It was actually hardly a surprise that Akamai, which provides Content Delivery Network services to companies, beat earnings expectations. All things Net have looked solid of late including Google, Amazon, and Overstock. Add to this the revelation that Internet ad spending has stopped shrinking (TechCrunch) and you have the makings of a very strong secular growth story firing on all cylnders for all parts of the ecosystem. Granted, growth will be slower than in a solid economy and Akamai was careful to  be cautious about forward prospects. But all told, not a bad day for CEO Paul Sagan and his team.

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Under the hood, Piqqem has been tracking trends across key demographic groups in our user base. I'll be commenting on them periodically here. One that jumped out at me today was this gem --  among Piqqem's female users, the most highly rated stock was Apple and the least highly rated was Dillards, the department store chain. This tells us a lot. Department stores have been struggling for some time. Witness the recent cutbacks at Macy's. Specialty retailers have, as well, but the most focused ones have weathered the downturn relatively well and maintained a stronger rebound position in the continuing secular shift away from high-end unified shopping experiences to mid-to-high specialized shopping experiences. Specialty retailers that have been able to connect well with non-teenage women have done fairly well, in some cases -- witness the relatively decent results from William-Sonoma. And while Apple has seen sales growth in its chain stores level off, I submit that a big reason why Apple has held strong is due to the attraction its products, stores, and services hold to women beyond the teenage years. Call me wrong but my focus group (my wife) went Apple a couple of years ago and now I worry any time she hits the mall with an Apple store. On the other hand, she loathes department stores of all stripes (such as Dillards). The upshot? Sell well to women of college age or older, make your products sticky (Chico's and Ann Taylor  had problems with that) and you might do OK in this environment.

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That would be me. My name is Alex Salkever. You can Google me and learn about what I've done in the past. Short version - I worked on Wall Street helping hedge fund managers with their research for the past four years. Prior to that, I spent four years as the Technology Editor at BusinessWeek.com.

At Piqqem, I am going to be helping the company synthesize all your picks into interesting articles and insights that will help you and others use the power of the crowd to get a leg up on the stock markets. I'm very excited to start doing this, being something of a stock geek.

My arrival marks something of a passage for Piqqem as we feel we have a very solid product at this point and are looking to grow our user base significantly and quickly. So I'll be doing a number of things in my blog posts. First, I'll be explaining new and existing Piqqem features and answering user posts and questions. Second, I'll be posting interesting information gleaned from Piqqem user picks and commenting / analyzing that information. Lastly, I will be pointing to interesting investment posts in the blogosphere and in other places, mostly focused on sentiment stock picking and variants on stock selection and rating using crowd inputs or assessments.

I hope you have enjoyed using Piqqem thus far and look forward to working with all of you in 2009, a year when picking winners will be harder then ever due to the wild volatility of the market. Feel free to drop a comment or suggestions.

Piqq early and often!

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Besides a whole host of under-the-hood changes, we released a couple of new features onto the site earlier this week. When users visit their MyPiqqs page (login required), they'll now see that we've broken things down by piqqs that are active and piqqs that are expired. On the expired piqqs page, stocks which are no longer of interest to a user can be removed, which makes it sort of a "to-do" list for keeping all the different piqqs up to date.

By popular demand, we've also added the ability to create new User Takes for each equity. We went back and forth on this for awhile--the take was originally meant to be a single users's most current opinion of a stock. In the end, though, our users were just entering too much great content. It would've been a shame if someone had to delete a great comment in order to leave a new one! Members can now click on any User Take to go see if the author has any older takes on a stock, or click on one of their own takes to manage all User Takes for a given stock.

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We just rolled out a new feature: behavioral and demographic groups. Based on demographic information users have submitted (or are going to submit, right?), we've placed those users into demographic groups based on age, gender, location, and profession. Based on how they interact with the site, we've placed users into behavioral groups. Are they an optimist or a pessimist? How often do they vote? How long have they been a member? Groups are available from the user profile pages for now, but it's a safe bet that they'll start showing up in other places once we've collected enough data.

