Tech Buzz Game - Yahoo! Research Labs, Yahoo!’s organization for advanced research in science and technology, has teamed with O’Reilly Media, the premier information source for leading-edge computer technologies, to develop a joint research project called the Tech Buzz Game, an online prediction market that allows consumers to forecast the popularity of technology concepts, products and trends. The game was introduced today at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. The Tech Buzz Game leverages search query volume and frequency on Yahoo! Search to measure a term’s popularity or “buzz.” It mirrors the functionality of the stock market, enabling participants to “buy” and “sell” virtual shares in their favorite technology terms based on their estimates of future value. The game, which is powered by NewsFutures (http://www.newsfutures.com), the leading provider of prediction markets software, utilizes new patent pending market and auction mechanisms invented at Yahoo! Research Labs by Dr. Gary William Flake, Yahoo!’s principal scientist, and Senior Research Scientist Dr. David Pennock. The Tech Buzz Game is divided into separate markets that fall into topic areas such as hardware, software, mobile and web. Each market pits rival technologies against one another. For example, the “Browser” market includes Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox among others. Participants would buy stock in the technology they believe will increase in search popularity. “The Tech Buzz Game is a fundamentally new type of online auction that will allow us to determine how well emerging trends can be predicted by the collective wisdom of crowds as correlated with Internet search terms,” said Yahoo!’s Dr. Flake. This has been added to Information Futures Markets Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.