Bonds and Becks

Its been a prolific two days for me at the Hubdub Blog.

With two posts in two days, one arguing for the return of a baseball drug cheat and another deriding the likelihood of Englands golden boy winning his 100th cap, I may yet become a great sports controversialist!

Be my friend on Hubdub (and marvel!)

Alas, while my sojourn amidst the summit of the Hubdub leaderboard towards the end of January was brief, it did result in this blog‘s best days in terms of traffic (more than 10!).

Of course, the briefness of my time at the top has nothing to do with diminished or relatively inferior predictive capabilities on my part. It is entirely due to the embargo on me making predictions in the sports category which falls under my jurisdiction and the channeling of my efforts towards making this category the best one on Hubdub (colleagues – forgive my vanity).

I am after all quite the bright spark and my powers of prediction ought to be (instead of are) legendary.

Now that Hubdub has introduced friend leaderboards, I feel compelled to re-assert and demonstrate these mighty powers.

So if the cynical amongst you (reading via Facebook) want to challenge such assertions, or if you agree entirely with me and want to marvel at my (criswellian) ability to predict the future course of world events; then do add me as a friend on Hubdub (join if you haven’t already) and cower beneath me on your respective leaderboards!

I’ll try not to get a nose-bleed!

Hubdub Blog Post

I just posted this today on the Hubdub blog. It briefly discusses the coverage of the NFL Draft on prediction markets and why Hubdub will be a great way of following and predicting the outcome(s) of the Draft.

Hubdub!

In addition to being an MSc student, I am now working as the Sports Editor for Hubdub Ltd, an Edinburgh based startup that combines news aggregation and prediction markets to create what we call (drumroll)…the world’s news forecaster.

The site went into public beta today, coinciding with the company’s attendance at DEMO 2008 this week.

So far the publicity has been fairly good. The launch has been covered by TechCrunch and an AP article has been doing the rounds.

The Gregg Williams/Washington Redskins question referred to in the above report is my creation along with most of the other American sports markets (although my position as the dominant sports market maker will dwindle with the huge spike in users that is occuring)

I’m pretty excited about this. For quite some time, I’ve been interested in markets; especially exchange markets such as Betfair (ever since I discovered the intraday FTSE markets). Although this doesn’t involve exchange markets with real money, the combination of news aggregation and prediction markets is unique and interesting and will hopefully contribute to something that is fun and serves as a point of reference for others.

(now that the sales pitch is over) We’ll see