TechCrunch50, the start-up launch conference brought to you by Mike Arrington and TechCrunch, kicks off this Monday. From the 50 hot technology companies that will unveil themselves to the world there, only one can win the $50,000 Best in Show prize. Despite sounding more like a dog prize than a coveted industry accolade, all 50 companies will be clamoring to be the chosen ones and join Aaron Patzer, last year’s winner with Mint, on the Internet start-up A list.

Who will win? Hubdub will be forecasting it live from when the companies are announced on Monday morning (PT), throughout the pitches, right until the winner is announced. You’ll be able to make your predictions and see whether you’ve got an eye for a hot start-up.

If you’re a company launching at TechCrunch50 who thinks you’re in with a chance, or an armchair tech pundit who thinks they can predict who the judges will choose, watch this space. The Hubdub prediction market on the winner will be live from Monday morning and linked to from this post.

In the meantime, check out how the war of the launch conferences is going with TechCrunch50 taking on DEMOfall08 head to head:

DEMOfall v TechCrunch50: Who Will Win?

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Image via Wikipedia We are really excited to announce our first ever partnership, which is with the Huffington Post. According to Wikipedia The Huffington Post “…is ranked the most linked-to blog by Technorati, the most visited news weblog by Alexa Internet, and the most influential blog in the world by The Guardian.” So in short we are very excited to have partnered with them. Hubdub will be providing forecasts via our widget which is embedded in all of their tag pages (for example here is John McCain’s tag page). We are currently putting together a widget and API page which will allow other news publishers and blog use this data.

Our press release is below:

Hubdub Interactive News Forecasts Now Used By The Huffington Post

Hubdub allows HuffPost’s readers to see accurate and timely forecasts on all the top news stories.

Want to know how likely it is that Palin will pull out of the presidential ticket? Or perhaps, the chance that Obama is the next US president? Or how strong tropical storm Ike is likely to be? Hubdub has literally thousands of user-generated news questions, on which Hubdub users then buy and sell predictions, creating thousands of spookily accurate results.

This new partnership means that from each of The Huffington Post’s tag pages, readers can see a list of all the current forecasts on that particular topic. For example, Sarah Palin’s tag page includes Hubdub forecasts on whether she’ll pull out of the presidential ticket (16% chance) and whether she will mention Alaska’s proximity to Russia as evidence of her national security experience (38% chance). All these forecasts update automatically when the Hubdub market moves, and Huffington Post readers can easily click through to the question on Hubdub for more information and participate in predicting the news.

Hubdub’s CEO, Nigel Eccles says, “This is a really exciting partnership, from day one we’ve always wanted the Hubdub market information to sit beside high quality news content”.

“We think our news obsessed users will get a kick out of Hubdub’s fun forecasting feature,” said Mario Ruiz, VP, Media Relations, The Huffington Post.

Prediction markets are becoming increasingly popular, especially now in the run up to the November election. They have proven to be more agile than polls, responding in near real-time to developing stories, and indeed to be more accurate since participants actually have a stake in the game. The fact that it’s Hubdub dollars at stake is apparently irrelevant – Hubdub users are so competitive that the most important thing is that they prove they were right to the rest of the vibrant community.

This partnership marks a significant development in the growth and focus of prediction markets. Projecting market forecasts out to news sites means that prediction markets are becoming more mainstream and easier for casual browsers to appreciate.

About Hubdub

Founded in November 2007, Hubdub enables users to trade predictions across 2,000 news stories and future events. For more information, visit Hubdub

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Hubdub Provides News Predictions To the Huffington Post

News forecasting game Hubdub (DEMO 08) today announced its partnering with the popular news Web site The Huffington Post so its readers can predict what they believe will unfold during the U.S. presidential election campagins and the outcomes of other thousands of news events from hurricanes to business controversies.

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Image via Wikipedia NFL kicks off this week and it ’s always a guessing game as to who will win. Will the Cowboys win the Superbowl? Which wide receiver will play best? Will the Dolphins win more than 5 games?

Well this season you don’t have to keep your predictions to yourselves as we have just launched the NFL Prediction Center.  The prediction center will let you predict on all the games and keep you up to date on news and forecasts. Enjoy!

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Interestingly Intrade’s forecast for Obama is actually at the low end for the betting markets. If you take the prices from Oddschecker (http://www.oddschecker.com/specials/politics-an…), strip out the overround (that’s the bookmaker’s margin) and convert to percentages, you will see that Obama is trading at between 61% and 65%.

Around the question if the betting markets are likely to be politically biased, this is highly unlikely. Many years ago you could make money by, for example, betting against England when betting with a English bookmaker (and then potentially arb it by laying off with a Swedish bookmaker) however the betting markets are so transparent and so many bettors use bots that systematic bias doesn’t really occur (or if it does it is fleeting).

The Hubdub presidential market has been consistently about 5% more in favor of Obama than the betting markets. We believe part of the reason for this is the automated market maker we use but we are still investigating. We believe it isn’t because of emotion based trades (as someone suggested above). The price the market settles on is mostly controlled by our heavy traders. These users spend up to several hours a day on the site competing with friends and trying to climb the leaderboards. They tend to treat their trades as they would real money. The emotion based trades cause volatility but shouldn’t set the long term price.

Originally posted as a comment by Nigel Eccles on A VC using Disqus.

