“Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant-better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.”

- James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of Crowds”

What is Crowdcast?

For participants, Crowdcast is an engaging application that lets them express their beliefs about future outcomes of key metrics. For managers, Crowdcast is a real-time read on the pulse of the business.

Crowdcasts are better than forecasts

At its core, Crowdcast has a patented prediction market-powered knowledge aggregation engine. A prediction market is a speculative information exchange, similar to a stock market, where participants forecast, or bet, on what they think will happen using virtual currency. The individual forecasts are aggregated into a crowd forecast, or crowdcast, which is made available to decision markers.

Unlike traditional forecasts, which contain the knowledge of just a few people, crowdcasts contain the knowledge of experts (say VP of Sales) as well as that of people in Marketing, R&D, and Customer Service. Moreover, crowdcasts are free from bias and spin, which so often creeps into traditional forecasts due to poor communication channels and misaligned incentives.

A crowdcast is much more than just a number

Participants express their beliefs by selecting a range that captures where they believe the true outcome will fall. Crowdcast aggregates these beliefs into a sort of average, expressed as a crowd mean and a confidence interval. Participants also give their bet a weight — if a participant is confident in her prescience, she will bet more of her cash.

Take a unit sales crowdcast, for example. Say its mean is currently 1,000 +/-120. These values are a sort of average — some participants bet lower, some higher. Moreover, the confidence interval is a statement about consensus. A smaller confidence interval means most of the participants are in relative agreement about the outcome.

Unparalleled transparency

A crowdcast is composed of many pieces of relevant and complementary knowledge. When participants place their bets, they are encouraged to qualitatively explain their points of view. This enables management to understand not only how a metric is trending, buy also why.

For all this to work, participants must be able to share information without consequences. How do we ensure that the knowledge embodied in your crowdcast is free of bias and spin? By anonymizing the individual bets.

Information flow velocity

Crowdcasts have a remarkable property: at any time, they represent all available information about a given metric.

Say you’re crowdcasting market share for a new product, which stands at 18%. One of your sales engineers sees that a competing product is having lots of quality issues. He believe that his product will benefit to the tune of 3-4% in market share gains. Crowdcast incents him to share this knowledge as soon as possible, because the market doesn’t yet “know” about these developments so he’d stand to see a good return on his bet.

Not all data is for everyone

We realize some data is confidential, which is why we’ve made it easy for stakeholders to restrict access to certain metrics.