Web Mission 08 – killer UK start up # 1 Hubdub
News prediction online is a real web hot spot at the moment with sites like The Industry Standard (yep the place which once housed the website of the innovative online magazine) now giving users the chance to say how they think the tech world will look tomorrow.
Hubdub the brainchild of Nigel Eccles, is by some distance the best so far in that it covers a lot more areas. So if you are a news junkie, love predicting sports results or just like guessing how long it will be before Britney has her next spell in rehab, you need to be here.
Hubdub is actually based on a fairly simple premise. You choose a question you want to predict on, read the RSS links to the news sites which discuss the issue and then make your vote on Hubdub. The smart bit is that you are given some virtual cash to back up your predictions and when you get it right you get more (virtual) cash. You also get an email telling you if you were right or wrong too.
You can also go deeper into the site too by creating your own questions and competing with your friends. Needless to say it is utterly addictive and Eccles claims that every user actually looks at 66 pages each month, a figure that is way higher than most blogs and even social networks.
Eccles is hoping that Hubdub becomes a huge destination site in its own right, but it is my hunch it’ll make more money (its main revenue source is advertising) if he lets newspapers use the technology to create their own versions.
It is definitely worth checking out and just for the record my first $100 are on a 3G iPhone being launched before July 31st