Each of these "subcrowds" will operate on principals identical to the whole crowd, and any datapoint (i.e. top stock or most favorited) that can be pulled from the whole crowd can also be pulled from an individual subcrowd. The end result is two-fold. The most obvious result is that there will be a lot more data to explore. Just as important, though, is the fact that users now have a reason to have an identity. With a full profile (whether you mark the data as publicly viewable or not), a single vote now counts as a vote for both the whole crowd and each of the many behavioral and demographic subcrowds.

You'll probably never see a list of most accurate users on our site, but there's no reason why you wouldn't see a list of most accurate subcrowds. I believe certain subcrowds will be more adept at predicting certain stocks, but the only way to know that for sure is to keep an eye on the data. I've been watching these for awhile now, and some interesting trends have already come and gone.

• Users under 30 disliked Starbucks more than any other stock.
• At one time, our female users were most likely to favorite Adobe (though that got bumped by Apple last time it was Piqq of the Day).
• Our Southerners really love Campbell's Soup (it's been the highest rated for a few weeks now).
• Not surprisingly, users from the Midwest like Ford almost an entire point higher than the whole crowd.
• At one time, users who'd listed their profession as "Business & Finance" didn't have a positive outlook on a single stock (now they're single-up on Apple).

As you can see already, the extra data is pretty fun to poke through! We'll keep an eye out for cool trends and keep you up to date with things we spot in this space.

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The wisdom of crowds is all the rage lately. Or so it would seem, since it's talked about so much. But as it turns out, many self-proclaimed wisdom of crowds applications are actually leveraging crowdsourcing or collective intelligence, which are different organisms (see my previous post for an explanation of the difference between the wisdom of crowds and crowdsourcing, and Henry Jenkin’s post for the difference between crowd wisdom and collective intelligence).

(img src: Oracle Blogs)

All the buzz about crowd wisdom implies that it’s sitting atop the Peak of Inflated Expectations on Gartner’s hype cycle (see above), a cycle representing five phases that emerging technologies go through. (Note: I’m taking liberty to consider the wisdom of crowds a technology, in that it is something that can be used to achieve a desirable goal, though this might be a discussion to have here...) The Peak of Inflated Expectations is a phase in which a frenzy of publicity generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations about a technology, resulting in some successful applications but more failed ones. We could wish that technologies just ascend the Slope of Enlightenment already, but the Peak of Inflated Expectations is actually a great place to experiment with possible applications of a technology, and the subsequent Trough of Disillusionment is a great place to sober up about the applications for which a technology is actually useful. (Besides, these phases have awesome names.) So, with all due respect to the Peak, it’s only via experimentation that we discover what works and what doesn’t. Hence the Peak’s importance as part of the cycle emerging technologies go through. And hence widespread experimentation with the wisdom of crowds as it sits atop the Peak.

Again, or so it would seem. Because, when I looked around to see what other wisdom of crowds applications were around, I didn’t find to many. Which gives me the impression that we aren’t experimenting so much yet – we think we’re experimenting, but we’re oftentimes conflating crowd wisdom with other organisms. A case in point is FinancialPuzzle's comment on Lazy Man and the Money’s post about Piqqem, "this whole crowdsourcing thing is trying to work its way into every industry." So, I'd actually venture to say that the wisdom of crowds as a technology is not at the Peak, but somewhere closer to the Technology Trigger. (Crowdsourcing and collective intelligence, on the other hand, are other stories.) That said, there's still some experimentation going on, and I still wanna take a look.

In James Surowiecki's conception of it, the wisdom of crowds is only applicable to quantifiable, objective data. Which means Wikipedia, Digg, and even most of the examples in We Are Smarter Than Me, a book ostensibly dedicated to the wisdom of crowds, don’t make the grade. Yahoo!, CBS Sportsline, and other major newsie sites already display aggregate user results, but they don't explicitly apply crowd wisdom to coming up with those results, which is what I'd consider a wisdom of crowds application. And according to Wikipedians, crowd wisdom applications fall into three categories: prediction markets, Delphi methods, and traditional opinion polls. But I found mostly predictions markets. Here's a sampling:

