Web 2 Ireland

Foretal, a new site based in Malta using IP developed in Ireland has just launched. It is built around users making predictions and voting on the predictions of others. The cunning twist is that you can do either part for free or for money.

Betting sites like PaddyPower are very popular in Ireland but they currently don't provide a way for you to propose things to bet on. Foretal allows you to do it on anything. Many of the predictions on the site are currently either politics or sport but I expect the range to increase as people realise that the possibilities are unlimited.

The way it works is quite simple. Each time you vote on a prediction for free, you get a credit. Make five credits and you can post your own prediction for free. If you prefer, you can pay €5 to make a prediction and others can vote yes/no for money too. Once the closing date has passed, some of the money that has been bet is dispersed to those who voted correctly and to the predictor.

The site itself looks beautiful and the user interface is very easy to understand but painfully slow. I honestly love this site since I was looking to bet on the outcome of some reality TV show recently but couldn't find it on PaddyPower. Some of the things I can imagine people predicting and voting on are:

• Environmental disasters
• Junta evictions
• Deaths and marriages of famous people
• Court case outcomes
• Election outcomes in other countries

Win/Lose is very simply done on the basis of coverage by three web-sites. The first two are from a drop down list of news organisations like the BBC and you can decide the third one.

The mix of free/pay is a very smart move with the free side reminding me a little of Jyte. The requirement to vote before you can predict for free will drive up usage. The two things I'd like to see added are widgets so I can show what I'm predicting/voting on my blog/MySpace and RSS feeds for new predictions from each of the categories.

You may be wondering about the Malta angle. According to Julian Ellison it is because Malta has the best on-line gaming regulatory framework. As with all of these sites, people in the USA cannot legally use it.

I've made my first prediction. See if you can figure out which one it is.

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Comment posted by Julian Ellison
at 10/3/2007 11:44:34 AM

Thanks Conor sorry to hear that you founds things slow, we'll look into that, but nonetheless thanks for your very kind remarks.

Incidently, if you look at the public profile of your prediction, you can find two links. One which gives you an RSS feed, and the other as a normal link. They are:

For RSS:
http://www.foretal.com:80/foretal/action/sitePredictionAction?mtc=predictionRSSInfo&prediction_id=73

For Blog link:
http://www.foretal.com:80/foretal/action/sitePredictionAction?mtc=predictionBlogInfo&prediction_id=73

The very kind people at CMP and O’Reilly have offered some free tickets for Irish bloggers to attend Web2Expo in Berlin from November 5th to 8th. Each of these tickets is worth €1100 so this is a big deal. We have OKed it with them to make the first two tickets available here as a pair.

Of course we’re not going to make it easy for you, so you have to do a little bit of work. Rather than just putting all the names in a hat and randomly picking one, we are going to have a little competition.

This is the deal; the Irish (or Ireland-based) blogger who makes the best suggestion for an original Web Application with an Irish focus will win the tickets. A few simple rules would make sense:

• “An Irish Facebook” is not a good enough suggestion
• The suggestion should be a paragraph of text with “what” and “why”
• You MUST seriously intend going. Wasting these tickets would be criminal
• You can give the second ticket away but offer it back if you can’t find a taker
• “Best” is entirely at the discretion of the judges
• It would be nice (but is not compulsory) to blog about this competition
• It would be nice (but is not compulsory) to blog about Web2Expo if you win
• The winning suggestion will be blogged here along with the winner’s name
• “Blogger” includes company bloggers, not just personal blogs
• The closing date for suggestions is Sunday October 7th
• The winner will be announced by Tuesday October 9th
• E-mail your suggestions (or questions) to Web2Ireland Editor

For those of you who don’t win, we will be publishing a discount code shortly which will reduce the price of a standard ticket.

A friend of mine in London met some people selling Viagra over the 'net last week. Last year they claim to have made £750,000 clear profit with a team of three people, and all through deft manipulation of their meta-data to get them up the Google rankings. And there we all are worrying about business models. When I hear stories like this, I do wonder whether I am making my business life more complicated than it needs to be, but in the spirit of openness, here's what we're doing so you can judge for yourself:

Whatever happened to Tablane? Some of you may remember the browser we released a couple of years ago and our aspiration to make Internet research more productive. It’s still the only browser with a five star user rating on Download.com, but, we've taken in just €100 in revenue from our TClipper tool and decided to go in a different direction. We are now collaborating with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute of NUI Galway using some of their semantic smarts to build a new type of document search platform. It's all very buggy and alpha at the moment, but it's interesting. Hats off to the Border Midlands and West Assembly for helping to fund this through their voucher scheme.

InTimeMedia, our mobile technology business, has been doing steady work for the BBC and is looking for investment and new customers. We got Innovation Partnership funding with Enterprise Ireland back in April which was handy. We've created an excellent framework for application development and can literally script new applications in minutes, plus our ability to synchronise apps with broadcast programmes has big wow factor. But the broadcasting industry in the UK has been in a flap over dodgy phone-ins, and corporate restructuring which slowed things. It looks like we're coming out of that now, and we've started approaching the Irish market too, so fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, have you been to Foretal.com? This exciting venture has had its technology developed in Ireland, funded by angels, but licensed its IP to an operational company in Malta. Why? Because Malta has the best on-line gaming regulatory framework, and boy, is it rigorous. Foretal — a portal, foretelling the future — is a social site for people with an interest in the future. You can make predictions, and vote on the predictions of others. You can do this for free or for cash. We opened it up after two years of development last week. Your registrations and comments would be much appreciated. It's very exciting, and potentially a customer for the platform we're developing with DERI. Check it out.

Lastly, we've just completed a left field project for Somerset House in London in conjunction with two artists Langlands and Bell. It's called Superactivei2i and involves a 3D model of the courtyard of Somerset House, links to flash movies, avatars, chat features and 'see what I see' functionality whereby someone can control what someone else is seeing in their browser. We used Westport based AMT3D to laser scan the courtyard and build the model, while Norwegian company myVR supplied the cutting edge 3D streaming technology. Best to use IE7.0 with pop-ups turned on for best effect (and doesn't work on the Mac yet).

Probably be easier to sell Viagra wouldn’t it!?