Fantasy sports betting startup PicksPal has taken $3 million Series C in a round that included previous investors Bay Partners and Canaan Partners. PicksPal is a free sports site where people bet on upcoming games, but without the use of real money. Sports covered include boxing, NFL football, pro football, bass fishing, ultimate fighting, basketball and baseball with the site making money via advertising. PicksPal launched a related site “PicksPop” in January that offers fantasy betting on celebrity news and also offers a paid “Genius Picks” service that provides betting tips based on the top 30 users of PicksPal. PicksPal is based in Silicon Valley and had previously raised $6 million. (via PEHub) CrunchBase Information PicksPal Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
BluBet lets you and your friends bet on anything, while avoiding the rather controversial use of real money in online gambling. On BluBet, players will be able to place bets on anything from Brittany’s sex life, to Facebook outgrowing MySpace. The site is launching out of a quiet beta and is backed with $225,000 from Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder of Xoom), Joe Greenstein (Co-Founder and CEO of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (Former PayPal & LinkedIn Executive and Current Slide Executive). You start off with 30,000 BluBucks, their fake currency. Bets are based on topics (technology, politics, business), much like a news site. Anyone can post a bet, which consists of a question, a pot, and an ante. Bets are broken into two types of categories, polls and challenges. Polls base the outcome of the bet on the most popular response. Challenges base the winners on the outcome of some real world event (e.g who wins a football game). Every bet is live for a set period of time, with challenges needing the person initiating the bet to list the final outcome. You get 1,000 extra BluBucks for posting a bet and winners split the pots amongst themselves. Your winnings rank you on a leader board and are tracked in your personal profile. If you go bust, it’s marked on your record and you restart with 10,000 BluBucks. Fraudulent bets, where users rally to affect the outcome, are naturally a concern. However, they’ve implemented a system where players rate how good a bet was after the bet closes. The rating for the individual bet is added to a users overall rating, hopefully making crooks with low ratings easy to avoid. Otherwise it’s a case of “Caveat Emptor” with spending your virtual dollars. The founders see it as a simple way of creating a predictive market, although that’s not their goal. Even though free systems don’t motivate users with enough of an upside to be consistently accurate in aggregate, some free systems have discovered very successful individuals. Money-free PicksPal was able to beat the Vegas spread for sports, but probably serves as a proxy for a lot of the real sports gambling happening offline. Social stock picking startups are another category trying to create a predictive market based off of their users. Social Picks, MarketWatch, and the Motley Fool CAPS service are some of the sites taking this → Read More
Last year I wrote about PicksPal, a fantasy sports betting site where well over 100,000 members bet their friends and coworkers on the outcome of sporting events (and they just launched a nifty March Madness site as well). No money changes hands, but top users can win various prizes. It’s all for fun, but the company started selling the top picks of its best users in October. For $10, you can get the collective picks of the top 30 users on five games. The idea was that people could use these for-fun picks to win bets in Vegas. The question was, would PicksPal be able to consistently beat Vegas odds, and the spread, with these picks. So far, yes. By a lot. PicksPal’s overall record, against the spread, has been 562-338, or a 63% win rate. In college basketball, the win rate is 66%. In pro football, 62%. They are even getting a 52% win rate in pro hockey, their worst sport. Some of the recent results can be viewed here. PicksPal is a fascinating human experiment in predictive markets. The people making the picks (the elite users) don’t know they are doing it – they are simply making bets with their friends for bragging rights. If they did know that their picks were being used as part of an average to give advice to actual Vegas betters, they may choose games differently. Perhaps they would be more conservative, for example. If PicksPal’s win rate over the long run remains over 50% against the spread, they will begin to disrupt the betting markets. Pickspal also expanded into pop culture “betting” earlier this year, with PicksPop. → Read More
PicksPal, a fantasy sports betting site, is launching a March Madness game this morning. Picks are made via an Ajax interface by clicking on the winners through to the Final Four. Once you’ve selected winners for all of the games, you can invite friends to participate as well, and create a widget showing your picks to put on a blog or social networking site. Users can also set up private leagues to compete directly with friends and office workers. There are a number of prizes that the company is giving away each round (iPods, Nintendo DSs, Slingboxes, PS3s 37″ TVs and two Mini Coopers) . If anyone you’ve invited wins any prize, you get that same prize as well. → Read More
