
(Includes interview w/ YC's Inkling founders) Web 2.0: Return of the dot-com - mattjaynes
http://www.suntimes.com/business/363986,CST-FIN-Net30.article
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mattjaynes
Here's the Inkling interview:

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 _Adam Siegel, 33, founder of Inkling at inklingmarkets.com, an online
predictive market._

 _Didn't the Internet craze die back in 2001? Why launch an Internet
business?_

The Internet craze didn't die in 2001. Companies with no path to
profitability, no plan, and excessive irrational behavior died in 2001. The
possibilities of the Internet in relation to consumer behavior and
transforming business are still as potent as ever.

 _Where did your idea come from?_

Our idea came from doing consulting for several large companies and working in
one for several years. We watched the lack of quality information flow between
the hierarchies. We saw how people with relevant knowledge, whose input should
be key in strategic decisions, were completely left out of the process, and we
saw broken business processes for innovation and coming up with new ideas. We
also read a lot about collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds, paired
our understanding of those two worlds, and out came the idea to do Inkling. We
certainly weren't the first to say prediction markets should be used by
corporations, but we think we're taking an approach that sets us apart from
our predecessors and current competitors.

 _What is your elevator pitch?_

Inkling helps you capture the collective wisdom of a diverse group of people
to give you insight about what may happen in the future vs. relying solely on
high paid consultants or individual experts. This is important because it can
help you mitigate risk, make better strategic decisions, spawn innovation and
entrepreneurship, and change your corporate culture.

 _How is your proposition different from earlier generations of online
business?_

Online business services, beyond eCommerce solutions, still usually required
an expensive consulting component. There also was not traditionally a focus on
ease of use. We've tried to address both by creating "do it yourself" tools to
allow anyone to manage their own prediction marketplace. We've taken something
as complex as trading in a stock market mechanism and made it easy enough for
our Mom's to use. Related we've obsessed on our user-interface and iterate on
it constantly to make sure people can use it. After all, you can't say you
sell software that helps you capture the wisdom of a crowd if the crowd
canÃÂt use your software.

 _How will you make money?_

We make money by selling service agreements to large and small businesses to
set up and maintain prediction marketplaces. We also do a fair amount of
customization work for our larger clients.

 _Why will you succeed? What are your biggest successes so far?_

In less than a year we have attracted several thousand users to our public
marketplace and have about 20 clients. We are working with Abbott Labs here in
Chicago, ABC-KGO in San Francisco, the Government of Singapore, AlderTrack,
think tanks, a video game maker, and an array array of small businesses and
non-profits. We think we will continue to see success because of our well
designed product and because we think this is a blue sky market that people
are just beginning to think about as a way to changing the way they do
business. We also think we're going to be successful because we are largely
self-funded. When the success of your business means you can or cannot pay the
mortgage and your bills, it makes you a little hungrier.

 _What is your age and previous business experience?_

The two co-founders of Inkling are Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny. We are 33 and
29 respectively. Adam worked at Accenture here in Chicago for 10 years in the
Accenture Technology Labs and was a senior manager when he left. Nate worked
at Accenture as well in the same group and left as a consultant to work as a
senior developer at Digital River.

 _Have you received funding? If so, how much and from whom?_

We received a small amount of funding (18k) from yCombinator when we
incorporated but have taken no funding since.

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jkush
What's interesting is that the average age of the founders listed in the
article is just over 27 years of age. Youngest being 20, oldest being 37.