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Image via CrunchBase, source unknown OK, excuse the pun in the title, but I’m a little bemused by what happened to me today. I’ve had an account with Digg for about 6 weeks now, and have been thoroughly enjoying trying to get my submissions onto the front page of the site, working out who the Digg audience is (hey, newsflash, it’s NOT 15 year old tech nerds!), optimizing my list of “friends”, working out the shout system. And when a submission hits FP, WOO HOO, after a quick run around the kitchen, I have to IM everyone I know to tell them to take a look at how cool I am (sad?). It has been a surprisingly huge amount of fun.

Imagine my dismay then when I went to check my latest submissions this morning (with a bad hangover) only to find that instead of my beautiful profile picture, the page said “Your Account is Invalid – please contact Digg support if you have any questions”. Dumpf. The hangover just got worse.

So now I’m paranoid. What did I do wrong? Was it because I had submitted something that they didn’t like? Was it because I haven’t been selective enough in what I’ve been Digging? Have I had too many submissions buried? Have I not been looking at the home page often enough……the mysteries of Digg are well known and discussed to death. I fretted over my cornflakes. How could I survive without my daily dose of Digg?

Then it dawned on me. My submission yesterday was to an article in a national UK newspaper of a semi-nude picture of Kate Moss in a classical pose. And the Digg gods didn’t like it. Not one bit. Coming from a country where the biggest selling national daily newspaper has a picture of a topless model on page 3 every day, I was astounded that this article was enough for them to suspend my account.

The picture of Kate Moss is beautiful, classical, tasteful and quite breath-taking. There is absolutely nothing pornographic about it in my mind, and she is certainly not known for being a porn model – she’s one of the highest paid supermodels of all time. In fact, they are about to unveil a solid gold sculpture of her in the British Museum in London.

Digg has a history of being anal about sex. Who can forget the FoxNewsPorn debacle for example? Perhaps it’s because they’re American. And perhaps it’s the pilgrims fault that Americans are taught that the female form and anything to do with sex is dirty, naughty and should at all times be hidden away from sight. Sex is something to be conducted in secret and never mentioned. Perhaps it’s their history of religious right-wing politicians, tutoring the masses in upstanding moral behaviour. Whatever. It comes down to the fact that Americans miss out on a lot of wonderful things because of their anal rectitude. Here’s my next submission (SFW. Safe for Digg? Who knows!). Let’s see what they think about that one.

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Image via Wikipedia The market on who will be Obama’s choice for VP has been incredibly active over the past couple of months with 465 public predictions being placed on it. Over time Tim Kaine, Evan Bayh and Joe Biden have all been slim favorites (according to the market Hillary never really left the starting blocks). However in the past few hours their has been a very pronounced shift in support to Biden making him the strong favorite, currently forecast at 77% likely to be Obama’s pick.

Checking the other exchanges shows that Biden is 2.14 with Betfair (which equates to about 45%) and 36% with Intrade so he is definitely the favorite. However, do Hubdub users have more inside information than most? We’ll soon find out

Who will be Obama’s choice for VP?

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TechCrunch UK recently invited guest posts. My post on how to compete in the US without leaving the UK went up today. Check it out (BTW I am still chuckling about the second comment).

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Sometimes the sheer breadth of the games is overwhelming. We can’t watch it all, but how do we know which events to watch? Here are some of my picks for the most interesting events to watch this Olympics. Let me know if I missed your favorite!

Basketball – Its all been downhill since Barcelona’s Dream Team finished 8-0 with a gold medal. But a disappointing bronze finish in Athens has reenergized team USA. Superstars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant join this all star team of NBA players hoping to bring back the gold. Finishing the exhibition games 5 and 0, their first game is Sunday night against China, led by none other than 7’6” Houston Rockets’ star, Yao Ming. Hubdubbers prefer USA by a comfortable margin over rivals Spain and Argentina. More basketball questions

Who will win the men’s basketball at the Beijing Olympics?

Taekwondo –The last time three siblings qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team in the same year was 1904 when Edward, Richard and William Tritschler all participated on the U.S. gymnastics team. None of them medaled, but siblings Mark, Diana and Steven Lopez all have a serious shot at gold medals.  Steven won gold in Athens and both Mark and Diana have won world championships. Talk about a family affair! I know I wouldn’t be betting against them, but Hubdub gives them only a one in four shot of each medaling.

Will the three Lopez kids medal in taekwondo at the Beijing Olympics?

Gymnastics – There are two drastically different stories in gymnastics this year. For the women, Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin, two of the best gymnasts in the world, hope to lead team USA to gold. The men, devastated by the loss of Gold medalist Paul Hamm and twin Morgan Hamm, will likely be sidelined by a dominant Chinese team led by Yang Wei. More gymnastics questions

Olympics: Which country will win the Women’s Artistic Gymnastics, Team All Around Gold?

Olympics: Which country will win the Men’s Artistic Gymnastics, Team All Around Gold?

Well that’s it for me. The opening ceremonies are now only hours away and hopefully you’ve got a couple of ideas about what you’re going to watch the next couple of weeks. Make sure to keep up with the markets while you’re watching!

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Image via WikipediaOnly one day to go until the opening the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing (or 8 hours and 57 minutes to be exact). And despite pre-games injuries, US athletes causing offense and activists launching pre-game protests, I am incredibly excited to see the games kick off.

No matter what happens in the Olympics they are guaranteed to produce drama. Drama always produces great news stories and event better markets. That is why I am excited to announce the new Hubdub Olympic Prediction Center. In the Prediction Center we have pulled together over 250 Olympic markets for you to trade predictions on.

It is tough to pull out one market in particular but I am going to go with a contentious choice and predict that China is going to top the US in the medal tally (cue more hand wringing books on how the US has lost its competitive edge).

Which country will win the most gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics?

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