I recently discovered a new-comer to the top echelons of the Hubdub leaderboard and thought I would investigate. It seems that he won his fortune on the question on the Stimulus Bill.  After offering him my congratulations, I was thrilled to receive the following email which I thought I’d share with you - the excitement of Hubdub, brought to you by a genuine, bone-fide Hubdubber…

Paul from Minnesota

Age 41 male

Real Estate investor owning nearly 100 properties.

“For my business I have to keep on many aspects of the news.  HUBDUB is a natural fit for that need.

How I found you:

I think I found HUBDUB from a mention on a story from 20/20 on ABC…..they may have mentioned collective intelligence being smarter than any one opinion.

Starting out:

When I started HUBDUB I lost everything and was looking forward to the $20 sign on credit.  Eventually I won a bet here and there and built up my funds.

Satisfies my needs:

I love to gamble and this is a lot cheaper and offers many more avenues to wager on.  I love the news and learning new things.

Valuable tool:

I read things on HUBDUB and wager a small amount.  When it settles, I am emailed and find out what the outcome was.  Great way to keep up on the news.

Chatter and insight:

I have found that there are so many genuine people on HUBDUB that offer accurate and insightful angles to each topic.  It would have been tempting to spew falsities out there to scare people into making a position better, but it is virtually not out there.  There is a fairness to the participants that is to be applauded.

Taking Chances:

To get to the top you have to take chances.  Searching for the popular questions that people want to throw money at is difficult.  Sometimes I toss in $2000 and the percentages go haywire.  In the Stimulus bill I tossed in money at 50% return and then it does to 40% and even 30% within a few minutes and my account net worth drops like a rock.  I then figure, if I liked it at 50% I should love it at 30-40%.  So I go in again even heavier.  My Net Worth creeps up even higher than before.  Within a few minutes people dump money on the other side and again I am tempted to wager even more at 15%.  This repeats its self over and over for several days until I find I have tens of thousands into the question.  Finally, there I sit with tons of money in the question sitting at 17% and cashing out of another deal just to find funds to put more in.  The whole time I am seriously doubting myself as to why I would want to put more in.  I thought I was a sure loser.

Then I signed on and thought there was something wrong with HUBDUB as I saw the account read twice what my previous net worth was from only signing on a few hours ago.  I initially thought that someone must have made a wager big time on the wrong side, I should hustle and cash out while I can at least get something out as I was assured to lose this according to the news days leading up to this.  Sure enough I check the news sources and it was pretty much a done deal and I had won.  People were sending me messages and congratulatory remarks.  I had won a ton of money and everyone appeared happy for me.  I think that says a lot about those involved.  The heartfelt comments were almost touching enough to give the HUBDUB funds back…..I said almost!  I will be giving it away sometime I am sure in my next wild prediction…..or perhaps the one after that or somewhere down the line.  I am happy to encourage someone to beat me and will offer congratulations when it happens.  Until then today is my day and I am trying my best to climb up the leader board.”

For more information about the Stimulus Bill questions, read Destry’s blog post.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Image via Wikipedia

Over the next couple of weeks we are going to be experimenting with advertising on the site. Initially, we are going to be trialling Adsense (that is the one that gives context sensitive text ads) but then we will also be looking to add some display advertising soon. We will be trying to add the advertising in a way that doesn’t significantly affect the look and feel of the site or negatively effect the functionality.

As I am sure everyone reading this blog will know, times are tight. Unfortunately, Obama’s stimulus package doesn’t stretch to us so we are on our own in trying to turn a dime. Hopefully, in the process we can introduce you to some great products and services.

If you are interested advertising with us then please contact us here.

Popularity: 15% [?]

The Independent is the first media company to introduce “Powered by Hubdub” - a new product developed by us at Hubdub to allow other news organisations to host Hubdub’s functionality on their own website. This first iteration is focused solely on the Six Nations Rugby Tournament, but “Powered by Hubdub” can be configured to offer predictions and forecasts on any combination of news, sport or entertainment, all hosted on a third party site. We expect to be announcing more deals like this shortly.

