About the European startup scene:
Nigel Eccles is not dead.
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Experts trading on prediction markets
Top tier sports, national elections, and Hollywood releases are all arenas in which all the information one might analyze is already pretty much public. There are many methods for predicting these outcomes, and I wouldn’t argue that prediction markets have a huge advantage in these arenas. The markets where I expect PMs to have an advantage are where there are experts who, given an incentive, could share (or discover) information that’s not already public, and where you don’t already have an enormous crowd trying to figure out the answer. Certainly it’s fun to bet on your team or party, or to develop expertise on how the public will react to particular movies, but it’s not clear to me that we get better predictions in those areas.
This is also one of my criticisms of the Servan-Schreiber paper. While I believe there are probably markets in which the availability of serious money to be won could attract people who’d be willing to spend research in order to get a better answer, NFL sports isn’t an arena where spending thousands of dollars will help you uncover facts that aren’t already in the mainstream media.
When we talk about CEO markets, or product release dates, or market penetration numbers, we’re talking about [prediction] markets in which the information isn’t already out there, and some people will spend time and effort to ferret out relevant facts for reputation (we see this often on Foresight Exchange) or money.
Ladbrokes data scandal: personal information of millions of customers offered for sale to national newspaper
Ladbrokes suffered a mighty embarrassment, earlier this week, and 4,500,000 customers had cause to get nervous, when the Mail On Sunday revealed that the UK uber-bookmaker’-s customer database had been offered to them for sale:
The confidential records of millions of British gamblers who bet with top bookmaker Ladbrokes have been offered for sale to the Mail On Sunday. The huge data theft is now at the centre of a criminal investigation after this newspaper was given the personal information of 10,000 Ladbrokes customers and offered access to its database of 4.5 million people in the UK and abroad.
(more…-)
This is no fake claim, as attested to by the fact that a “-taster”- of the full database was handed over by the culprit, fully ten thousand names and highly confidential personal details for the purpose of whetting the potential client’-s appetite.
Hey-ho. The gambling industry at its predictable worst.
These incidents are not new –- I reported on an occurrence a few years ago in which an online gambling industry leader touted a database of 100,000 UK players to the highest bidder on his forum. Neither are they remotely hard to believe- while the average customer service representative might struggle to access his company’-s full customer list, an employee higher up the chain in the IT department should have no such difficulty –- a quick copy, paste and save…-and it’-s time to start lining up the buyers. I daresay the names of four and a half million bona fide gamblers would fetch a very fine price.
And while our data watchdog, the ICO, huffs and puffs its righteous indignation, I’-m sure they know there really is very, very little you can realistically do about this. Just one employee with access is all you need.
It serves as a reality check: when you put your details online, they are just that: online. Assume that, at some future point, someone will be hawking your phone number, email and physical address to the highest bidder.
I commented also in my Ladbrokes data theft post, and see also the Racing Post’-s Ladbrokes reassure users over data protection article.
Oh well, I don’-t know- maybe privacy is overrated. 
Mike Robbs blog on PR, media, betting exchanges, and other British things (mint sauce on red meat, etc.)
When he is not reading Midas Oracle, Mike Robb works at BetFair on the Right2Bet campaign —-as you all know.
BetFair (via Right2Bet) are furious at the new French gambling laws.
Right2Bet (operated by BetFair):
A Senate hearing on Tuesday looked at ways in which the French authorities could make it more difficult for operators not licensed in France from offering their products to French citizens.
They are now looking at adding wording to the new gambling bill, set to ‘-open up’- the market in time for the World Cup this summer, that makes it illegal for any French-based company from taking advertising or even simply linking to certain sites.
Those sites based inside France, including multi-nationals with French subsidiares, notably Google, found to be ‘-aiding and abetting’- (no pun intended) foreign operators could face fines of up to €100,000.
This is just another example of the French bill being a facade. They want to appear like they are liberalising their market, to fit in with EU rules, but clearly they are going to make it as hard as possible for foreign operators to offer their services to value-deprived French citizens, and are even looking to make it difficult for those who do apply for a French license.
At what point is someone going to wake up and say ‘-enough is enough’-? Don’-t wait for someone else to do it, sign our petition today and add your voice to the thousands of EU citizens already calling for fairness in online gambling.
France = Communist China
France will soon block access to the BetFair and InTrade websites.
Gambling operators that are not be licensed by France will have their web access blocked for the French public. The license would require that servers be located within French territory.
France = Communist China
The Internal Revenue Service is examining whether equity swaps help banks avoid taxes by masking who really owns the shares underlying the instruments.
Jim Rogers on commodities, the commodity bubble, gold, the gold bubble, crude oil, the crude oil bubble, China, the China bubble – etc.
ROBIN HANSON, WE DONT GIVE THE FIRST FIG ABOUT YOUR DEBATE WITH THAT MENCIUS MOLDBUG.
Social betting In Italy -> vedrete.it
I am told that vedrete.it is similar to nostradamical.com, with a stricter method, though:
- they don’-t show results in advance-
- they ask twice to predict, one before knowing the results, one just after, to learn the differences.