For-fun betting sites like Gottabet and PicksPal, which combine social networking with betting, are gaining popularity. The success of PicksPal in particular has been stunning. Friends group together and bet on the winners of upcoming sporting events, or more detailed things like the number of touchdowns in a given game. A small percentage of users on PicksPal tend to be correct in their bets so often that the company started selling their predictions last year. It’s no surprise, then, that PicksPal is expanding and launching a pop culture version of its sports betting site. The new site, called PicksPop, allows users to bet on things like “Will Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee get back together?” (pays 100/1), “Will Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt announce their separation?” (also 100/1), and “Will 24 be in the Top 10 for the week?” (pays 1/1). All bets are for points, and each user gets 1,000 points to start. Top ranked users are listed on here. Like PicksPal, PicksPop is also a social network where each user gets a profile page, can add friends, etc. The company is based in Silicon Valley and has raised $6 million in venture capital over two rounds of financing. They are backed by Canaan Partners and Bay Partners. → Read More
We wrote about a distilled version of the Wisdom of the Crowds idea a couple of weeks ago when profiling PicksPal, a fantasy sports betting site. PicksPal’s new product takes the best fantasy sports pickers and (without them knowing) repackages their advice as a paid service to sports gamblers. It’s done remarkably well after the first couple of weeks. The idea is that if you can take the true experts from the crowd and average their opinions, you can get to really stunning results. Now we have a second recent experiment in this area, the launch of Motley Fool CAPS. The service joins a host of others (such as SocialPicks) seeking to forecast markets. CAPS lets users place predictions on a publicly listed stock’s performance vs. the S&P 500 over a given time frame. After 7 such predictions a new user is given a CAPS percentile ranking that takes into account their overall return and accuracy (correct predictions / total predictions). Users join the service for the bragging rights that come with being number one on the leader board and the various award icons adorning their profile. But CAPS is also using that data to create buy/sell recommendations on stocks. Users with a higher rating affect a stock’s recommendation far more that users with low ratings. So its like Wisdom of the Crowds, but with a weighted average towards proven winners. Markets have traditionally been seen as the most efficient way to value information (even for the ill-fated DARPA terror futures market). But for investors looking for an edge, CAPS may give them the information they need. A problem, though, is that unllke PicksPal, “experts” on CAPS, which are those users with very high ratings, know that they are affecting stock recommendations. The simple fact that they have this knowledge may affect how they pick stocks, and disrupt the entire system (one of the basic ideas behind the original crowds v. experts analysis in Wisdom of the Crowds). If and when that happens, CAPS may be little more than a way to push stocks that “experts” have a financial interest in, or for other non-efficient reasons. There are rumors that the new free stock brokerage Zecco is going to offer a similar service. If Zecco customers don’t know that they are part of the user group being used to make predictions, their results may be much better over the long → Read More
Tom Jessiman, the founder of PicksPal, stumbled onto something that could change the way we predict sporting event outcomes. And it could therefore have a big impact on sports betting markets. PicksPal is a free sports site where people “bet” on upcoming games. No money is involved. If they win, their point total goes up and they have bragging rights around the office. Since launching about a year ago over 100,000 people have joined the site, making daily picks on just about every kind of sporting event in the U.S. – boxing, NFL football, pro football, bass fishing, ultimate fighting, basketball, baseball, etc. The site makes money from advertising. Recently, however, the PicksPal team noticed that a very small percentage of users tend to be correct in their picks significantly more often that they should be statistically. When they grouped these special users they found them to be a powerful predictive force. Sports betting (both legal and illegal) is a massive worldwide business. Participants are always looking for an edge and are willing to pay for picks by “experts” (I know this from my extensive research watching Two for the Money). Tom and his team figured out pretty quickly that there was a potentially massive business here. And next Tuesday they are going to start tapping into that business when they launch what they call “Genius Picks”. For $10, users can get access to the collective wisdom of the 30 best PicksPal players over the previous five weeks in a given sport, and get five predictions on upcoming games. They’ve been running this internally for a while and the results are impressive. This last weekend, for example, they went 5-0 against the spread, picking Toledo -3 in college football, and Indianapolis – 13, Cincinnati – 10.5, Baltimore -9.5 and San Diego -11 in the NFL. Tom says not to expect Genius Picks to maintain that kind of record over the long run, but the results speak for themselves. PicksPal will be leveraging their technology to participate in completely new markets later this year. They say a “Hollywood” version could be next, to allow people to bet on who’ll be on certain magazine covers, reality show plots, etc. Look for mainstream media to start covering this company in the very near future. PicksPal is based in Silicon Valley and has raised $6 million in venture capital over two rounds of financing. → Read More