The press release follows:

The Independent Launches Six Nations Fantasy Betting Market

Edinburgh, Tuesday 3^rd February 2009 – Cash-strapped sports fans can now bet on the results of Rugby’s Six Nations Tournament without breaking the bank, thanks to a new fantasy prediction game available exclusively on the Independent’s website (http://independent.hubdub.com/ )
Powered by the media technology company, Hubdub.com, the Six Nations Fantasy Betting Market gives players a pot of virtual dollars with which to make predictions on the outcomes of questions such as how many points will Gavin Henson score and how many kicks will Danny Cipriani have charged down. The game is free to enter with predictions being bought and sold, and managed much like a stock portfolio, with the top predictors winning prizes at the end of the tournament. Players can set yourself against your friends and colleagues or see how they rate against the Independent’s wider community and try to earn the accolade of the canniest rugby supporter online.

Hubdub launched their main prediction game, www.hubdub.com in January 2008 and has proved that fantasy betting can bring added excitement and engagement to avid news followers. This is the first white labelled product that Hubdub has produced, and media organisations are lining up to bring the technology to their own news sites. As Jimmy Leach, Director of Digital at The Independent, says, “It’s a fantastic opportunity for sports fans to show off their knowledge of every aspect of the Six Nations tournament and be able to prove to their mates just how much they know about everything from full-back to prop and from Edinburgh to Rome”

Current predictions include:

Who will win the Six Nations? Currently Wales has 58% chance of winning http://independent.hubdub.com/m16634/Who_Will_Win_The_RBS_Six_Nations_2009

Who will complete the Grand Slam? Current forecasts says 55% chance nobody will complete it http://independent.hubdub.com/m26178/Who_will_complete_the_Grand_Slam_in_the_2009_Six_Nations

Popularity: 16% [?]

Today’s my first birthday at Hubdub and its forced me to do some reminiscing…  A year ago today, I read about Hubdub in Wired magazine — it looked like fun so I signed up, but like many of the early adopters didn’t get my initial 1000 stake. The Hubdub servers were unprepared for the onslaught and crashed.  I was quickly mollified though when Nigel wrote me a personal note to apologize!  I got my husband signed a couple days later and my mother a month after that.

In the beginning, I wasn’t very interested in my net worth. I put down random 10 and 20 dollar bets on what I wanted to happen and paid little attention to my dimishing bank account. It wasn’t long though until my husband was nearing the 10 thousand mark and all of a sudden I got a lot more competitive. I remember the days of obsessively tracking the stock market, listening to all the financial news prior to the opening bell and researching what earnings reports were being released that day — and at what time. I remember being *so* anxious that the American Idol market wasn’t settled within minutes of the reveal, because I was desperate to reinvest for the next week. (It took me a while to learn that all the editors at the time lived in the UK and were asleep then!).

The early days were short on rules. There were questions about aliens meeting with the UN and a lot more focus on the leaderboard rankings. New rules were usually hashed out over on the getsatisfaction board — ahh those were the days. Here’s one of my alltime favorite threads.  I think what I miss most was the little emoticons at the end of every message. I would love it if we could include that in our new forum!

We developed some Hubdub venacular early on in the year, which seems to have fallen by the wayside recently (via meanderingsearcher who was the official Hubdub vocabulary keeper):

“Spitzer” - literally “screwed”. Check out the history on this market…

“fistinction” - its gotta to be my way or “to the moon Alice”

“pics4ded” - I’m gonna take my toys and go home

“cognositis” - the act of deliberately losing your net worth, just to prove a point   

One of my favorite missing users — lucidstates. Which was clearly a misnomer, because he was rarely lucid, but a great player. He was the first to get me addicted to box office markets. He also spammed nearly every single open market during the Hubdub strike of 08! Craziest question, hands down, goes to Destry, who, while clearly being sarcastic made a pretty great question encapsulating every single important news item of the week.

Now a year later, I’ve been a user, a superuser and now a category editor. I figure by next year I should own the company (kidding, Nigel!). I find myself wishing the birthday cake on my profile was edible, but am thankful for the year of experiences that it represents. Can’t wait to see what another year will bring! [Did I leave out your favorite Hubdub story? Post it in the comments!]

Popularity: 14% [?]

As part of our First Birthday celebrations, we thought we would amuse you with some facts you probably never knew about Hubdub…see if you can spot the one that’s not true…

1. Hubdubbers come from 161 countries throughout the World

2. There has been over H$1bn traded on Hubdub in the past year

3. The Hubdub logo is made up of fonts from different newspapers around the World

4. A 3 year old boy named the company

5. The original name for the site was Newsbazaar (and of course there was Gumbonews and Noodlenews…to name but a few!)

6. The co-founders come from all four nations of the UK (ok, so Wales is a principality, let’s not get nit-picky!)

7. The Category  Editors are located in three different continents

8. Three of the founding team are left-handed

9. The CEO used to be a dairy farmer (!)

10. The Hubdub office overlooks Edinburgh castle

Popularity: 12% [?]

