I have completed a site design for the prediction market/bet/poll site. The purpose of this design was to have a clear vision of the result as well as to more clearly define all the features of the software which will need to be implemented.

The vision I have is to link the market, bet pool, and poll participants so that, for example, the betting pool payout size is adjusted based on market prices, market prices fluctuate based on poll participants choices, etc. All the forecast methods are intertwined and affect one another. I still have to work out the algorithms to make this work correctly. It most surely will be a guess and test process where I'll eventually find a sufficient solution.

The site design can be seen here: http://www.l1ghtm4n.com/PBM

The next step is to start writing the PHP code. The database design is already complete. I plan to start with a simple PHP front end and then move later on to an integration into drupal or wordpress. This project may be a little while coming as I have a contract I will be starting soon which is similar enough to this project that I don't want to encounter a conflict of intellectual property. Even so, I anticipate about 2 weeks full time work to get the site mockup running.

If anyone else is interested in the project, I am open to talks with investors and potential partners (web dev guys?).

After reading "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki, I became interested in prediction markets as a forecasting tool. After using some public prediction markets, I thought their ease of use could be improved upon. Since then I have been hard at work at designing a forecasting tool which uses parallel interfaces, namely a prediction market, betting pool, and simple poll, to gather event occurrence probabilities. If designed correctly, this model of forecasting will allow for wider participation and greater accuracy in probability.