With all the furor around the battle of the launch conferences (that we kinda got involved with too) let’s remind ourselves what it’s all about: the start-ups. They’ve slaved away for months for this important moment, and every company can only launch once so it’s hugely important to get as much from all that effort as possible. We know, we’ve done it.

Several awards will be given to lucky members of the 52 hopefuls judged by impressive panels of the industry elite (including Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Mark Cuban, Om Malik and Marissa Mayer amongst others). The top award is the TechCrunch50 Best in Show winner, and all 52 companies are eligible.

Think you know what makes a good start-up? Can you predict who the judges will pick? Make your predictions here. The current forecast is shown below.

TechCrunch50: Which company will win Best in Show?

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After over a month tracking the predictions of some of America’s top pundits, today we are launching PunditWatch. TechCrunch covered the launch.

Bear Sterns is doing just fine shouted Jim Cramer just before they got bought by JP Morgan for $2. Google could hit $2,000 claimed Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider just as their stock price peaked and started its long slide to under $500. Hillary Clinton is going to lose in New Hampshire claimed just about every commentator before her dramatic come back.

These are just some of the examples the recent examples of ‘experts’ failing miserably to predict future events. But we still listen to them. Are these isolated examples or does the seer/sucker theory hold true (”No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, seers will find suckers”)?

The Pundits

Well now we will find out. PunditWatch’s mission is to track the predictions of public commentators to see how they perform. Initially we are going to select 10 commentators from the fields of Politics, Entertainment, Sport and Technology. The pundits are:

• Politics: Chris Matthews (MSNBC), Pat Buchanan (MSNBC, NBC), David Brooks (PBS, NYT)
• Entertainment: Perez Hilton, Nikki Finke (Deadline Hollywood Daily), DListed
• Sport: Peter King
• Technology: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider

There were plenty more we wanted to add but after exhaustive investigation we found that they don’t ever in fact make any real testable predictions. We do however plan to add a second wave of pundits to this list so do comment with your suggestions.

How it all works

We have created a Hubdub account for each of the pundits (for example the TechCrunch user id is techcrunch_pw).

1. Every Monday morning we will post up a round of all of their previous week’s predictions, a look at their performance and also a call for readers to be on the look out for them spotting new predictions.
2. During that week each time a pundit makes a prediction we will place H$10 on it from their Hubdub account.
3. If the question doesn’t exist we will create it with an estimate of the correct probabilities. We will then invite some of the top Hubdub forecasters to make predictions in order to set the prices. Then when the prices have settled down we will place a prediction for the pundit from their account.
4. We will update the PunditWatch blog with a post to say that the prediction has been placed.

Pundits can make anything from zero to three predictions per week. If they make more than three then we will ignore the later ones. After analysing many of these pundit’s predictions it is clear we are going to have to give some interpretation to their predictions to make them testable (hey, if they don’t like that then they can just start making real concrete predictions!). We will have to feel these out as we go along. One point is that if a pundit reports rumors then we will treat these as a prediction. If they don’t think the rumors are likely to be true then why report them?

Click here to check PunditWatch out.

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Recent analysis conducted for ReadWriteWeb has shown that the presence of Tech stories on Digg has halved every year for the past 3 years. They found the percentage of most popular stories that are Tech on the front page were:

1st Week in March 2006: 75.72%

1st Week in March 2007: 37.89%

1st Week in March 2008: 19.78%

Get over it, we’re mainstream now

The reason for the drop is pretty clear as Digg tries to make itself more mainstream, potentially in preparation for a sale. In last night’s town hall event Kevin and Jay pretty much seemed to be say “Get over it, we’re mainstream now”. So what will the percentage of tech stories in most popular be in March 2009 compared with March 2008? If the current rate of halving continues it will be around 9%. However, I don’t often see tech on the front page of Yahoo News so if that is the aspiration it could be even less.

Currently the forecast is around 12-18%, although some are forecasting a even steeper drop. What do you think, is there a future for tech stories in Digg?

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By Nigel (Technology Editor)

There are tons of rumours that Digg is going to get sold, then Yahoo Buzz launches and now the market is forecasting Google is going to buy them. Do we think Digg will stay independent?

Who will buy Digg by end of June?

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“Making predictions is hard, especially about the future” said Yogi Berra but that doesn’t stop us trying.

ValleyWag and ReadWriteWeb have already announced their predictions for 2008 and they make for fun reading. The first golden rule to making new year predictions is to get the balance right between unobvious (ValleyWag’s prediction that the WSJ goes free didn’t exactly require Nostradamus like powers) but at the same time not too unlikely. There is definite kudos for nailing long shot predictions however you don’t want to end up with a list like Wired’s 2007 predictions (Google hits $1,000, Digg becomes the new Friendster and dads become biologically irrelevant).

John Battelle did much better with his 2007 predictions (YouTube to be integrated, Amazon to move into web services and Google to get significant negative press), which Robert Scoble recently reviewed. Of course he sometimes uses the second golden rule of making predictions which is to keep them vague and/or widely applicable (e.g. one major internet company will screw up on privacy/trust).

My modest suggestion for would be predictors would be that when making predictions ensure they are precise, testable and attached to a probability. The last one means we might be a bit more forgiving if it is a long-shot prediction. So taking ReadWriteWeb’s (RWW) and ValleyWag’s (VW) lists, and adding in some of my own (Hubdub) here are my predictions for 2008:

100% likely: Wall Street Journal to drop the pay wall (VW), Facebook does not get valued in a transaction at greater than $15 billion (Hubdub)

80% likely: Zoho to be acquired (RWW), Digg to be acquired (RWW & VW), SixApart gets acquired (RWW & VW), Facebook to remain independent (VW), Linden Labs to remain independent (Hubdub)

60% likely: YouTube announces HD (VW), AOL gets spun out (VW), Twitter remains independent (VW), Technorati enters the deadpool (VW), Tumblr to be acquired (RWW)

40% likely: Twitter to be acquired (RWW), Facebook to release a browser (RWW), Google Open Social to be a failure (RWW), Yahoo! has a major lay-off (VW), Perez Hilton’s TV show gets cancelled (VW)

20% likely: Facebook to decline in popularity (RWW),  Microsoft to buy Technorati (RWW), Google to hit $800 (VW), Jason Calacanis starts another project (VW), Microsoft buys Yahoo! (Hubdub)

Of course if all else fails and you get them all wrong you can always use the third golden rule: Brazen it out and forget all about your predictions.

Any one want to add to the list (or bid the percentages up and down)?

UPDATE: John Battelle has now published a rich list of predictions for 2008.

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