Happy Birthday Hubdub! It’s exactly one year to the day since Hubdub launched and we thought it would be fun to look back at the highs and lows of this rollercoaster year!

We’d like to thank you all for making Hubdub what it is today, and particularly those of you who have stuck around since last January to realise just what a journey it’s been! If any of you have sweet Hubdub memories from the Wild West days, then leave your comment below – we’d love to hear them!

January 2008
We launched at Demo on January 28th – the journalists loved it and we had 20,000 visits on our first day Of course our servers crashed

February 2008
We thought it might be nice to chat to some of our lovely new Hubdubbers so we introduced Friends (shortly followed by shouts). We’d never been so popular before…

Oh, and we realised it might be a good idea to have some Hubdub rules. It was to be the beginning of the end of Hubdub’s Wild West…

March 2008
Governor Spitzer resigned. Well, technically he announced that he was going to resign. And Hubdub had it’s first Hoo Haa. Was it or was it not a resignation? The “Spitzer rule” was added to the Big Book of Rules.

April 2008
Users started to try to “game” the system and the first banning occurred after the first official Hubdub protest strike! Satyaki was no more.

May 2008
Super Users were introduced and came with their newly found Super Powers to the aid of the overworked (and under-paid!) Category Editors. Hubdub was a better place!

June 2008
The first Hubdub millionaire was created – crudsy reached the giddy heights of 7 figure Hubbucks, much to everyone’s amazement.

Meanwhile, we launched Punditwatch – to track the predictions made by some of the more prominent bloggers in business, technology and entertainment. The pundits were horrified to see how badly they’d done!

And there was a small matter of a Democratic nomination.

July 2008
We announced our first official partnership - with Reuters. (and we felt all grown up!)

August 2008
August was all about the Olympics. Hubdub’s Olympic Prediction Center reached the front page of digg.com and had the predicted effect. And the servers didn’t crash

September 2008
We partnered with The Huffington Post (woo hoo!) and The UK Independent (they had faith that our UK users would come…). The excitement was almost too much!

October 2008
The October surprise wasn’t too surprising to Hubdubbers - we correctly predicted the Dow Jones tumble.

To cheer everyone up from the economic gloom, Hubdub introduced Forums and the debates were fierce!

November 2008
Election fever prevailed – and Hubdubbers accurately predicted the Electoral College votes split (apart from that pesky Nebraska one!)

We launched Hubdub in the UK (and had the predictable football vs soccer debate!).

December 2008
Users were seeing stars…when we introduced star levels and a new-look dashboard. Becoming a Hubdub God become a genuine life goal.

We launched our Newspundits blog and the annual Newspundits awards.

January 2009
We rounded the year off on a high when we  announced our Series A funding and all took a deep breath…ready for Year 2….bring it on!

Popularity: 9% [?]

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve successfully raised our first round of venture capital funding. It’s been a tough climate out there, I’m sure you’ll all agree (we pitched the day Lehman Bros went bust!) but we’re very excited to now be able to focus all our energies on improving and growing Hubdub even more. We want to thank you all for making Hubdub what it is today, and hope you’ll join us all on this next part of the Hubdub journey. It’s going to be awesome! Here’s the Press Release that we issued today:

Edinburgh, January 14th, 2009 - Daily reports of dire economic circumstances have not prevented , Hubdub.com, the Scottish-based web start-up, from securing £810,000 ($1.2m) in Series A funding.
In a downturn, more people stay at home and look for cheap entertainment. And that can only be a good thing for Hubdub – a website which allows users to predict the outcome of news events by staking virtual cash on the results.

In these difficult times, raising series A funding is indeed a feat in itself. But Hubdub has also successfully brought on board some big hitters in the European web scene.

Led by Pentech Ventures, the UK’s leading software VC company and Scottish Enterprise’s Scottish Co-Investment Fund, funding is also backed by a group of angel investors, including Rikki Tahta, CEO of Covestor.com; Simon Murdoch, CEO of friendsabroad.com and Tim Jackson, founder of QXL.com.

Since launching last year, Edinburgh-based Hubdub has garnered a substantial and loyal following. With a quarter of million unique visitors trading around 100,000 predictions per month, Hubdub has altered the way news is being discovered and interacted with. Some users are spending several hours a day on the site, with many of them confessing to a definite Hubdub “addiction”.

