Is it a good idea to encourage all employees to trade in these markets? Should insiders and/or highly uninformed people be allowed to trade? Do they help or hurt the market?

Today, organizations are exploring and taking advantage of different social networks such as blogs, wikis, collaborative filtering, and now, predictions markets. Prediction market is another technology that could be helpful to an organization in many ways. It can help generate predictions that efficiently aggregate many employees’ information and augment existing forecasting methods and provide insight into how organizations process information and how the same one flows within the organization

For predictions markets to work, even spread of information across the organization is recommended.
In markets where highly informed employees or insiders are allowed to trade some problems might occur:
• Employees from areas not related to the subject on the trading market will lose on average, and their incentives and motivation to trade will be reduced. Thus, the number of trades in the market will be hurt.
• Insiders or highly informed traders may also reveal highly protected information to the markets. They can also attempt to mislead the market about the outcomes in order to gain personal profit.

To avoid this problem and make the market work better, the organizations using prediction markets can try to evenly spread information across the organization, reducing the insider’s advantage. The organization could also do what happens in the stock market and prohibit insiders or group of employees highly informed about the subject in the market to trade in that specific market.

On the other hand, highly uniformed employees or employees who do not take the time to research and make and informed trade, sooner or later, will stop trading in the markets because they will have high probabilities to loose all what they have, and this will be an strong incentive for them to stop participating.

In what other industries or areas would Threadless’ community-driven product development model work well? And not so well?

Online social networks have become ubiquitous in the past few years. What forms of value do users get from these services and who is most likely to sign up on LinkedIn versus other sites?
Today, social networking has become deeply embedded in the lifestyles of all kinds of people. Through social networking, people can fulfill their desire to communicate better with the people they already know. They can also meet their need to become more popular and connect with a lot of people from different places, and social levels. People can also feel they are empowered to express their opinions, views, and knowledge about their topics of interest.

Some of the most common social network activities are the following:
• Posting messages
• Downloading music and videos
• Uploading music
• Updating personal Web sites or online profiles
• Posting photos
• Blogging
• Creating and sharing virtual objects
• Creating new characters
• Participating in collaborative projects
• Sending suggestions or ideas to Web sites
• Submitting articles to Web sites, and so on

In the last few years, there has been an explosive growth in social networking activities and sites that are competing for attention against television. Social Networking sites are positioned differently and try to target different segments of the market, which have different interests, needs, and lifestyles. For instance, sites such a LinkedIn are most likely to target the professionals and students segment of the market that are looking for to create their business networks while other sites such as Facebook and MySpace are likely to target the segment of the market that is looking for to satisfy their social needs by sharing their interests, connecting with old friends, and so on.

How do Wikipedia’s processes for creating and modifying articles ever lead to high-quality results?

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia created by volunteers. Many people have asked themselves how the Wikipedia model has motivated individuals to give away their time and effort to write articles. According to some experts, the incentives for contributors to write to the open content encyclopedia are similar to those of the scientific community. Like scientists, people seek to collaboratively identify and publish true facts about the world. However, the increased size of collaboration can lead to ambiguous results in quality. In general, the quality of Wikipedia articles vary depending on the relevance of the same one, and the overall quality of Wikipedia is very difficult to measure, but its content is undoubtedly very useful to the community.

A study conducted by Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman from Hewlett-Packard Labs(October 2007) found that high-quality articles in Wikipedia are distinguished from the rest by a larger number of edits and distinct editors. These findings are in contrast to observations of cooperative efforts in other domains where result quality does not necessarily increase with the number of collaborators.

Another important point leading to high quality results is that while it is difficult to eliminate vandalism, jokes, or entry of false information, the wiki technology makes easier to undo damage than to do damage to the encyclopedia. Due to the track of versions features it just takes few seconds to undo damage that might have taken hours or many minutes to do.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of implementing internal versus external employee blogs in a corporate setting? Are there certain industries where one of these strategies makes more sense?

Some of the benefits that external blogs can bring to a firm are the following:
• Blogs represent the lowest cost and effective communications channel with costumers.
• If companies are properly able to leverage benefits of this technology, they can create communities of products ambassadors that will improve sales and firm’s recognition.
• Blogs can show honesty and transparency within a firm to people outside the organization.
• They can help firms to get more knowledge from their external environment.
• They can also improve external communication and feedback with consumers, firm’s marketing and branding activities, and search engine position.

Internal blogging also offer the following benefits:
• They represent very strong communication and information sharing tools within the organization since any employee can participate at any time.
• Blogs can be used at every level of the organization; they can improve participation, collaboration, and learning. They also make easy to run projects with heterogeneous teams.
• They become the written memory of the organization, and speed up the transference of knowledge to make ideas flow easily.

Internal blogging is very useful in almost any industry because of the multiple benefits. External blogging also makes sense in most industries but might be very difficult to implement in some highly regulated and supervised industries such as investment banking, health care and pharmaceutics. Although many firms in these industries have already implemented some initiatives of social technologies, they usually require too much effort, time, and energy. It is true because regulatory entities are constantly watching companies within these industries, and posting content to blogs require many control mechanisms and corporate policies within firms to ensure compliance with regulations and avoid legal implications. In these regulated industries, firms should outweigh the benefits of using blogs against its costs before making a decision to implement this technology.

As a follow-up to Apple and the Mobile Industry subject, here is an article , from CNN Money that talks about the new iPhone OS coming up this summer. After reading about the many new cool features of this OS and how it seems to address the tastes of the pickiest users, I can not avoid to point innovation and creativity as some of the reasons why Apple is a very strong player that is increasing dominance in the mobile industry.

Has the digital music market irreversibly tipped in Apple’s favor?
Nowadays, it seems that more than ever consumers are looking for multi-functionality in a single device. Phones now include cameras, video cameras, recorders, web browsing, of course, media player functionality, among other capabilities. As of today, Apple has made the right strategic moves, especially, when it introduced Apple iPhone. The iPhone seems to have captured the best of the mobile capabilities and the iPod. These types of moves have helped Apple to stay ahead of the competition and keep its position as a leader of the digital music market. However, there are still ahead many battles to win for Apple. Mobile Network operators, record labels, handset maker are forming strategic alliances to try to defeat Apple’s dominance. In addition, other strong players from other industries are also trying to leverage their position in complementary industries to capture some value in the digital market. Moreover, the industry is still evolving, and there are many important technological and legal changes to come such as the rules that govern the DRM technology, which might change the rules and positions of this industry. Consequently, the digital music market has not irreversibly tipped in Apple’s favor yet, and if Apple wants to remain competitive on this growing market, it would need to keep being innovative, creative, flexible, and pro-active.