An interesting Businessweek article describes how researchers are tapping into mobile phone usage patterns to analyze the behavior of individuals. The article describes plenty of beneficial ways in which mobile usage data could be used such as identifying traffic congestion, tracking and preventing contagious illnesses and even helping event planners manage high budget conventions. Also known as ‘reality mining’, this practice provides an innovative way of collecting and analyzing  data to more effectively predict and manage future outcomes.

Similarly, many entities are looking to use the collective intelligence of internet users and are finding innovative ways to harness this power.  A good example is Google’s Image labeller game which pairs users against each other in a competition to label images thereby helping to improve the quality of google image results.

However,  emerging Web 2.0 technologies such as Blogs and Wikis provide a new challenge in how to organize the vast amount of emerging qualitative data such as opinions on blog posts or reviews of feature films. Online prediction markets provide a glimpse into the future of  how such collective intelligence could be gathered.

Sites such as Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSE) and Intrade use the power of the market to trade idea futures in order to aggregate opinions into one coherenet metric and make predictions on various topics. Such sites have been proven to be extremely accurate in the past with the HSE accurately predicting 7 out of 8 top category Oscar winners in 2007.  Since prediction markets provide a forum to aggregate information in an engaging and fun way, their popularity will only continue to increase. However, marketers are still experimenting with various forms of prediction platforms with sites like Predictify that provide users with a simpler way to make predictions. Such prediction platforms can benefit marketers by providing them with access to critical consumer data as well as a forum to engage customers. Thus, marketers should not overlook this innovative method of harnessing the collective intelligence of customers while at the same time creating a new platform for engagement.