievement. The Academy honors women who, through excellence and leadership in their chosen fields, serve as role models for other women. We at Consensus Point are extremely proud of Linda for having achieved so much in the traditionally male-dominated software industry.

Linda will be honored at the 20th annual Academy for Women of Achievement celebration and induction dinner, presented by YWCA of Nashville & Middle Tennessee and First Tennessee, to be held Tuesday, Oct. 25.

The Consensus Point team is pleased to be featured in an article in the MIT Technology Review entitled “A Futures Market for Computer Security.” The article focuses on the pilot prediction market being run by teams from Carnegie Mellon, Verizon, U.S. intelligence and, of course, Consensus Point as a means of predicting security events. This collaborative effort will utilize the collective wisdom of approximately 250 security experts to create actionable results around computer security concerns.

For more information on the security project, read the article.

For more information about Consensus Point, prediction markets, or how you can harness the wisdom of the crowds to solve your business problems, contact us.

Where is a comprehensive spot on the web to get information about crowdsourcing? We suggest that www.crowdsourcing.org is an informative place to go. Consensus Point is proud to announce that we have once again been included in Crowdsourcing.org’s Crowdsourcing Industry Landscape! Their helpful new infographic navigates the many different applications of crowdsourcing, all of which are a part of their Directory of Sites. The directory includes over 1,000 crowdsourcing and crowdfunding sites. It certainly provides a thorough viewpoint, and we are excited to be a part of it!