Tech Companies Draw on 'Wisdom of the Crowds'

An anonymous reader writes "News.com is carrying an article on a 'mini-conference' held at Yahoo's HQ this past Wednesday. The get-together put representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and HP together to talk about their experiments with predictive networks. The 'wisdom of the crowds' allows these companies to make use of the collective knowledge their employees hold to answer important questions for the company." From the article: "David Pennock, a principal research scientist at Yahoo Research, said the company has created a currency called a Yootle. It's described as a 'scorekeeping system for favors owed.' Pennock offered as an example a programmer offering to write a piece of code for a few Yootles. Or, when organizing a dinner outing, one employee could use an internal SMS tool to bid 2 Yootles for Italian and 4 Yootles for Mexican. 'If you don't get to go to the restaurant you want to, you get compensation' in Yootles, he said. Related to Yootles is Yahoo Research's experiment with a fantasy prediction market for technology called the Tech Buzz Game. It's a modified version of software licensed from NewsFutures in conjunction with O'Reilly Media and features topics like Atlantic hurricanes and portable media devices. Winners are those who predict how popular a topic will be on Yahoo Search. "

Comments

Microsoft believes in community efforts?

[JohnnyComeLately]

Isn't this the same company that scoffs at similar situations that result in source code being written, re-written, etc For example, open source which results in Linux? It's a bit of an irony.

Although, they've done this many times before. Take part of something well respected and has community involvement (Java, etc) and then consume their efforts later. I'd be very careful what I share with Microsoft. Not because I don't like them, but because of a very long track record.

Other than that little tidbit, it sounds like a great idea. I try and get my sister companies to help out each other, but everyone is always so focused on their own piece of the pie. Harvard Business Review (December 06) had an interesting write up ( Managing the Right Tension) which talks about the competing priorities of making collaborative efforts that help the community but hurt your individual unit. They use it in the sense of cross-organizational groups, but it's still a concept you could apply to industries. How often do you seen companies move on an opportunity to help the whole industry at their own expense?