I really like prediction markets. The other day I saw a tweet from Fred Wilson that opened my eyes to a nice new site based on the concept. It's called Hubdub and I highly recommend you give it a try.
The concept is simple. Users come up with statements about events that will happen in the future, and then other users buy and sell 'shares' in the outcome for those statements. The value of each share depends on the popularity of that answer at a given time. If you hold the share until the outcome of the question then you either get the return promised at the time you bought it or you lose the lot. It's a simple concept, but it's been proven to be very good at predicting outcomes.
Hubdub have got some other nice features down too. See below for a nice embeddable banner that shows one of my bets. And they've got a nice Twitter integration too. I think prediction markets are going to be really important in the future, and I'll be really interested to see where Hubdub goes next. Want a go? Try my LHC question below!
