Hey thanks for the revision, I appreciate it.

AlphaCast is our public market, but our clients basically use a private version of it behind their own URL. In neither case is real money being used — we haven’t found it necessary thus far based on the use cases we’ve been tackling. That said, there are certain other use cases where real money would certainly help incentivize participation and encourage sharing information/predictions that probably couldn’t be solicited otherwise, so we’re exploring our options.

Sigh, oh Prediction Store. :) This was an idea I had a couple years back to create a marketplace for predictions. We were going to start with NFL games and essentially let people put in their predictions for point spreads, etc. They wouldn’t share their models or methods, just enter their predictions. We would be the clearinghouse of the predictions and keep track of accuracy.

After certain players had established track records, we would start to charge for their predictions using some sort of auction mechanism. So in essence at the beginning of the week, you’d subscribe to their predictions and you would be granted access to their predictions (and I assume use them to make bets.)

The plan was to expand the concept to other venues after we used NFL games as our test case and had built up a group of people who were contributing/consuming predictions. I read today about a somewhat similar AI hedge fund that was following a similar concept.

We had to shelve the idea because we got busy with some other stuff, but I’m hoping we can get back to it sometime soon. I still think it’s viable and haven’t seen much out there like it.