Searching for the Future
Think you're pretty good at sussing out the future? Try matching wits with Yahoo Research's fantasy prediction game that lets you bet for—or against—emerging technologies and trends.
Think you're pretty good at sussing out the future? Try matching wits with Yahoo Research's fantasy prediction game that lets you bet for—or against—emerging technologies and trends.
Think you’re pretty good at sussing out the future? Try matching wits with Yahoo Research’s fantasy prediction game that lets you bet for—or against—emerging technologies and trends.
The Tech Buzz Game is an intriguing offering that lets you and others predict the technologies people will be searching the web for in the future. How? By buying or selling fantasy “stocks” that reflect a mix of companies, products and technologies in innovative areas.
The game is a collaboration between Yahoo Research and tech publisher O’Reilly. The markets and stocks reflect O’Reilly’s picks of “important, emerging, intriguing and disruptive forces in the technology world.”
It’s free to play the game. When you register you’re given $10,000 fantasy dollars to play with. You can then decide which markets you want to “invest” in.
Each market focuses on a specific area of technology, such as operating systems, wireless internet and so on. Many of the markets focus on web-based technologies: Ad services, desktop search, virtual earth, social bookmarks and others.
Within each of these markets are “stocks” that represent companies working on particular products or services within the market.
The game is fun if you’re interested in the whole idea of buying and selling based on your own bets on future trends. But what makes it even more interesting is that each stock has a “buzz score” that represents its percent of search buzz compared to other stocks in the same market.
What’s search buzz? Essentially, a number of words or phrases associated with a particular stock. Buzz words are chosen by starting with an initial seed set of related search phrases. This initial set is expanded by using Yahoo Search Web Services to discover related searches.
You can see the buzz words for a stock by clicking the “view buzz words” link on the stock’s information page. Another bonus on this page: Headlines from Yahoo news related to each stock.
At certain intervals, all shares in all stocks cash out according to buzz scores. This means that prices in the game are grounded in something real: frequency of search on Yahoo. Ultimately, this means you’re not only making bets based on your own knowledge and insight, but you’re also trying to predict search trends.
Apart from being an amusing and interesting pastime for participants, the project has some other, more serious goals. From the Tech Buzz Game’s frequently asked questions page, these goals include:
Even if you don’t play the game, checking in to see which markets and stocks are “moving” from time-to-time can offer valuable insights if you spend any time at all following trends and technologies.
How do you play?
Say you want to invest in the maps and directions market. The four “stocks” in that market represent Mapquest, Google Maps, MSN Maps and Yahoo Maps. Currently, Mapquest is the most expensive stock and Yahoo Maps is the least expensive.
To buy one of the stocks, simply select it and indicate the dollar amount you want to invest. The system calculates the number of shares you’re eligible to buy. There is no transaction fee for buying stocks. There is a one penny per share transaction fee for selling stocks.
You’re also not allowed to sell stocks short, so the only significant way to make money is to buy “undervalued” stocks and sell them once they’ve appreciated.
There are other nuances to the game that I won’t bother to elaborate here. If you’re interested in learning more details about how the pari-mutuel market mechanism establishes prices for the stocks, see this Yahoo Research publication.
NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication’s search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.
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