Compare this to the user experience of a dull poll widget: You set up your question, add the widget code in your website; then every visitor of yours is able to submit his quick answer. Such a hassle-free option is available around the web, but, still, it’s just a static poll, and you have learnt to ask for more. Markets, that is.

Today, askmarkets bring the two worlds together, by keeping their benefits alone. And we are happy to introduce you the askmarkets widget, what we consider a cross-industry innovation, enabling you to replicate the full askmarkets functionality straight from your website. Full? Well, almost. You’d better check it out and judge by yourself, here is how it works:

- You log-in to askmarkets, and create a new market.
By turning your question into a prediction about the future, while the answers are the various potential answers – it is possible for almost every topic out there.
Or you just pick among the already available markets, the catalog is big enough and it keeps growing.

- Then you grab the html code to add it in your website.
You can also customize all two colors and dimensions, it’s as simple as it gets and it blends in with your website style.

- Now the market question with all the answers and their probabilities gets monitored in real time right in your website.
But, it doesn’t stop there.

- Every visitor of your website is now able, not just to see the latest results, but also to co-shape them, by trading into the relevant market right from the widget.
It does not require a login, each visitor (and session) gets ¥€$1000 to trade within the market(s). By just clicking on the outcome of choice, the cursor moves to the ‘Invest’ text field, where you just enter the amount you want and press the invest button, while watching the prices getting updated in real time (if you want to have more play-money available, you need to log-in first).

Enough said. You’d better take a look in the widget below, or go straight away and create one for yourself; questions in your website will never be boring again :)

You may also try our marketplace solutions and services, and create some widgets right from your enterprise marketplace.

To be honest, this sounds like an almost self-explicable question to us: Markets are applicable everywhere, wherever people and information co-exist. And every decision to be taken involves one or more estimations about the future; improve them and you will get a better decision.

The truth is, we cannot but be strongly biased towards the ubiquitous applicability of our services, after spending several years on researching the topic and developing the tool itself. But things are different out there. For a good reason.

In a given business setting, which already works, one needs to have a clear view of the potential benefits a new tool could bring into his organization, and finally assess if these benefits justify the need and cost for change. Being cool, or interesting, is not a force of change, but having a tangible benefit that offsets these costs is and, after all, each pitch needs to finally come up with a cogent answer on the initial and  most important of questions.

Here’s our answer.

We fundamentally believe that askmarkets is helping your organization succeed in:

- bringing people together
Employees along with customers, insiders along with outsiders, essentially everyone with relevant information, keen interest or simply curiosity on the topics that matter.

- fostering conversations
“Markets are conversations” (Cluetrain Manifesto, Thesis #1) and we enable you to easily facilitate them around the clock and at almost no cost, serving as the conductor of your custom crowd.

- summing up information
Conversations do generate tremendous value for your business, provided that you are able to aggregate the information they host. Markets appear to be the best tool to do so; you may just let askmarkets do the rest.

- transmitting it through prices
Where lies wisdom, there lies opportunity and transmitting the insights and information produced is equally useful to collecting them. The fact is, collection and transmission of information are the two sides of the same coin when it comes to askmarkets. Early indicators, actionable signals and reality-driven decision support are to follow.

After all, you will be bringing in the right mix of people, motivations and interest, while hosting conversations in a setting proper enough to eliminate biases and balance between being utterly professional, yet equally engaging and playful. At the same time, you will be able to transform the totality of relevant information into proper metrics, markets prices and probabilities that is, while transmitting these results in real time to everyone interested.

To us, these are the most important of benefits askmarkets will contribute in your company or community. And, as you probably figured out, we didn’t refer to predictive accuracy, or anything directly related to that. And that’s because people tend to overestimate, or actually not to understand the great oxymoron behind the overselling of “predicting the future”. In practice, a tool’s forecasting ability should not be judged against a virtual fool-proof prophet, as such a tool simply cannot exist; you’d better compare it with other existing tools or widely-used mechanisms, finally leveraging on the supremacy of one over the others.