• Betfair Betfair applies the wisdom of crowds to predicting future events from Horse Racing to Sports to traditional gambling. Falling under the category of predictions markets, Betfair is the is the world's largest online betting site, with around $28 billion traded in 2007. Users make 'Back' bets (normal bets on a selection to win) and 'Lay' bets (bets on the opposite side of the Back, against the selection), enabling Betfair to aggregate bets, and gauge crowd sentiment. Note that Betfair is similar to other predictions markets like Predictify, which is based on deterministic, verifiable questions concerning future events, but differs from those like Long Bets that pit only two users against each other or don’t aggregate the opinions of many.
• Hollywood Stock Exchange The Hollywood Stock Exchange, or HSX, is a predictions market applying the wisdom of crowds to predict Hollywood-related events. Players use play money to buy and sell "shares" of actors, directors, upcoming films, and film-related options. According to Wikipedians, "because trading directly affects the prices of the securities — purchasing enough shares of a stock causes its price to rise, and selling causes its price to fall — and because the ultimate value of a moviestock is based on the film's box office, stock prices act as box office predictions. For example, if a particular moviestock trades at 'H$40.00', the market is predicting that the movie will gross US$40 million at the box office in the first four weekends of wide release." In 2007, for example, HSX players correctly predicted 32 of the 39 major-category Oscar nominees and 7 out of 8 top-category winners.
• NewsFutures Another predictions market oriented towards news and without real money is NewsFutures, which applies the wisdom of crowds to predict future news events. Users buy and sell contracts that will pay a given amount of play money if a particular event happens in the future, and zero if it doesn't, enabling News Futures to generate consensus probabilities for news events. As a company, it is one of several helping large corporations set up private prediction markets to predict project completion dates, sales, or the market potential for new ideas (please comment on other companies if you know of them).
• Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition As a photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum that leverages crowd wisdom to evaluate art and, in turn, curate the exhibit, Click! could fall into the category of a traditional opinion poll. "Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?" Ok, fine, art evaluations are not necessarily quantifiable, objective data, but I’m letting that slide for purposes of including an example other than a predictions market.
• CrowdChess Thanks to Stan Oleynik, the founder of CrowdChess, for submitting this! CrowdChess is precisely what it sounds like: a web app that applies the wisdom of crowds to playing chess. Members of the same team can introduce new moves, vote for and comment on already proposed ones, see real time game stats, and chat with each other. Again, chess moves are not necessarily quantifiable, objective data, and the ability to chat with fellow players compromises the requirement of independence for crowd wisdom to emerge, rendering CrowdChess more of a collective intelligence app than a wisdom of crowds one. But it was too awesome to leave off this list, so voilà.

Which is to say: please gimme more examples. Does anyone know of a case applying the wisdom of crowds to scientific data? What ideas do you have for crowd wisdom applications? To clarify, asking you for ideas is applying crowdsourcing to wisdom of crowd apps; if you submitted your proposed applications wiki-style, enabling the crowd to discuss and edit, it would apply collective intelligence to wisdom of crowd apps; and if you voted on whether the apps would succeed or fail, well, that would apply the wisdom of crowds to wisdom of crowds apps – letting the wise crowd predict which crowd wisdom apps would succeed vs. fail. Adorable. But we'll need a hearty selection of crowd wisdom apps to start with, so comment on ones you know of, or invent your own!

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Piqqem’s been getting press in some pretty hotshot publications lately, like Techcrunch and MarketWatch. But with press have come the same ol’ misconceptions about the app. So we thought it worthwhile to dedicate a post to addressing these misconceptions, not only for purposes of clarity, but to arm you – members of the crowd – with what you’ll need to engage in informed debate about Piqqem specifically, and the wisdom of crowds in general. We’re kinda tired of copying and pasting the same arguments in comments to blog posts, so we’re equipping you to develop your own! And we’re gonna quote from those blog posts to do so.

Misconception #1: The market already expresses crowd sentiment "I think a community-based system where people vote on the likely future price of stocks already exists: It's called the stock market" ( in response to MarketWatch article). Come on, yalls. Do you really think such fine minds would invest in a poor re-creation of the stock market? The stock market is a summation of the demand and supply of stock market shares, in which few big buyers following the advice of few expert analysts completely overwhelm individual investors. Au contraire, Piqqem gives an equal vote to all investors – whether expert or not – therefore providing a much more accurate representation of what the crowd thinks. Besides, the stock price today is what investors think of the company today – we want to know where the stock price is going in the future.

