I showed MixedInk’s demo at the last NY Tech Meetup on Nov 11.  I’m always energized to see all the amazing startups and intrepid entrpreneurs in this city!  We received great feedback after the event, and it seems people are excited to try MixedInk when it launches.  (If you can’t wait, just send us an email at info@mixedink.com and we are happy to get you started now.)

Other startups in the lineup were:

• Freshman Fund - a gift registry to get started on your childrens’ college savings
• AdaptiveBlue (Glue) – to connect with people around music, movies, & books based on the websites you visit
• 10gen - a cloud computing platform that seemed pretty sweet (says MixedInk’s programmers)
• Cookstr – your favorite cookbooks & chefs’ recipes online, fully searchable by everything from mood to texture
• Wee Web – to privately share your children’s pics
• Co-op – twitter for your work team (we’ve been using it – very fun!)
• Habitat Map - curious where your closest waste transfer site is?  Look no further.

The NY Tech Meetup will be changing leadership, and in the process it will transform from an event to an organization.  There’s definitely a lot of potential there, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves.

Sorry for the big pause in MixedInk’s musings. It was a busy Spring!

Over the past few weeks and months, there have been some notable developments in the crowd-powered arena, and I just want to take a moment to highlight a few interesting examples.

We’re always excited to see forward-looking companies embracing the collective wisdom, so cheers to Starbucks
and Dell, both of which opened the door to major customer feedback. Both companies have embraced a platform called Salesforce Ideas, which TechCrunch aptly described as “Digg-for-ideas.” It allows people to share their ideas, discuss them, and then vote on the ones they like. Participants also get updates from the company responding to the top-rated suggestions. Pretty cool! To many skeptics’ surprise, the Starbucks page has been very popular, with ideas coming in by
the thousands and garnering hundreds of thousands of votes. Starbucks has embraced this feedback as an opportunity to offer their customers the ultimate form of respect – asking their opinion – and to get some new and innovative ideas for free. Dell’s “IdeaStorm,” which was the first site to solicit consumer feedback in this way, rightly earned PR Week’s Innovation
of the Year Award in 2007.

Radiohead has also opened the door to crowd-sourcing. The band surprised fans earlier this year by letting them decide whether or how much to pay for their last CD. In April, they upped the ante by offering “stems” (or different tracks: bass, guitar, drums, vocals…) of their single “Nude,” and then letting fans remix the song. Fans could post the remixed versions to Nude Re/Mix, where the public then could vote their preferences. As SocialMediaInsider points out, “This practice views the original content creation as the mere starting point for what happens to it once it is embraced. Some artists dabble in this area, but most don’t.” This is exactly how MixedInk views the collaborative writing process. Each person’s written contributions are like stems – ready to be edited, remixed, and ranked – that together build the best possible response, reflective of the wisdom of the different people involved in the process.

Most recently, MoveOn challenged its members to make a 30-second TV ad that tells the nation why Barack Obama should be the next president. A whopping 5.5 million votes were cast on 1,100 entries. The top 15 videos were sent to a panel of filmmakers, artists, musicians, and progressives, including Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Lawrence Lessig, Jesse Jackson, and Moby. The winner was recently announced, and will be aired on TV during the campaign.

We’d love to hear about other applications that show the power of the crowd. Please feel free to highlight any innovative examples in the comments!

Until recently at Hewlett-Packard, a group of managers would sit through unending meetings to predict future prices of key computer supplies – information the company would then use to plan its purchasing strategy. Today, a prediction market at HP accomplishes the same task, but with better accuracy in far less time.

A prediction market is a stock market for ideas, where people can buy and sell “stock” in different outcomes, which impacts their relative prices. Between 1868 and 1940, prediction markets forecasted elections before advanced polling. They made a comeback in 1988, when the University of Iowa started the first electronic prediction market focused on economic and political events, such as elections.

The idea behind prediction markets is that the aggregated knowledge of diverse individuals produces a prediction with greater accuracy than a small number of experts. Diversity is critical here – if everyone starts out with the same knowledge, predictions will be the same and betting will therefore be negligible.

Though they are not infallible, prediction markets are strikingly accurate. In the 2006 Senate elections, for example, no public opinion poll predicted all 33 races correctly, but bettors at Tradesports did. Today, people use prediction markets to forecast everything from the popularity of movies to influenza outbreaks. In the corporate world, ArcelorMittal, Best Buy, General Electric, HP, Nokia, and Samsung have been using prediction markets to divine public reaction to new products, next quarter’s sales revenues, whether products will be ready on time, and future commodity prices. A comprehensive study at Intel concluded that prediction markets are at least as accurate as forecasts by Intel’s management, and often as much as 20% better.

Small companies have been slower to embrace prediction markets, but Entrepreneur.com points out that there is no reason they should miss out on the benefits. Markets can work well with relatively small groups of traders, and a small employee base can be supplemented with suppliers, vendors, and other outsiders. Small companies often seek the same answers as big corporations and can save precious time and money by replacing complicated market research with prediction markets when appropriate.

Despite all their benefits, prediction markets are only appropriate in cases where predictions are separable into neat categories: Will Microsoft release its software before November, in November, in December, in January, in February, or later than February? Will Amazon.com sell more books, iPods, or 500-thread-count sheets next month? This condition limits the prediction market’s usefulness when companies want to aggregate opinions without influencing people with a preconceived framework of possible responses or when nuanced answers would be more appropriate.