Markets appear to be the one to stand out, at least as theory, experiments and practice so far typically indicate (that said, you need to remember that this comes with no absoluteness or strict mathematical proof). Moreover, markets’ unique nature is further highlighted by serving as the only mechanism each time revealing its probability of failure (for example, an askmarkets’ stock priced at .70, at the same time indicates a 30% probability of not turning correct etc). Finally, they essentially consist a meta-mechanism that potentially taps and continuously weights, among others, the outcomes of other tools (while at the same time cannot but follow the principle of “garbage in, garbage out”).

The short presentation that follows attempts to provide a short abstract to the above, next to an attractive narrative.

Still, after all these, people ask for practical examples, and use cases. So, here are two of them.

Case I, Retailer (private marketplace)

Retailex Corp. is a very healthy and profitable organization. It is focused on a bunch of great products, which imports, stores, distributes and finally sells across a wide range of customers. With capable and much experienced employees, next to an extended network of salesmen and distributors, Retailex is a well-structured and efficiently functioning enterprise, optimized to deliver great products to its customers and value to its shareholders. Digging into its main cost drivers, one comes up with inventory and transportation costs throughout the supply chain, the management of which finally ends up to the estimation of future demand and the communication of early indicators that may arise across the various parts of the chain.

The company is by now using a couple of methods to forecast its sales, therefore manage its logistics into a more efficient way. The tools in use track the weekly or even daily sales using the advanced ERP (which costed a really significant amount of money) and attempt to extrapolate the given data to come up with proper estimations, while surveys of the managers’ perceptions are performed quarterly to get a feeling about what’s coming. However, it seems that these approaches do not meet the company’s needs. Shortage of various products is a usual case in many points of sale, while other products remain devalued by the big inventory. These facts equal to a tremendous amount of opportunity and money being not wisely spent, while the uncertainty of the given economic situation is expected to further highlight the problem.

This is where askmarkets come into play. The number of employees, salesmen and distributors in a sense stands as a powerful network or tree, continuously collecting information about the topics of importance for the enterprise. Asking all these people about such topics, while providing a sufficient motivation, next to a simple but capable platform, enables the collection and filtering of this vast amount of informational resources back to its roots, where decision making takes place. For example, managers’ information cannot be but limited, while monitoring data have little to do with being proactive. At the same time, each salesman comes into touch with a number of people each day, shaping his mind on the top of the information he collects. And each salesman or distributor contacts with a different set of people, or has unique experiences, helping to finally come up with a unique perspective on the topics of interest.

Finally, askmarkets enables Retailex to aggregate the perspectives of all people across the supply chain on the topics that matter for the company, including sales per month, product or distribution point, next to products’ import and transportation costs, and pricing. In a few words, askmarkets serves the company as the ceaseless and seamless aggregator and filter of the information flow across the enterprise, providing real-time insights and a significant competitive advantage for both the day-to-day and the strategic decision making. Wouldn’t you bet on it?

Case II, Marketing (public marketplace)

Marketex Corp sells some high-end products, putting most of its efforts (and budget) on marketing. Echoing this fact, the marketing department has an extended list of liabilities, next to a really significant share in the decisions taken across the enterprise. Among all others, the department runs a bunch of campaigns each year, while keeping track of the industry and competitors in various markets, measuring customer behavior and satisfaction, also monitoring selected performance indicators that are considered of crucial value for the enterprise. And the department is comprised of highly experienced employees, with a strong intuition and understanding of both the core characteristics and latest developments in the industry.

However, it has lately become clear that, no matter of the expertise and experience of its members, the marketing department -and the whole company at large- is failing to detect significant turning points in its customers’ behavior and preferences, competitors strategic moves, after all the evolvement of the industry. And this is not due to a lack of focus or devotion; the company is performing everything it used to do to get a clear view of what is happening out of its corporate offices. Surveys, focus groups, industry reports, and meetings, meetings, meetings, all have a prominent place in the company’s arsenal, when it comes to supporting its marketing decisions. However, results suggest them as almost incapable; and there are probably both the tools and their users to blame for. The marketing manager put it like that in a recent board of directors: “It is like either the information we possess is very partial, or the tools we are using to filter it and sum it up are inadequate. In my personal opinion, both these are true. We need a different approach.”

