Prediction Markets Platform - Inkling Incorporated

Company

We enable inklings to happen.

Inkling is a Chicago-based company that helps organizations and individuals tap into the collective wisdom of their employees, peers, and customers to improve forecasting processes, predict key corporate metrics, identify promising future innovations, and forge new communication and collaboration channels. Inkling's prediction market platform, Inkling Markets, is leveraged by numerous industry-leading corporations, start-ups, academic, non-profit, and government institutions.

Our Clients

To learn more about these and other projects we are working on, contact us.

Abbott Labs is running an internal prediction marketplace.

ABC-KGO San Francisco is running a public prediction marketplace for its viewers.

Acxiom in conjunction with the University of Arkansas is running an internal pilot.

The Government of Singapore is forecasting long term technology and social trends.

CNN used Inkling to predict the outcome of the 2008 U.S. Elections.

Capital One

What's in your wallet?

Chevron is running internal markets about performance metrics.

Cisco is running an enterprise-wide internal marketplace.

Chrysler is using Inkling to enhance strategic forecasting.

Electronic Arts used Inkling to predict product sales and marketplace reception.

General Mills is predicting the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns on product sales.

Government Futures is running a marketplace to forecast legislative outcomes.

IFTF is collaborating with Inkling to run prediction markets for an international research agency.

Infosurv is integrating prediction markets in to its market research offering.

IPSOS is doing market research experiments on behalf of their clients with Inkling.

Johnson & Johnson is running markets to improve awareness of project performance metrics.

Kmart is using Inkling to forecast success of new strategic initiatives.

Koch Industries is running an internal marketplace.

Lockheed Martin is running an internal installation of Inkling.

Media Predict uses Inkling to predict the future success of books, music, and movies.

National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education is running a marketplace for their constituents.

O'Reilly Media is forecasting future book sales to assist in strategic planning.

Overstock.com is using Inkling to better forecast performance metrics.

Pop!Tech is using Inkling to aggregate the wisdom of its conference participants.

Procter & Gamble is improving demand forecasting and mitigating risk.

Risk Metrics is forecasting sales metrics and internal HR trends.

Sears is using Inkling to supplement its internal sales forecasting processes.

Viacom is hard at work on a public marketplace.

Wells Fargo is using Inkling to run an internal marketplace.

Research and Non-Profit Relationships

The University of Arkansas is using Inkling Markets as part of its research on prediction markets.

Global Giving is using Inkling to help filter new ideas to receive additional funding.

The Harvard Business School is collaborating on multiple projects with Inkling

Los Alamos National Laboratories is using Inkling to conduct research in collective decision making.

The Monterey Institute of International Studies is using Inkling to foster innovation among its students and alumni.

OpenDemocracy.net is using Inkling as a geo-political forecasting tool for its users.

Oxford researchers are working with commercial entities to better understand use of prediction markets in the corporate space.

Pact is piloting Inkling for strategic decision making and to drive innovation among its partners.

Stanford Graduate School of Business is using Inkling as part of their curriculum.

UVA is collaborating with USC on prediction market research using Inkling.

Our Founders

Adam Siegel
Adam serves as CEO and leads the development of Inkling Markets' user experience and business consulting efforts. Before co-founding Inkling, Adam worked at Accenture, a global consulting firm where he served over a dozen clients across multiple industries for over a decade. At Accenture, Adam also directed a research initiative in next generation user experiences and ran a small internal venture fund to seed innovative ideas. Adam has spoken and served on expert panels at numerous conferences and in MBA classrooms and has been published or quoted in Fortune, Business Week, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, InfoWeek, NetworkWorld, and Risk Management magazine. In addition to his daily chores at Inkling, Adam spends his time being a political junky, reading short stories by Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, Bernard Malamud and the like, loves the radio show "This American Life," and "The Moth" podcasts, has a dog, and first used a computer made of pine wood and metal when he was 4: the PLATO system at the University of Illinois in Champaign. Adam holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from Indiana University.

Nate Kontny
Nate serves as CTO and leads the application development of Inkling Markets. Before co-founding Inkling, Nate was a Senior Developer at Digital River, a large eCommerce platform company in Chicago. Nate also spent five years at Accenture in the Technology Labs where he worked for clients across multiple industries implementing bleeding-edge technology solutions. As a longtime contributor of the Ruby on Rails framework, Nate has developed and contributed to several plug-ins and Inkling was recently listed on the Ruby on Rails site as one of the "most prolific." Other applications on this list include Twitter, Shopify, and Hulu. In addition to his duties at Inkling, Nate is an avid reader of business non-fiction, an active blogger, actor, and amateur bartender. Nate holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

Friends of Inkling (FoI)

As we've built the company we've met lots of interesting, intelligent, and insightful people along the way. Some we've asked to be our informal advisors in various aspects of our business. Here are some of the friends of the company:

Bo Cowgill, Google Inc. - product developer, expert on decision markets for Google; creator of Google's prediction market and co-author of Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google
George Gendron, Clark University - founder and director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at Clark University; former Editor-in-Chief of Inc. magazine
Michael Giberson, Texas Tech University - professional economist, blogger and Inkling Top 10 trader
Bob Johansen, Institute for the Future - author of Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present and six other books; Distinguished fellow and former CEO of Institute for the Future (IFTF), a Palo Alto based think tank that does ten-year forecasting
Jane McGonigal, PhD, renowned gaming developer - award-winning innovative game designer, researcher and analyst. MIT Technology Review named her as one of the top 35 innovators changing the world through technology
Russ Roberts, management consultant and professor, Northwestern University - a strategy and organization effectiveness consultant and professor at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University
Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab / Second Life - founder and chairman of Linden Lab, creator of the acclaimed 3D virtual world Second Life. In 2007, he was listed among Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the world.

Investors

Inkling was started in January of 2006 after receiving seed funding from yCombinator, a Boston and Palo Alto-based venture fund started by entrepreneur Paul Graham. Besides yCombinator's investment, Inkling is self-funded.