Currently partnered with Reuters, The Independent and Huffington Post, Hubdub will now focus on growing its partnership base and developing functionality to allow media partners to carry Hubdub prediction markets on their site. With each user generating hundreds of page impressions per month Hubdub technology is delivering social media type engagement to regular news content.

Marc Moens from Pentech says, “The news industry is currently seeing a structural change to their business. While off-line ad revenues are slumping, news media companies are aiming to build web businesses with significant user engagement. We see Hubdub as a key enabler for media companies to build that engagement around their content.” Marc Moens will be joining Hubdub’s board.

Andrew Sloane, Senior Investment Manager at Scottish Enterprise Investments, added: “This is an exciting investment for Scottish Enterprise, as it represents our first venture in prediction markets technology. This sector is still in its early stages, however we see considerable scope for expansion and development, and are confident that Hubdub has the capability to capitalise on these opportunities. We are delighted to be able to support such an innovative Scottish company alongside our partner Pentech Ventures”

Popularity: 10% [?]

2008 - You Read it Here First! (January 7th 2009)

Hubdub.com, a news prediction site, has been comparing the predictions for 2008 made by assorted media organisations - and awarded the FT’s “crack corp of pundits” top marks. More…

News Pundit Winners: who got it most right and most wrong? (January 7th 2009)

So, at the end of beginning of each year, the news pundits predict what’s new and what’s hot for the 12 months ahead, but who then holds them to account? News prediction site Hubdub took a look at the end of 2007/beginning of 2008 predictions made by news pundits for the year ahead. Which journalists and bloggers were right and which were wrong? And who got it most wrong and took away the illustrious prize of wooden spoon? More… 

Popularity: 8% [?]

Hubdub along with 34 other of the UK’s top digital/tech companies have been selected to go on Digital Mission to the South By South West Interactive (SXSWi) conference. The conference is in Austin, Texas and runs from the 13th to the 17th of March. It is considered one of the best tech conferences in the calendar.

According to TechCrunch, the 35 were selected from over 100 entrants. For more on Digital Mission and the list of all the companies attending click here. If any readers are going to SXSW then let us know. It would be great to meet up.

Popularity: 10% [?]

At Hubdub we have many markets covering all the nuisances of the potential event. We have a market asking which bible verse his bible will be opened to:

Presidential Inauguration: What verse will Barack Obama’s Bible be open to?

We are also curious if Barack Obama will use his middle name while taking the oath of office, most Hubdubbers feel he will:

Will Barack Obama use his middle name when taking the oath of office?

One of my personal favorite markets is asking about the infamous “Yes We Can” line that began in New Hampshire, swept the country with the video by Will I AM, and was chanted at the acceptance speech on election night. Currently more than half of the Hubdubbers feel he won’t use the line at all, but I think he will, it fits his style, the American people want to be told that “Yes We Can”:

Presidential Inauguration: How many times will President Obama use the phrase “Yes We Can”?

For those of you who are going to be in the crowd during this day, we have a market right up your alley, the National Weather Service measures the temperature on Inaugural Day and we have a market asking what our Hubdubbers feel it will be, you better hope they got a good bead on this one, they are calling for a very comfortable 35degrees:

Presidential Inauguration: What will be the temperature at noon as recorded by NWS?

Another market more tuned into those of you who will be braving the weather, while the rest of us watch from the comfort of our homes or offices, is this market asking How Many Words Long will the Inauguration Speech be, again here at Hubdub we seem to feel that President Obama will carry on for more than 2250 words:

Presidential Inauguration: How many words long will President Obama’s address be?

and for those of you were were wondering here are the shortest and longest speeches - George Washington’s second address was the shortest (135 words) and William Henry Harrison delivered the longest (8,495 words).
And before we let you go, we would like to ask those in attendance to help us out if at all possible. If you see someone throw a donut at Rick Warren please notify the category editor right away so we may settle this market:

Will Mega Church leader Rick Warren have a donut thrown at him before or on Inauguration Day?

and finally if you see Tom Hanks at the Inauguration and you give him your seat, you will be helping settle a very fun but silly market:

Will Tom Hanks be given a seat at Barack Obama’s inauguration?

In a note of seriousness, please be safe, have a great time, and take alot of pictures. You may send all the pictures directly to me at destry@hubdub.com and I will share them on Picasa for everyone to see. Have a great time, enjoy your moment of history, and remember this “Now is the time to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.”

Popularity: 18% [?]