At the same time, Marketex enjoys a considerable number of devoted customers, who could easily be characterized as fans. Their passion and brand loyalty extent at a level that they do know every Marketex product in detail, while tracking the competitors moves and other evolutions in the industry (so as to be able to refuel their passion, or not). In a sense, Marketex’s marketing department extends to these people, too, as they largely perform what the company needs to, at a much bigger scale, free of cost, and without the biases that typically accompany all such intra-enterprise relations. The idea is clear. Marketex needs to get this group of people together, motivating them to contribute their beliefs and, by appropriately aggregating them, shape an insightful input for its decision making.

Askmarkets come to the rescue. A public marketplace is set up, on the topics of interest for Marketex. Competitive intelligence, efficiency of the latest campaigns, customer satisfaction, evolution of publicly available performance indicators, all these and other crucial topics are turned into market questions and literally outsourced into the Marketex community. A symbolic prize given to the 5 most efficient traders further enhances the engagement and, a few weeks after the launch, Marketex includes in its arsenal a more than valuable tool that monitors in real time the information and perceptions of hundreds of experts, providing the greatest of insights for some really successful decisions. Still looking for the market leader?

Well, in the case that the above use cases sound as being too close to your organizational reality, you may check out our Services or contact us directly for more details. If not, we are here to create together with you your very own askmarkets story, by empowering your company or community to optimally use askmarkets for your specific needs and requirements.

After all, we do believe that now it’s high time to turn potential into value and discrete resources into collaborative ones. Tough times require wise decisions and wisdom lies in the crowds. You may leave the rest to askmarkets.

We decided to launch our first marketplace as a small contribution to the website that inspired us through the years and we truly love. TechCrunch that is and today we are happy to announce “The (unofficial) TechCrunch marketplace“.

Building on the power and simplicity of our core product -we challenge you to find a simpler and more intuitive market interface around- we created a marketplace for start-ups, all the ones you can find on CrunchBase. And by now you can sign up or get in via facebook connect and start trading on the possibility of each of the start-ups getting acquired, getting further funding or heading to the deadpool.

Remember, the current price of a stock equals the probability of this outcome proving to be right. So, if you believe that the stock is undervalued, you have a reason to go buy some shares and sell them back later at a higher price, or wait for all play-money invested in the market to be redistributed to the owners of the winning stock, right when one of the outcomes proves to be true and the market closes. Also, if you can’t find a market for the start-up in which you’re interested, you can create it by just going to the relevant screen, searching CrunchBase for the specific keyword and clicking on the result of your choice, it’s a one-step process.

Eventually, the more money you have gained the bigger your impact will be on shaping prices, therefore expectations, about the future of each start-up. So, we think it’s both engaging and useful, a really fun way of aggregating information which exists out there about the future of our beloved tech companies, and we are looking forward to your very own ‘bets’ and collective insights.

And please share your comments with us, tell us what you like and what you don’t, and, in the case that you just love our service and you want such a public or private marketplace for your community or enterprise, just contact us.

P.S.: And, yes, we’re techcrunched!

Well, you’d better stop thinking of how you would react and act now on what you just read, because all and every combination of the above is possible, starting today. And you don’t need to worry about regulations or products or real money or anything. This is as simple and straightforward as it gets, with all the joy, functionality and actual (non-monetary) value included, minus the parts that used to make all these impossible.

We’re talking about our software, of course, and as you may already know the askmarkets marketplace is simultaneously a game, a bet, a market, and much more. And we do believe that we have the most simplistic market functionality and interface around or as Tim O’Reilly put it “the pbwiki of prediction markets”. But, today, we’d like to present you something even more better and useful.

We’re excited to announce the public launch of our services, giving to each one of you the ability to create your very own marketplace, with a few clicks. We’re talking about a clone of the askmarkets.com marketplace, which you may customize to your looks and feels, define it as public or private and fully administrate everything happening inside.

We’re not kidding: you may go now, create your own marketplace and see for yourself. To spice it up even further, we give you the first 30 days for free. Yes, unlimited number of markets, traders and predictions, with the domain prefix of your choice and you may experience the whole thing for free, no small print attached.

