The Inkling Markets platform has been designed to be easy to use and easy to administer. Instead of taking weeks and months to set up a marketplace, it takes seconds. Instead of having to talk to us every time you want to run a new market, we've given you a powerful suite of tools to let you do it yourself. That way you don't have to waste your time fighting with the technology and can instead worry about the value using Inkling is inevitably going to bring to your company.

The first thing you'll notice about trading in Inkling Markets is it's unlike any other trading you've done, whether you've bought and sold real stocks online or used another prediction market application. The typical reaction we hear when we demo to people is something like: "Really? That's all you have to do to trade? No problem!" This is because we've designed the trading interface from the ground up to be something anyone can use, no previous experience or knowledge necessary.

If you understand basic odds and probabilities, you can master Inkling Markets. See for yourself:

Our trading interface is made this easy by utilizing something called an "automated market maker." In a real stock market, when you want to sell shares, there has to be a buyer. Likewise, when you want to buy, someone needs to be selling. The price of the stock is set by the supply and demand of the shares being bought and sold. If more people want to buy, the stock price goes up. If more people are selling, the stock price goes down.

Using an automated market maker, we remove the complexity of this "auction" process by always being the buyer and seller of shares. We determine demand by the amount being bought and sold and set the price accordingly. This also allows you to have far fewer people participate in a market and still have it yield statistically relevant results. In fact, in research done by Jed Christiansen, a graduate of the London School of Economics using Inkling Markets as his research platform, he found only 16 people participating in a market consistently delivered accurate predictions.

The algorithms behind our automated market maker are largely driven by Professor Robin Hanson of George Mason University, a pioneer in the field of prediction markets. If you want the gory details about the algorithms behind our automated market maker, see these Google results.

You know your business, you know your subject matter, and in many instances you know the people who will be trading in your market. Why should we get in the way of all that?

Inkling Markets gives you and any of your traders the ability to create your own markets. It used to be that if you wanted to run a prediction marketplace in your company or for the general public, you hired a consultant. It would take weeks, sometimes months, just to set up their software and get one market up and running. Now with our DIY market publisher, you can have multiple markets up in a few minutes. Don't believe us? Create a pilot marketplace and publish a few markets or simply join the hundreds of "market makers" on our public marketplace and create one there. Just think, after you've hit "publish" and traders are immediately buying and selling shares you can gloat to all your friends and colleagues that you're running your own prediction market.

Just the word "Administration" makes many people run for their phones to call their IT departments to say they need help. Fortunately with Inkling Markets, you don't need to bother them. Not only is all the software you need , but we've provided simple tools to help you manage access to the marketplace, customize the home page and welcome pages, write marketplace announcements, edit and approve markets submitted by other traders, and even proactively look for people who might be trying to cheat.

Just as important as the tools to administer the marketplace are the reports you have access to about trading activity in the marketplace. You can download reports any time you want to see the value of all the different markets, the balances of all the users, and much more. Reports are in a standard .csv format which allows you to import them in to Microsoft Excel or any data analysis package you may already have.

No matter what role you play in your organization, this is likely the first time you've ever had to manage a prediction marketplace. The good news is we've designed Inkling Markets to be as intuitive as possible to not only trade, but to administer.

When you do have questions about how to use our software, how to structure a market, or how to interpret the data from a report you've run, we're available to help via email, chat, or phone. There are no bronze, silver, gold, and platinum levels of support, everyone receives the same level of attention and assistance when necessary.

We've also provided a comprehensive reference section marketplace administrators have access to. This includes documentation on launching your marketplace, ideas for incentives, what type of market to use for various types of questions you're asking, and much more.

Curious for a sneak peak at the reference section? Sign up for a pilot marketplace.

We understand maintaining a consistency across all your web sites, whether they be internal or external, is an important part of providing a good user experience for your customers and employees. We've therefore designed Inkling Markets to be easily customized to match the look and feel you've already created. All we need from you is an example of an existing web page or a screenshot of the user-interface you are designing and we'll take it from there. Typically these customizations are made by modifying style sheets and take 1-2 weeks.

Beyond user-interface customizations, perhaps you want an additional widget for your marketplace, a custom report, or a new feature. Because we host all our marketplaces from a single platform, a changes we make for one client is made for everyone so we have to be picky about how we customize the product. That said, many of our best features were suggested by our clients so if you have an idea for a new feature, we're all ears.