The Industry Standard Team Blog RSS

Do prizes really matter?

Eric Hill — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:59:07 -0800

For the last 6 weeks, you've probably noticed a serious lack in responsiveness to the Prediction Market's prize program. Behind the scenes, we had some unexpected bug issues that have delayed the awarding of prizes to players of the Prediction Market in a serious way. This bug was serious enough to require extensive work to simply get accurate reports for November (and October).

The good news is, the bug has been repaired, so December will bring the awards back to a normal release schedule. The bad news is, we won't get November finalized until the end of this week. Even though the bug has been repaired, our previous database numbers are having to be recreated for the month of November, and it's having to be done manually.

During all of this chaos these last six weeks, I've come to ask myself (probably out of frustration, but it's worth asking), "Do people care about the prizes?"

I know for a fact everyone cares about the ranking, and their performance. I check mine daily, and I use my networth at the top of the page to quickly guage if any of my predictions have swung wildly overnight.

But, some of our montly winners have confided to me that they didn't even know there was a prize program.

We've enlisted some serious firepower to make the gaming aspects of the prediction market our next major push in early 2009. Some time between March and May (we're finalizing the calendar now) we'll be rolling out a series of pure-gaming updates that we believe will make the markets a total blast to play, and increase engagement several fold. I'm not going to go into details here right now, but rest assured, I can't wait until we can get these new pieces in place.

But, I digress... I ask you, for those that care to read this: Do you really play for prizes? Did you start playing only because of them? Would you even notice if they disappeared?

Just curious. . .

(photo credit: CBS Interactive)

October's prediction market top percentage gainer

Eric Hill — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:11:24 -0800

October's prize winner for having the top % gain month/month is Tom Holowka with a healthy 201% monthly gain (off of one massive bet). Some of the leaderboard regulars have crept into the mix again, too, which is nice to see. Below is a breakdown of the top ten performers for the month.

name	start	end	% change
Tom H	S$196,517.86	S$592,373.34	201.43%
Denis Lafont-Tr...	S$99,102.06	S$221,579.36	121.58%
Stephane Cheikh	S$83,389.44	S$184,735.66	84.74%
Lenny T	S$77,524.58	S$159,931.75	59.93%
Brian Connelly	S$52,648.80	S$159,896.84	59.90%
Chris Allison	S$57,811.67	S$159,087.43	59.09%
Rick Onyshko	S$52,786.57	S$153,006.80	53.01%
betsy schiffman	S$205,414.97	S$307,755.47	49.82%
Lev Danilov	S$302,893.56	S$438,564.99	44.79%
Marc Chiang	S$803,441.17	S$1,131,642.39	40.85%

Congrats Tom! Check back soon for the November totals. We'll be updating the other relevant prize pages to record this win shortly.

What's going on with the prizes? The drama, explained

Eric Hill — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:36:34 -0800

Apologies to all who have been dialing in to find out who won October, and who won November.

The winner for October was incredibly difficult to contact - something we've never experienced before. Usually, players are eager to send over the required paperwork so we can ship things off in a timely manner.

This time around, however, we had an excrutianingly difficult time communicating with some of the players, which slowed the entire process down to a gringing halt.

The winners of the last two months will be posted here in the next 24 hours.

Thanks for your patience.

Now featuring: charts

Eric Hill — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:41:22 -0700

Last night we rolled out charts for the predictions. The charts show the price history, or the community consensus, across a horizontal timescale. The graphs default to the monthly view, but may be rebuilt using different time ranges. If you run your mouse across the blue line in the chart, you'll see the price reflected for that time period.

There is a known bug in Firefox 3 on Macs (only) that causes the chart to display incorrectly when it first loads. Upon refresh, the chart repairs itself. After much research, it appears to be a defect found in the Flash plugin for FF3/Mac users. There is no known fix that we're aware of, so hopefully a future Flash update will rectify the issue.

Major site update

Eric Hill — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:55:55 -0700

On Tuesday, October 7, we rolled out a major release with several important site enhancements. It has taken a little while for the dust to settle here, so apologies for the delay in the official announcement.

Here is what is new on thestandard.com:

Story “Carousel”
Across the top of nearly every page on the site, we now have an area directly under the site navigation where we can promote important news and predictions that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. The tool is capable of holding an infinite amount of content, but we generally keep ours loaded with about 10 pieces of content.

Home and News pages
The most obvious update for most users was the new homepage update. The news stories now all contain graphical components, which are actually attached at the article level, yet used in multiple places (Home, News, Article and Carousel). This new image system gives our editors much more power to add visual interest to the stories they publish.

We’ve also added the Associated Press as a content partner to add additional scope to our tech coverage.

Article level
As I mentioned earlier, we now have an image system in place that makes adding images to content incredibly easy for our editors. Any image can be put into an article and it will automatically become resized, and compressed, appropriately. At the same time, all of the necessary thumbnails are generated on the fly should the article be promoted elsewhere on the site. And, most importantly, if a user is at the article level and he/she clicks the image, the original will be put into a modal window to allow for closer inspection. This is especially important for information-rich graphs and charts.