After the first month, there is a single, simple and transparent pricing plan, charging you $50 + $1.00 per market + $0.50 per trader + $0.05 per prediction, more details are available here. Moreover, we’re also fine tuning an option with extended features, for those of you who want even more; you can contact us for the details.

You may call it wisdom of crowds, collective intelligence or just the most enjoyable information aggregation mechanism. What we definitely believe is that our marketplaces are of great value wherever people and information co-exist (isn’t this everywhere?) and we’d love to watch them fostering conversations and facilitating the predictive and aggregation processes along your companies and communities.

You’ll find more reasons about why you probably care, why markets may work for you and why you may pick askmarkets, or you can just go create your marketplace right now and experience everything in practice, it just takes a minute and it’s free.

To cut a long story short…

Get your own copy of askmarkets for your enterprise or community.
Create a custom marketplace within a minute & put collective intelligence to work.

Distributed information. And you couldn’t find a way to sum it up.
You may now rest in the power of markets. On every single topic of your interest.

Markets bring people together, transmitting information through prices.
And askmarkets is the simplest way to put market power at your fingertips.

We offer you a one-stop, off-the-shelf solution.
Get your hands on now, your marketplace will be up and running in a minute.

Start now with a 30-day, full-fledged free trial. Then pay as you go.
No long-term contracts, no sign-up or termination fee, cancel at any time.

Managing your marketplace is simple, just like playing within it.
Customize it, add, edit or delete traders, markets and predictions in a few clicks, or less.

Our inspiration for askmarkets stems from several years of research on the topic of prediction markets, enabling us – hopefully – to separate the wheat from the chaff. The concept, at its very core, goes like this. Markets are institutions that are everywhere. From the stock market in New York to the fish market in Tokyo to the flower market in Amsterdam, markets exist and are used for a variety of purposes. But, while stock markets, for example, seem to be so different than betting, or fish and flower markets, in their core all those institutions are essentially the same: Markets bring people together, they sum up their information and transmit it through prices.

Askmarkets intends to bring this functionality to the masses. We provide a tool with which anyone can create a virtual market or trade in markets created by others. In other words, we provide a tool which can aggregate the opinions and knowledge of the many and transform these into a meaningful result. Markets arise as the ideal tool to crowdsource cognitive tasks and arrive at consensus results which are typically proven to be more accurate or correct than the opinions of the few experts, as suggested by both theory, experiments and practice.

Practically speaking, the whole concept of markets as an information aggregation tool has a relatively short history of existence. Better captured by the term ‘prediction markets’, it is only during the last years that the rise of the Web has given an actual shape to the idea and its potential. Especially among companies, the promise of markets as a decision support tool has been put into practise and been used as an effective decision-making tool only during the second half of the running decade, while by now all of the following companies are reported to be using markets internally: Siemens, HP, Intel, General Electric, Google, Eli Lilly, Microsoft, Archelor, Nokia, Intercontinental, Best Buy, Electronic Arts, Swisscom, Cisco, Motorola, Qualcomm, InfoWorld, MGM, Chiron, Frito Lay, TNT, Yahoo, Corning, Masterfoods, Pfizer, Abbott, Chrysler, General Mills, O’Reilly and TNT (disclaimer: no, these are not our customers, yet). Typical uses of markets for enterprise decision support range – so far and we’re still counting – from planning and forecasting, project management and marketing to new product development and market research. As our product is suitable for and targets all these applications, we could say that we naturally serve these or any other enterprise needs for dynamic information aggregation. Stay tuned for specific details coming out real soon.

Another major field of use regards public applications of aggregating people’s choices, on elections, movies, products or anything else. Especially regarding election results, relevant markets have proven to be more reliable than polls and surveys, and – lately – are gaining extended coverage from media sources like Time, Wired, CNN, Economist, New York Times, Financial Times, Newsweek, Fortune, ABC, Science, Nature, New Scientist, Business Week, Wall Street Journal and others. Moreover, many of these outlets already use markets to tap into the collective intelligence of their audience, giving them the ability to directly shape public consensus to ultimately provide a better alternative than polls. We also address such emerging needs – including yours, too -, so bear with us to find out more or just contact us in case that you want to be among our enterprise product testers. And thank you for your fantastic feedback and support so far, you really stand as our most valuable of assets!