Misconception #2: Piqqem ain’t no different than all those other social investing sites "So, some well known brains from MSFT and AAPL (a co-founder of AAPL and a Microsoft exec) have come up with a site that uses collective knowledge to rank stocks - the wisdom of crowds. Hmm, why does that sound familiar?" (TMFSarahGen’s CAPS Blog, implying that Piqqem is the same as social investing site Motley Fool CAPS). It might sound familiar, but don’t be fooled (heh). Piqqem differs from other sites in that we believe the crowd has more knowledge than any single individual. Instead of looking for the best individual stock picker and weighting votes based on investment ability, which is what CAPS and other social investing sites do, we look at aggregate opinion and allow everyone to vote as much as they want. This orientation towards crowd wisdom manifests itself in our crowd indicators, such as top rated stocks, most active stocks, stocks with most rising sentiment, and stocks with most falling sentiment.

Misconception #3+: General misconceptions about the wisdom of crowds (hence 3+) "So the site looks ok, but I was turned off already. Why was I turned off you might ask? Because I can't find out the rating for a stock, unless I rate it myself!" (TMFSarahGen’s CAPS Blog). Ironic that this is what turned her off, because this is precisely what sets Piqqem apart from CAPS and other social investing sites! See Misconception #2 for a refresher on that misconception.) Users cant find out the ratings for stocks before voting to maintain independence, which is one of the four elements required for crowd wisdom to emerge. "Hmmm, imagine that I am a biotech investing neophyte or idiot (either word would possibly describe my ability to pick biotechs), and then imagine that if I want to see what the crowd has determined - that I must vote first! You don't want my vote on a biotech, believe me you don't!" (TMFSarahGen’s CAPS Blog). Listen naysayers, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. First you say Piqqem is the same as the stock market, and then you react to the fact that everyone gets an equal vote (which makes it different than the stock market). This is because Piqqem, unlike other social investing sites (here we go again…), is a true wisdom of crowds application. This means it gives an equal vote to everyone – yes, everyone – including the neophyte/idiot, because amateurs are just as important as the experts in maintaining diversity, which is another of the four elements required for crowd wisdom. (Bratty side-note: I made the above comments on TMFSarahGen’s post, and although other commenters agreed, she didn’t even respond!) If any of the above doesn't make sense, I recommend reading about the wisdom of crowds in James Surowiecki’s book of that same title. Besides being an awesome book, Piqqem will make more sense.

Misconception #4: Piqqem should be used as a stand-alone source of stock information "I find such a concept intriguing but I wouldn’t necessarily base investment decisions on this site" (ANithian in response to Techcrunch post). We’re not suggesting that Piqqem is a silver bullet, but that it’s a source of stock information, to be used in conjunction with other sources – such as expert analysis, the market, and yes, even social investing sites. Within this portfolio of different sources, Piqqem is an entirely different organism, because it leverages the wisdom of crowds, which is what makes it valuable.

Misconception #5: Applying the wisdom of crowds to stock predicting won’t work "…when dealing with financial instruments and the regulations, I don’t think crowdsourcing will last in the stock market realm…" (FinancePuzzle in response to Lazy Man and the Money post). Right now, there’s a lot of experimentation going on with applying the wisdom of crowds (blog post about that forthcoming). As far as we know, whether or not the crowd can successfully predict stock movements is still an open question. Which means, open to debate. And we’d Love to hear your thoughts in the comments. But the only way we’ll find out is if we try it. Hence, join the crowd!

There are other responses to misconceptions hanging out in our FAQ, so I’ll leave it hear for now. But if you've found other misconceptions and/or defended Piqqem chivalrously, share it with the crowd by commenting here or posting on our Facebook wall!

