(I fully expect increased volatility in that market now oil producers are in on the game…)

What will a barrel of oil cost, in US Dollars, by the end of 2008?

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Silicon Valley PR Guru, Brian Solis, has pulled together a conversation prism. He describes the prism as:

The conversation map is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate.

We think the prism is very cool (although it looks more like a rainbow flower than a prism). It is not only easy on the eye but it also includes Hubdub. It is at the top and slightly to the right (it is worth one point if you are a darts player*) and labelled ‘Crowdsourced content’. We are sandwiched between Newsvine, Mixx, Reddit and Digg, so we are keeping in good company.

Here is Brian’s post on the Prism. And here is Duncan Riley’s amusing reply.

[Full disclosure: Brian’s company FutureWorks handled our PR in January when we launched at DEMO, and did a fantastic job]

* And here is a darts board for those of you who aren’t:

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In a recent interview about the Doha round of trade talks on Al-Jazeera, the interviewee quoted a Hubdub forecast of the likelihood of a successful result. Here is the clip:

Since that clip was recorded the forecast has dropped to 17%.

In launching Hubdub we believed that the markets could prove a great way to follow any running news story. With the number of open stories/questions we are tracking approaching 2,000 the site is starting to achieve that potential.

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PunditWatch has just got written up by the Wall Street Journal. Whoop whoop. However some of the pundits aren’t too happy. I like the idea that we get dog but I was thinking more of Westie than a Doberman. Anyway, here’s our response (and on the record, Seesmic is seriously cool. Nice one Loic Le Meur):

(For those of you that don’t follow TechCrunch this video is inspired by Loren Feldman’s Mike Arrington Show)

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By Nigel (Technology Editor)

We were really excited to find out this week that we have been selected to go on Web Mission 08. Web Mission is a showcase of the best UK internet start-ups. There were over a hundred entries and we were selected as one of the 20 start-ups to participate. Some of the other companies such as WAYN (which was rumored to have a price tag of $200m) and TIOTI are really big names so we were pretty surprised to be selected. TechCrunch is covering the event.

Anyway, I’ll be over in San Francisco on April 19-25th hopefully taking in the Web 2.0 Expo.

Here is the press release we issued this morning:

News Prediction Website, Hubdub.com, selected for Web Mission 2008

Hubdub.com, the news prediction website, is selected to take part in Web Mission 08, a prestigious showcase of the best of the UK’s internet start ups to be held in Silicon Valley next month.

Edinburgh, UK – March 10th, 2008 – Hubdub.com is one of 20 UK companies hand-picked to attend Web Mission 2008, a new initiative set up to enable successful UK-based entrepreneurs to build relationships with influential people in Silicon Valley and explore possible future opportunities.

Launched in January 2008, Hubdub allows users to make predictions on the outcomes of news events and to challenge their friends in fantasy league style competitions. Unlike other news sites, Hubdub only tracks news that users think is worth creating a question on, such as “Will Obama be the next President of the United States?“, “Will Microsoft successfully acquire Yahoo?” or “Will Trace Adkins win Celebrity Apprentice?“.

“Hubdubbers”, as Hubdub users have started to call themselves, can not only create such news-related questions and stake Hubdub dollars on them, but they can also set up their own personalised leaderboard to compete against their friends. Co-founder, Nigel Eccles explains, “We’re bringing the thrill of fantasy sports to politics, entertainment and general news junkies”.

Being chosen for Web Mission is an exciting opportunity for the young company, founded in Edinburgh in November 2007. It will give them access to a vast font of Silicon Valley knowledge, from investors to other start ups, journalists to high growth success stories.

Eccles is thrilled, “We launched Hubdub at DEMO 08 in Palm Springs just six weeks ago, so this really is a golden opportunity for us to return to the States to show what we’ve achieved since the launch, and to pick the brains of some very impressive people. I’m delighted to be part of it.”

Since launching at DEMO 08, Hubdub has garnered a substantial and loyal following, with around 50,000 unique visitors to date. Some users are spending several hours a day on the site, with many of them confessing to a definite Hubdub “addiction” on the site’s forum.

“We’ve been blown away by the response from our members”, admits Eccles. “We’ve had more visitors than we could have possibly hoped for, and the quality of the debates they’re having is staggering. People are so competitive on the site - I’ve even had some members email me asking me to close their account because it is too addictive!”

Hubdub is mainly focused on the US market for now, although it has strong regional categories covering news and predictions from the UK, Europe and further afield.

