“Wisdom of Crowds” microconference at Yahoo on Wednesday 12/13/06

And you're invited.

The TechDev Group is hosting our first ever "confab" (microconference) - details at http://confab.yahoo.com.

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"Prediction Markets: Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds"
Wed Dec 13, 5:30-8:00pm
Yahoo! Headquarters, Building C, Classroom 5

Join us for a public “how to” session on prediction markets** moderated by James Surowiecki, New Yorker columnist and best-selling author of The Wisdom of Crowds. Speakers from Google, HP, Microsoft, and Yahoo! will describe how they are using prediction markets to aid corporate forecasting and decision making. Other speakers include the developer of Zocalo, an open source prediction market platform; the co-founder of InklingMarkets.com, a Paul Graham yCombinator startup; and Robin Hanson, the visionary economist and inventor whose pioneering work paved the way. The event is open to the public and will emphasize practical lessons and hands-on advice. After brief presentations from each speaker, Surowiecki will open up the session for discussion with the audience.


** A prediction market is like a stock market for ideas or information. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
The market rewards good information whether it comes from elites or the masses. Prediction markets have built a track record of besting pundits and pollsters when it comes to predicting everything from political elections to quarterly sales figures.

Q: Are we not men?

A: We are DEVO. D-E-V-O

I am turning into a bad traveller.

I cannot seem to sleep in strange beds. In NYC right now. Woke up at about 3:30am EST (which is 1:30am PST, still my biological time.)

But tonight I am happy. Turned on the TV... Not just the TV, but the very very nice 40" HDTV (which is a Samsung model that appears close to the LTN-406W for those that care)... And on HD-NET saw this concert: Devo and the yeah yeah yeahs in Central Park on July 22 2004.



We used to love Devo. But I haven't intentionally listened to Devo in nearly 20 years. It was fun watching myself sing along with every word.

Being up late watching Devo reminded me of the first time I saw the Beautiful World video, probably on Night Flight. From their Wikipedia entry "Devo created and directed many of their own videos, and the band has cited the video for the song "Beautiful World" as their favorite example of their video work."

The video works at an entirely different level than the "song." Over the course of a few minutes you see the sweet, sacharine images of our "beautiful world" unraveling into perverse carny devo funkiness... And only in the final moments do they deliver the punchline: "It's a beautiful world... (for you... BUT NOT FOR ME!)" Per the comments on YouTube: "devastatingly poignant irony that probably changed a few lives."

Both the yeah yeah yeahs and Devo were just so damn good. I'm glad I can't sleep.

Yahoo buys Bix

I said it all over here.

So one thing to note... It turns out that the voice in my head does sound a lot better than the one that is being recorded. Something must be defective with the microphone, the Bix system, or whatever that keeps knocking it out of tune. Until I debug that system, I won't be posting any karaoke.

Also - we need to get some cooler songs into the Bix karaoke system.