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October 27, 2005

Conference Report #2

[I'm going to write a little at a time about the recent Media, Communications & Technology in the Age of the Blogger conference. So, a post here and there about it over the next few days -- with two caveats: first, I'm not a reporter and though I write a lot and interpret quite a bit, I don't report on actual events very often, so if something needs clarification or even correcting, please let me know. Second, I'm still in New York til Sunday and plan to see the City a bit with Mrs. Chester. So, I won't be doing any super long posts . . . but of course will pick up in full on Monday.]

The morning panel featured two news executives, one from the Financial Times, and one from Reuters and two music executives. I thought that one of the more intriguing things to come out of the panel was to be found in the comments of Robin Johnson, who heads Financial Times - Americas. He mentioned the phenomenon of the wisdom of crowds, how the aggregate is smarter than any one expert, and the relationship between this concept and the "blogosphere" as a social phenomenon.

This was very interesting to me. Over the past few weeks, I've become enamored of prediction markets -- markets in event futures. These allow people to bet -- er, invest -- in the yes or no outcome of a given event. If you were around during the period when I live-blogged the Iraqi Constitutional Referendum for example, you may remember frequent references to the futures market for the referendum outcome, at the time found at Intrade Trading Exchange. The whole idea is that a market in a given idea is, at any point, smarter than any one person. As the blogosphere explodes, and all "new media" explode, and the whole world becomes more fragmented, I would be surprised if more technologies designed to track various forms of public sentiment don't become available. There's an interesting tangent to be discussed there about democracy in general: if tools to track public sentiment proliferate -- and are much more complex than the mere poll -- then how will this affect the process, or even conception of representative government? I think that could be a sleeper issue in all of this . . .

Mr. Johnson also focused on the importance of new technologies to tag data, to find metadata, to search for links between data, and to contextualize data; he was talking about news specifically, but made the point that such technologies could be spread to other forms of data as well. Now this was very interesting because of its similarities to the kinds of technologies that In-Q-Tel is funding. In-Q-Tel is a public-private venture capital fund, created by the government specifically to fund technology companies that offer promising tools to the US intelligence community. Here's how they describe themselves:

In-Q-Tel was established in 1999 as an independent, private, not-for-profit company to help the CIA and the greater US Intelligence Community (IC) to identify, acquire, and deploy cutting-edge technologies. In-Q-Tel's open and entrepreneurial venture capital model gives it the agility - lacking within traditional government contracting approaches - to help the IC benefit from the rapid pace of change in information technology and other emerging technology fields.

In-Q-Tel's mission is to deliver leading-edge capabilities to the CIA and the IC by investing in the development of promising technologies. Because early-stage technologies are often unproven, In-Q-Tel takes the calculated risks necessary to develop, prove, and deliver them to the Intelligence Community.

Ever heard of Google Maps? Before Google bought it, it was called Keyhole. Going to www.keyhole.com now redirects to Google Earth. But both Google companies use the mapping technology of Keyhole. Well, Keyhole was initially funded by In-Q-Tel, for obvious reasons -- the role of mapping and imagery in intelligence collection needs no explanation.

Getting back to the point, the kinds of technologies that In-Q-Tel seems to be interested in funding seem highly related to the kinds of needs for search, tagging, link analysis, etc that are likely to grow in the consumer market and in the news and information industries as well. Here's what In-Q-Tel lists as its focuses:

Knowledge Management
Search and Discovery
Security and Privacy
Distributed Data Collection
and Geospatial Technology.
I can't imagine how most of those ideas would not be relevant to the media business . . . and at the same time, as another participant noted, it's kind of "spooky" to think about.

Well, I'll offer some more thoughts tomorrow . . .

Posted by Chester at October 27, 2005 10:54 PM

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Comments

Prediction markets hold great promise in a variety of applications, not all of which are simple binary (yes/no, this/that, him/her) propositions e.g., elections. As a phenomenon, they've been on a steady upswing (more markets, more subjects, more money, more participants, more media exposure, more academic study, more mainstream acceptance) since getting pummeled (unfairly) in the press in August 2003 when it was proposed that they be used as one tool in a much broader terrorism and foreign intelligence toolkit.


Prediction: they will be back and in use for precisely that purpose, albeit with different sponsors and much savvier PR. One could argue that they already are in the form of contracts on established private exchanges.


Are they recursive with or overly influential of established democratic election processes? Good question. One data point suggests not. The $10 million that was thrown at the U.S. presidential contract on Tradesports two years ago this month - in favor of Kerry (rumored to have originated with George Soros and Moveon.org) - only swayed that market for a few hours and didn't really sway the press. Instead, it only enriched those who were betting on the correct outcome of that contest as they scooped up cheap contracts for the eventual winner (Bush).


I've written extensively on prediction markets over the past year on my blog at: http://cartegic.typepad.com under the category "Prediction Markets" (left sidebar.)

Posted by: Art Hutchinson at October 28, 2005 9:21 AM

Thanks for the comment Art, and I visit your site frequently. It's all fascinating stuff.

Posted by: Chester at October 28, 2005 9:56 AM