Misc
There was a lot of optimization done under the hood and CSS cleanup, which was unnoticed by 99.9% of our users (the other .01% being ourselves). Know that we are always striving to optimize and improve the site to ultimately improve everyone's experience.

(photo credit: mugley)

September's prediction market top percentage gainer

Eric Hill — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:47:19 -0700

September's prize winner for having the top % gain month/month is Chris Sternal-Johnson. Below is a breakdown of the top ten performers for the month.

name	start	end	% change
Chris Sternal-Johnson	S$485,913.74	S$710,963.02	46.31%
John Curran	S$353,030.96	S$483,283.51	36.90%
Tom H	S$150,952.50	S$196,517.86	30.19%
Bradley Baker	S$26,014,215.70	S$31,562,958.09	21.33%
David Kuan	S$8,468,399.89	S$10,250,174.29	21.04%
Matt Healey	S$240,328.42	S$289,688.50	20.54%
Daniel Fort	S$3,512,891.25	S$4,212,689.75	19.92%
Abner Germanow	S$157,238.98	S$187,905.16	19.50%
Alexander Hughes	S$144,831.80	S$170,749.12	17.89%
betsy schiffman	S$174,432.50	S$205,414.97	17.76%

Congratulations, Chris! We hope you enjoy your Dash Express GPS Navigator. You'll be eligible to win another prize in three months.

While we prep the site for a major site update tonight, let me tell you all ahead of time that October's prize will the sweet Logitech Squeezebox Boom. Here's a review.

New E-mail alerts for closed (judged) predictions

Eric Hill — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:17:01 -0700

Today we rolled out a new E-mail alert so that when a prediction is judged on the site, players that had open bets with the prediction that was judged will be notified.

For example, let's say I had bet S$10,000 on the Dow Jones Index prediction. Then, something occurred in the market that triggered an early judgment, but I was away from the site that day. I would then receive an E-mail within a ten minute timeframe of the judgment letting me know that the prediction had been decided. If I'm curious as to how I performed, I can go to the site to learn the results by clicking a handy link in the E-mail.

If, for some reason, I didn't want this type of E-mail alert, I could always go to my notifications screen and disable the service. We plan on making a mobile version of the same alert in the very near future.

August's winner, and a little more

Eric Hill — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:48:06 -0700

The August 2008 winner of The Standard's prediction market prize is Kevin Railsback. He made one all-or-nothing bet on the 3G jailbroken iPhone prediction, while others exercised caution. Kevin's big gamble proved to be fruitful.

"I could have either been in the top few, or the bottom few, depending on how that went," Kevin told me earlier today after learning of August's outcome. "I would have had -49995 if I lost that [bet]."

Until we have a leaderboard on-site that shows everyone's percentage gain day-to-day, I'll be posting the top-ten gainers here at the end of each month.

Here's how August fared:

name	start	end	% change
David Kuan	S$3,879,966.22	S$8,468,399.89	118.26%
Kevin Railsback	S$1,741,677.27	S$2,943,784.59	69.02%
Mark Zimmerman	S$419,714.81	S$528,204.33	25.85%
Eric Hill	S$806,686.97	S$999,909.81	23.95%
Wess Eric Sharpe	S$384,878.95	S$473,058.47	22.91%
Bradley Baker	S$21,296,587.53	S$26,014,215.70	22.15%
Marc Chiang	S$641,186.95	S$781,890.10	21.94%
Matt Healey	S$200,535.89	S$240,328.42	19.84%
Daniel Fort	S$2,938,136.62	S$3,512,891.25	19.56%
Chris Sternal-J...	S$422,281.68	S$485,913.74	15.07%

David Kuan was not eligible to win the August prize according to the rules of the game (David won in June, so he has to wait 3 months before he can be eligible to win again). You'll probably notice that I'm on the list, too, but I'm also not eligible to win any prizes for obvious reasons.

Congrats, Kevin, and congrats to David and everyone else on this list on your really outstanding performance!

Team blog take off

Eric Hill — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:40:33 -0700

After a bit of a delay, The Standard’s team blog is finally here. FTW!

Over the past six months, we have found ourselves time and time again discussing various aspects of the PM (prediction market) with some of our top players. We never really had a good place to do it, however. One minute the discussion would cover the intricacies or semantics of, say, jailbreaking an iPhone, the next we would be creating PM wishlists and sharing product enhancement ideas back and forth.

So, until we have a proper forum, right now we’ll be doing a lot of the PM functionality discussions with core users over here. We really value your feedback and look forward to the future discussions we’ll have.

Also, the Team Blog will be a place where we announce new site features, events, programs, jobs, and other tidbits as they relate to the site, the team, and your experiences at thestandard.com.

Image Credit: NASA