Play the Tech Buzz Game from Yahoo! Research Labs and O’Reilly Media
- Posted March 15th, 2005 at 11:05 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: News/Announcements
Today we’re announcing the launch of the
prediction market for high-tech products, concepts and trends. Your
goal is to predict how popular various technologies will be in the
future. Popularity or buzz is measured by Yahoo! Search
frequency over time. Predictions are made by buying stock in
the products or technologies you believe will succeed, and selling
stock in the technologies you think will flop. In other words, you
“put your fantasy dollars where your mouth is.”
You’ve heard of the Hollywood Stock Exchange or the Iowa Electronic
Markets, right? If so, you’ll feel right at home with our Tech Buzz
Game. You may get to win cool prizes (see the
rules) too if your instincts are keen and your trading strategies
sharp.
The game runs between March 15, 2005 and July 29, 2005 so why wait?
and start trading today!
Bernard Mangold
Yahoo! Research Labs
- 13 Comments
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And as an added benefit, you can sprinkle links like free beer to artificially inflate your buzz. ;)
Very cool. One question though, why doesnt the registration know my y! id?
This is spectacular. Just bought into OPOFFICE (OpenOffice) now I just wait for the beta testing flurry and subsequent release of v2.0. Woo hoo!
Why can’t you sell short?
Because that would take to “long.” (couldn’t resist)
Why oh, why only the U.S. residents get to take part in such fantastic games? Why not us, poor Indians?(or the rest of the world for that matter). Is the web(or the games thereof) only for U.S. residents, Sir?
Could be interesting or might fall on its bum after two weeks. Will be fun watching though ;O)
It’s telling that Copernic has been ommitted from the Desktop Search category. Copernic Desktop Search has consistently received the strongest reviews of any desktop search product, and has a very large user base, yet has been left off the list. Too much competition for YDS perhaps? This clear ommission should be corrected, else the category will be a joke, where bets can be placed on everyone except the real-world winner (Copernic).
ResourceShelf and the Search Engine Watch Blog have posted the slides from Gary Flake’s (head of the Yahoo Research Labs) ETech presentation yesterday.
See:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050316-221942
never mind this
sort out your email
and get rid of the text ads and pic ads for paying personal address customers!
the cheek of it
The Tech Buzz game was late into its second week (to end in July) when an exploit was discovered by some players and then publicized on the game’s message boards. Soon anarchy broke out as the market imploded and the technology supporting the game failed while trying to deal with unrealistic, impossible and unexpected market conditions.
Nothing has been done to address the situation as of this time (it’s Saturday for pete’s sake) and the players are anxiously awaiting what remedy will be made, if any.
The game has been rampant with accusations between players of exploits that the leaders must be using. Exploits such as bogus accounts being used to funnel positive trade activity into a single account and bots to automatically and speedily detect opportunities to make trades and to effect those trades.
The exploit that players have fessed up to actually involves nothing more than buying a high performing stock and a low performing stock. Doing so in the right amounts, in the right sequence and quickly hoodwinks the software into paying out more than it should under normal conditions.
Players using this exploit amassed several million dollars in a short time whereas the leaders prior to this had portfolios of just over a million after two weeks of game play.
It will be interesting to see how this gets handled – as a player and as a sympathetic Yahoo!.
When do you know your market simulation is really accurate? When someone attempts to fraudulently manipulate it, just like a real market! Yahoo!’s a veteran of fantasy league hacking – hackers and exploiters have targeted Yahoo! Sports fantasy games on several occassions in the past, but this is much more interesting, because the Yahoo! Tech Buzz website wasn’t only harmless fun for deskbound sports fans, it was an earnest attempt to predict the success of future technologies using the emerging science of opinion markets.
Just like the real IT markets the Tech Buzz game is modelled on, somebody’s been hacking.
Looking at it one way, it’s an encouraging sign of the accuracy of the Tech Buzz simulation if someone really has successfully hacked it to improve their standing, or to make their company, brand or technology look better in this very public forum. But if your glass is half-empty, then the Yahoo! Tech Buzz game was first hacked only two weeks after it launched, and will be hacked again and again, distorting the underlying opinion market and the final results until either Doctor Flake packs up his bat and ball and goes home, or the winning technologies/brands/memes are declared as “Hacker networks” and “Linux”.
i pay for web hosting at yahoo, and now i see why it sucks. all of you are too busy blogging. get a grip, your fooling noone but yourselves