MS has experimented with prediction markets internally off and on. This particular market is being run by David Rothschild who is a researcher at Microsoft. He's run the site http://predictwise.com for quite some time and done a really nice job with it. I've met David in person and he's an uber smart guy with some really good ideas. This is a "labs" project for the time being as the name implies, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some of this work make its way in to MS products in one form or another, i.e. embedded prediction market style questions in Sharepoint or MS Project, or even as ad units on Bing to collect a massive pool of forecasts.

I understand prediction markets are illegal in some countries, but ipredict.co.nz is very popular here and is often covered in mainstream media.

If you let people predict with play money only, it should be legal in most countries.

Intrade was a popular one, now closed. The big problem I see is lack of liquidity in the less popular markets.

Yes it was a total and utter failure as I recall: ipredict.msnbc.com

http://web.archive.org/web/20080820025756/http://ipredict.ms...

I think Foresight Exchange was one of the first ones: http://www.ideosphere.com/

It's from around 1995 or 1996, as you can probably tell from the site design.

http://home.inklingmarkets.com/ is a YC2006 company that offers crowd predictions as a saas.