TAKE YOUR CHANCES...
TechCrunch's redoubtable Michael Arrington reviews a new company called PicksPal today. When one reads about the company, it makes one ask, "what took them so long?"
Here's how Michael describes PicksPal,
"PicksPal is a free sports site where people “bet” on upcoming games. No money is involved. If they win, their point total goes up and they have bragging rights around the office.
Since launching about a year ago over 100,000 people have joined the site, making daily picks on just about every kind of sporting event in the U.S. - boxing, NFL football, pro football, bass fishing, ultimate fighting, basketball, baseball, etc. The site makes money from advertising."
So it's a "Wisdom of the Crowds" startup, but here's the twist:
"Recently, however, the PicksPal team noticed that a very small percentage of users tend to be correct in their picks significantly more often that they should be statistically. When they grouped these special users they found them to be a powerful predictive force."
So of course, the founders are moving to capitalize on this:
"Tom and his team figured out pretty quickly that there was a potentially massive business here. And next Tuesday they are going to start tapping into that business when they launch what they call “Genius Picks”. For $10, users can get access to the collective wisdom of the 30 best PicksPal players over the previous five weeks in a given sport, and get five predictions on upcoming games.
They’ve been running this internally for a while and the results are impressive."
It'll be interesting to see how this goes, but as one commenter to the post rightly points out:
Maybe the founders should shift the model to the stock market instead. What do you think?
September 19th, 2006 at 1:59 am
Top executives of both BetOnSports and SportingBet have been arrested in the US in the last few weeks/months. Online sports betting and the facilitation thereof is illegal in the US based on the highly outdated and over-protective Wire Act.
Think these boys should start moving their servers to the Bahamas."