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"Crowdsourcing" and "the wisdom of crowds." We throw around these two terms quite a bit here at Piqqem. But there's a meaningful difference between them, so for purposes of clarity, I thought I’d dedicate a blog post to it. And I'll use what could be considered the crowned jewel of crowdsourcing to do so: Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is "the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call." Basically, you’re taking a task and outsourcing it to a crowd; hence crowdsourcing. Examples include Google’s Image Labeler, which takes the task of labeling images, and outsources it to anyone who wants to play a simple game, and Threadless T’s, which outsources the task of designing t-shirts to its users by letting them submit designs and vote on them (shameless plug for my submissions here). Amazon even hosts a marketplace specifically dedicated to crowdsourcing simple tasks which computers are unable to do, called the Mechanical Turk, which has been used for applications ranging from searching satellite images for evidence of missing aviator Steve Fosset, to artist Aaron Koblin’s The Sheep Market, a collection of 10,000 sheep made by workers paid 2 cents to "draw a sheep facing to the left."

The wisdom of crowds is known to Wikipedia as James Surowiecki’s book by the same name, defined as a phenomenon where "the aggregation of information in groups, [results] in decisions that…are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group." The quintessential example is that of guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar, where averaging the guesses of many people is more accurate than the guess of one expert individual, and the wisdom of crowds also manifests itself from sports betting to traditional opinion polls.

Applications that leverage the wisdom of crowds are necessarily crowdsourced, because they outsource the task of voting, predicting, guessing, or otherwise submitting an opinion to a crowd. On the flipside, crowdsourcing apps do not necessarily leverage the wisdom of crowds; Koblin’s Sheep Market workers weren't voting on what a sheep facing left should look like, but were merely submitting their own drawings.

Wikipedia is a crowdsourcing app in that it outsources the task of creating an encyclopedia to a large distributed population. There’s been considerable debate about whether Wikipedia leverages crowd wisdom, but I’d argue that it doesn’t because – at least in Surowiecki’s conception of it – the wisdom of crowds is only applicable to quantifiable, objective data.

Piqqem, on the other hand, is both a crowdsourcing app and a wisdom of crowds app, in that it outsources the task of stock market predicting to a crowd, and aggregates the crowd’s opinion on quantifiable and objective data, namely the movement of stocks.

So I guess you could say Piqqem crowdsources the stock market wisdom of crowds.

Hopefully that last sentence makes this less, and not more, confusing!

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Most of us track a handful of stocks. We may look at the price on a daily basis using Yahoo Finance, monitor news releases, and watch very closely when earnings are announced. We may even buy and sell these stocks as their prices move through a various up and down cycles. But how about the remaining 10,000 publicly traded stocks?

This is where Piqqem is particularly helpful. If we look under the wisdom tab, we can see the most popular, active, rising, and even falling. By reviewing these Wisdom lists you immediately benefit from the wisdom of the Piqqem crowd to see what other people think are interesting, good, or even bad stocks.

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That blastoff marks the launch of the Piqqem blog. On this blog, we’ll be posting newsworthy items about Piqqem, and more broadly about topics at the intersection of the wisdom of crowds, the stock market, and/or social media. Resident bloggers consist of yours truly and the rest of the Piqqem team, but we’ll be quoting your User Takes, so keep ‘em quality and keep ‘em coming!

This blog won’t be the first time Piqqem’s been blogged about, and as an homage to those who came before us, allow me to highlight some of our past appearances in the blogosphere. This past August, Wall Street Fighter reviewed Piqqem, describing it as “mob mentality meets web 2.0, only with a lot less lynchings and burnings at the stake.” It’s heartwarming to know that the author perused our website thoroughly, as he discovered in Best Buy’s Overview wiki that the company was originally called 'Sound of Music’ in the 60’s. Back in October, we were featured on KillerStartups, a website dedicated to featuring, well, killer startups. We’re not sure what votes do for us, but we’d Love it if you vote for Piqqem, and if we win a trip to Hawaii, we’ll invite you along. Lastly, in early November, Piqqem got written up by Techcrunch. The post was somewhat critical, but we feel – as do many of the commenters – that the author didn’t properly understand the wisdom of crowds. For an awesome commentary, check out this post by Will Hankinson, one of our illustrious engineers. And for commentary written by someone with zero conflict of interest (heh), check out this thoughtful post by Mark Diller, a web editor/project manager from Seattle.

Considering that the wisdom of crowds and stock market sentiment are, on their own, juicy topics, we figure that combining them will make for some lively commenting. We’re excited to use this blog as venue for discussing what it means to crowdsource stock market predictions, and you’re invited to join in!

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