Image via WikipediaWe are pleased to announce our new partnership with the UK Independent, one of the UK’s most innovative national newspapers. The Independent successfully relaunched independent.co.uk earlier this year improving user interaction through blogs and forums. We are now adding predictions to that mix.

Press release:

The Independent lets users make the news

The Independent has just partnered with a new prediction website to allow their users to predict the outcomes of news stories.

The prediction site, Hubdub, allows users to trade predictions with virtual money on the outcomes of breaking news stories and future events, with approximately 2 million Hubdub dollars traded daily. As part of a new, dedicated section within the site, The Independent generates questions for users to trade on based on the latest breaking news, ranging in topics from the current credit crunch to football to politics.

Additional tools and resources are also included to help build a community for The Independent within the site, http://www.hubdub.com/partners/theindependent. These include a “friends” application, comment capabilities, links to the top Independent stories of the day and widgets which are embedded in The Independent’s own website.

Finally, because Hubdub prediction markets aggregate thousands of trades, the site often produces accurate forecasts on the likelihood of future events. Beyond weighing in on the outcome, users are able to reference the site for up-to-the-minute information on the public’s predictions about breaking news from The Independent.

Jimmy Leach, editorial director for digital at the Independent said: ‘It’s a tremendously exciting partnership we’re beginning, enabling our millions of news junkie users to predict the outcome of both the serious and the trivial. There’s a tremendous fit between our audience and the addictive functionality of Hubdub and we’re looking forward to expanding the offering in the next few months.’

Examples of The Independent’s questions on Hubdub:
• Will UK inflation hit 6% this year?
• Will house prices continue to fall until the end of the year?
• Will Scotland be given the 2012 European Championships?
• Will Kevin Keegan be Newcastle manager by the end of the month?

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