MixedInk sees prediction market software as a kindred tool. MixedInk steps in where prediction markets leave off by allowing people to respond to open-ended questions and provide more complicated answers. In addition to asking which of five products will be most popular using a prediction market, a company could use MixedInk to ask its employees to help conceive of its next innovative product or design a marketing strategy.

Using democratic, meritocratic aggregation tools like prediction markets and MixedInk, companies can truly benefit from the vast knowledge base of their employees quickly and easily. Of course, deciding to use these tools requires leaders to recognize employees’ wisdom, which can mean a big shift for some companies…but that’s a subject for another post.

Just a quick post to draw your attention to a recent piece in The New Republic. It highlights the fact that for some topics, Wikipedia’s combination of a strict neutral point of view policy and its dependence on the wiki platform results in articles that leave something to be desired. (No, this is not about its occasional – way overblown – inaccuracies!) We were pleased to see the author, Douglas Wolk, practically arguing for the type of complementary writing tool we are developing.

Wolk explains why Wikipedia isn’t the perfect venue for reporting on politics and other potentially controversial topics. Here’s an excerpt:

Graceful writing takes a distant second place to neutrality. The language of the “Plame affair” article, like a lot of Wikipedia, is flatly declarative, not particularly quotable and occasionally afflicted with wobbly construction… And so the entry is an obstacle course of little infelicities and colorless clots of subclauses, from the first paragraph’s factual but pace-dragging citation of Joe Wilson’s memoir The Politics of Truth to the concluding section, headlined “Other perspectives on the CIA leak scandal,” which reads (following a link to “Alternate theories regarding the CIA leak scandal”) in its entirety: “Since the CIA leak scandal became public knowledge, commentators began presenting multiple and often highly-contested perspectives on it in various media.” You don’t say.

To make a case for how the parts of the Plame tzimmes fit together is, unavoidably, to make a political argument. That’s antithetical to the Wikipedia ethos, whose dedication to unvarnished facts is worthy of Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind. Without some kind of thesis behind it, “Plame affair” is a dehydrated feast, a 20,000-word catalogue of notes and quotations and factoids that all have some bearing on the case in question but aren’t weighted for significance, have no particular narrative thread, and don’t begin to explain the meaning of the whole thing. It’s hard to imagine a Wikipedia that could function any other way, but the Internet hive-mind, negotiating in good faith and carefully hammering out compromise language, has done exactly what it was supposed to do–and failed anyway. The article, for all its catholic precision, isn’t actually useful, because it’s almost impossible to read… Wikipedia, friends, is boring.

Wolk hits the nail on the head. Generally speaking, and especially when it comes to controversial subjects, writers must make value judgments – whether writing individually or collectively. They must convey the order, context, and relative importance of an article’s components in order to sculpt narrative, digestible prose. As a tool, the wiki simply lacks the capacity to aggregate value judgments from a large number of contributors.

As regular readers of this blog know, this capacity is one of the central distinctive features of the MixedInk platform. We will allow contributors to focus not only on content, but also on style – which can be just as important in getting a point across.

(For more on how we intend to improve on the wiki, see this earlier post.)

Most of the time, when you try out some new software, you are able to get the intended functionality out of the program – without significant learning time or technical issues, if you’re lucky. It does what you needed it to do, and that’s that.

On rare occasions, however, the process is almost magical: you try out the program, and your jaw drops when you realize how much power it gives you; how much more information is at your fingertips; how much faster, simpler, and more fun your life can be made by this previously irrelevant (to you) chunk of code.

We’ve been using Google Analytics and Crazy Egg on our blog since day one, and would definitely put these nifty little (free!!) tools in the latter category. Google Analytics allows us to track our site visitor data with a shocking degree of precision – by time spent on the site, by location, by browser used, by incoming link followed, by navigation pathways through the site, by Java version installed, and by a whole bunch of other characteristics (all anonymously, of course). And we’re not even using several of the more advanced features yet.

The most impressive thing about the program is how easy and fun it is to use. It’s got a super intuitive interface, and it’s full of interactive visualization tools like the one to the right, which shows where in the US our visitors came from during a brief period last month.

Similarly, Crazy Egg lets us see what visitors do with their mouse pointers as they browse the site using four main views. The “overlay” view shows how many times each of the links were clicked (shown below) as well as the site from which the viewer was referred; a “heatmap” shows where the most clicks on the page occurred, ranging from ‘hotspots’ in red to less popular links in blue; a new “confetti view” shows the top 15 referral sites, top 15 search terms, browsers, etc. of those who clicked; and the “list” view provides much of this information in exportable chart form.

Now that the initial wow factor has worn off, we don’t check our stats on Google Analytics or look at heat maps from Crazy Egg particularly often. (And don’t worry, we’re not stalking our readers, as our soon-to-be-posted privacy policy will confirm!) The real benefit of having these tools will come later, after we’ve launched MixedInk. We’ll need to see where people are coming from, which sites send them here, and how they navigate around the site, so that we can improve the user experience and grow our user base.

If you’re tech-savvy, this may not be news to you. You may rightly point out that there are more powerful programs out there (though not any free ones, as far as we are aware). But I hope this at least helped you relive your long-lost moments of technological awe.

If you’re not a techie, maybe this little love-fest will inspire you to try new software – including MixedInk, when the time comes. The potential payoffs of using well-designed software are worth it!