(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

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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…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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