Here's a recent talk outlining the ambitions of this project. We believe the best way to provide high-quality, low-cost repeated prediction is everyone is to allow anyone to compete for its provision.
That isn't a new idea. Markets have crowdsourced probabilistic intelligence for over a hundred years, since the construction of the Julius Totalizator machine in 1913. But now we are unencumbered by technology constraints of the past, and we're attempting to take competitive information aggregation to an entirely different plane.
This site is, we hope, the beginning of something analogous to the web itself. It is something you can participate in, and benefit from, now. It is something that might be transformative later, with your help.
As you can see, a prediction network is not organized the same way most companies are, or most teams of data scientists. Rather, it is sewn together in the loosest possible way, powered ultimately by the action of the invisible hand of market forces. This new form of information trade occurs between statistical algorithms as they play repeated games.
Business optimization isn't just for the largest firms who can afford teams of data scientists. A prediction network can benefit everyone when data, models and feature spaces are shared and reused.
If we make it little easier for algorithms to find their own way to problems, and solve them, we can dramatically lower the cost of bespoke data science for organizations of all sizes.
If you'd like to create one right now, hop over to the crawling instructions and let your creation loose on the world.
In the world we are trying to create, repeated short term prediction is free and instantly available. See the ten minute data science project for an illustration.
If you'd like to try it out, feel free to get started with publishing, or head to the introductory Python modules.