About Hubdub
Founded in November 2007 by Nigel Eccles, Tom Griffiths, Rob Jones and Chris Stafford, Hubdub is headquartered in Edinburgh, UK. For more information, visit http://www.hubdub.com.

About Web Mission 2008
Runs from 19-25th April 2008, in San Francisco. For more information, visit http://www.webmission08.com

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  By Nigel

Three weeks ago today we launched Hubdub into public beta at DEMO. DEMO was an amazing event, the organization was slick and there were some great companies launching there are as well. It was an honor to be there launching with them. It is difficult to really pick one or two out as the selection was so diverse. Tech Confidential did a great write up listing all the companies in order of best investment opportunities (well we particularly like it because it placed us third!)

Off the launch we managed to get some great PR online, in print, on radio and even on local TV. We put together a sample of some of the press coverage on our Press page. A big thanks goes to Miiko Mentz and Brian Solis from our PR company, Future Works, who did such a fantastic job. Thankfully when the TechCrunch surge hit the site held up. Like a lot of start-ups we have found that TechCrunch drives a ton of traffic however the engagement and conversion levels are much lower than other traffic sources. All in all however, we’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much of the initial surge we have retained. Thanks again to all the journalists that covered us.

After DEMO we travelled up to Silicon Valley and San Francisco to suck up the vibe and meet up with lots of people. We managed to meet up with some seasoned entrepreneurs who gave us excellent advice (my measure is how many pages of notes do I take in a meeting - these guys are all four pagers plus). Steve Larson, at Krugle, is I believe on his fifth start-up so knows a thing or two about them (and also advised me to walk instead of taking a taxi, I’ve never had an American suggest that to me before!). We also caught up with Mark Fletcher, formerly of Bloglines and now at Startupping, who previously knocked out development at Hubdub for a day after a late night bender with the team in Edinburgh! Finally, we managed to see Dave McClure of 500 Hats who in passing introduced us to Kiva which is a great service that lets you lend money to entrepreneurs in developing countries.

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  By Nigel

This morning our press embargo for DEMO came down at 7am EST this morning. Unfortunately, 7am EST is 4am PST so while the team manfully pretended that we would all get up when we wake up and see how things went over night. So much for that. We were all under our respective duvets at 4am this morning to see how the proceedings kicked off! Its been very exciting, we’ve got lots of very favourable coverage. Here’s a few:

TechCrunch UK

ZDNet

Mashable

P2PNet

EditorsWeblog

ITPro

AP/StarTribune

Marketing Shift

Hopefully more to come!

Update

Oh no, we’ve just been TechCrunched! Scotty, how’s the engine room looking?

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We’re currently holed up in a Best Western in Palm Springs. It is blowing a squall outside however we have just pushed Hubdub to public beta. It’s been just over 6 months since Hubdub came into form as a scribble on the back of an envelope. Tomorrow morning we may get some publicity in line with our attending DEMO and then on Wednesday morning we present to the DEMO audience (and the world - live streaming at www.demo.com).

It is going to be a fun couple of days!

BTW A big thank you to Mike Masnick, Mike Clouser and everyone at the Techdirt Greenhouse on Friday. It was a great session on how Hubdub can focus on attracting power users to the service. Thanks guys.

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We’ve just released the great news that we’ve been selected for and are going to DEMO 2008 at the end of the month. Here is the press release. (Although, if you’ve been on the beta site you would probably have figured it out given the banner! We’re a bit rubbish at keeping secrets.) DEMO is an amazing technology product conference held in the US every year. They select about 70 companies out of around a 1,000 applicants to launch their products there. Great products like the Palm Pilot, Tivo and the Pleo have launched there. Also our friends at YuuGuu launched there last year and said they had an amazing time.

The format is that we get 6 minutes on stage to pitch our wares and then there is a pavillion session afterwards where you can do one-on-one demos. The 6 minute presentation gets posted to the web so any goof-ups will be recorded for posterity!

The team are still pinching themselves that it is really happening and are working flat out to make sure every thing goes smoothly. Additionally, to coincide with DEMO we will be taking the site into public beta on the 28th of January.

I’ll let you know how we get on.

Nigel

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…by 100 years!

The New York Times recently published an article on Wall Street betting markets on presidential elections. These were very popular from the turn of the century through to the rise of scientific polling in the 1930s. I thought it was very interesting how the markets themselves were referred to by the newspapers of the day and were regularly reported on.

It kinda makes you think when you realise that some of these concepts we now label web 2.0, wisdom of the crowds etc have been around for a very long time.

Nigel

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