Start-up to present at TechCrunch / Open Coffee event: askmarkets

a (~)guest post by George Tziralis, askmarkets co-founder

Askmarkets UnLtd, founded in 2007 by George Tziralis and Efthimios Mpothos, provides a web service for prediction markets, which consists of a virtual marketplace for information trading. Ok, let me tell you the story instead.

Markets are institutions that are everywhere. From the stock market in New York to the fish market in Tokyo to the flower market in Amsterdam, markets are used for a variety of purposes. But, while stock markets, for example, seem to be so different than betting, or fish and flower markets, in their core all those institutions are essentially the same: Markets bring traders together, they sum up their information and transmit it through prices.

Askmarkets intends to bring this functionality to the masses. We provide a web service with which anyone can create a virtual market or trade on markets created by others. In other words, we provide a tool which can aggregate the opinions and knowledge of the many and dynamically transform these into a meaningful result. Markets arise as the ideal tool to crowdsource cognitive tasks and arrive at consensus results, which are typically proven to be more accurate or correct than the opinions of the few experts.

The service, limited in its global competition, while absolutely unlimited in its potential and uses, is built from the ground up (that is, from the algorithms to the interface) with simplicity and intuitiveness in mind and, while yet in private beta, you’d better get ready for a secret sneak peek during the TC/OC event.