Gartner has released their Hype Cycle for Social Software, 2010 report. We agree that the interest and meaningful use of prediction markets are on the rise. In addition, Sherrilynne Starkie has an excellent summary of the identified trends.

She identifies two of our strengths in trends on the rise:

Idea Marketplaces: enable organisations to source innovative ideas, technologies, products and services by connecting them to innovators and solution providers from around the world.

Social Analytics: the process of measuring, analysing and interpreting the results of interactions between brands and consumers and/or businesses across digital channels in the context of specific goals and objectives.

Sliding into Gartner’s infamous Trough of Disillusionment, though, are prediction markets, sandwiched in between mobile social networks (aka Facebook) and unified communications (aka IP telephony and video conferencing):

Prediction Markets: are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. Prediction markets are thus structured as betting exchanges, without any risk for the bookmaker.

We agree that prediction markets are maturing, and our customers continue to use our versatile platform to make better decisions earlier. We’re glad Gartner is conducting detailed analysis of this important enterprise software domain, and support the forward movement towards mainstream business use. We also know the importance of services and already offer them to our customers—something that Gartner projects does not happen until technologies reach the slope of enlightenment.

Fortunately, the versatility of our Foresight platform—which allows for idea management, social analytics, and decision markets—has us and our customers and partners optimistic about the future.

This year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference was full of new product announcements and represented continued evolution in the value of Enterprise 2.0 solutions to businesses. The most striking realization for us was the increasing focus on Enterprise 2.0 solutions from players of all sizes, including companies as large as Cisco and CSC.

For instance, Cisco used the conference to announce an Enterprise 2.0 solution called Quad and shared that the net benefits of Cisco’s own internal use of Web 2.0 collaboration solutions were more than $1B in FY09. Cisco Quad leverages existing technologies such as Unified Communications and Telepresence and expands with business focused flip video and social software. To us, this seems like it is collaboration from the application down through the architecture.

Other items of interest:

• Andrew McAfee discussed some concepts from his book, Enterprise 2.0, and revealed that Gartner predicts that as of 2010 social software is an enterprise reality. This, of course, is backed up by McKinsey survey results on Enterprise 2.0.
• nGenera announced a human-centered enterprise collaboration solution, called Spaces, designed in collaboration with IDEO. Spaces includes a user configurable interface and plug-in architecture, allowing data access via interactive mini applications. This strikes us as collaboration from the middleware/web services layer out.

We’re already wondering what features Enteprise 3.0 will have. If you’d like to set up a market to test your ideas on that front, let us know.