Call-it

In September of 2012 I attended Startup Weekend, an excellent crash-course on product development. The event began with a “Pitchfire," where everyone was encouraged to pitch a product idea. I was given 60 seconds and a mic to pitch my idea for Call-it, a Klout for predictions - an app that would measure your ability to make predictions and give you a score so that you can pit yourself against your friends and the pundits, journalists, and forecasters of the world. After all the pitches were delivered, all attendees voted on their favorite ideas and the top 8-10 ideas were picked to move on to the next step. My idea was one of the finalists and ChiBuzor and Santoshkumar  decided to join my team and work on this idea for the next 3 days. Together we researched the topic, developed the idea further, and put some wireframes together. Lastly, we put together a presentation and I delivered our concept to a judge panel of four leaders.

Here is the presentation we put together:

We predict because that is what we are programmed to do. Our frontal lobe is dedicated to the function of forecasting what our actions will lead us to. And because it’s fun to be right. Whenever you predict something like who will win a basketball game it’s fun to say to your friends – booyah! I called it!

The problem is that there is no way to track our predictions, which means we can’t measure how amazing we are at predicting or how often we are right. This means we can’t get recognized for our brilliance. And on the flip side of that. There are plenty of pundits, journalists, and forecasters who make predictions every day that affect the lives of millions and there is no one to check them on their predictions! If they are wrong, nobody brings it up again or holds them accountable.

Introducing Call-it! A Klout for predictions. Call-it is an app that will measure your ability to make accurate predictions. Once it calculates an accurate rating of your ability, this will enable you to pit yourself against your friends, experts, and the world.

We learned that most of the time people like to make predictions about the media they are consuming. This is why we think our concept would work well with Bing because it’s a major hub for media.

This is how it would work. The first thing people will do is go to Bing and most likely they will click on the popular now links. Which will take them to a search. For example, let's pretend you click on the Donald Trump link below.

You are then taken to results page, where the results are on the left hand and Call-it activity on the right. The Call-it activity will show you the popular people or companies that have made calls around the search topic you’ve chosen. It may show your friends who have made calls and the calls of others like celebrities. It could show you which calls have been closed (by the green square) and have either been fulfilled or not. Each call could give you an option to easily make a prediction or not by highlighting the appropriate call-it button.

If you highlight a name or a picture it would give you a summary of the person’s Call-it score and other social media information. 

If you highlight a call-it button, it could show your call it score, perhaps other stats like how many calls you’ve made, how many people are following you. It would also allow you to make a prediction as well.

If you click on the link it could take you to the Call-it site. 

The Call-it site would basically be a media hub; it could be it’s own site or it could be tied to another MS product such as the Bing News App or MSN.

It would cover all major topics including technology and business. If you click on a story it would take you to the story and show you all of the call details.

Once you are at the story, it will show you all the calls and comments that have been made. You will be able to make a new call or add new comments. And if you click on a person’s photo or name it will take you to their profiles

Rahul Sood profile picture, with statistics, calls made, and flunk’d. It would also show other relevant data like friends, followers, following, etc. This platform has huge potential for gamifying the scores and predictions. We could give people a certain status for making a certain amount of predictions and averaging a certain score. Think Gold, Silver, Bronze. They could also get a hot streak status if they make a certain amount of correct predictions in a row. Or we could partner with companies and make a challenge – Warner Bros is making another Harry Potter movie! Predict how many people will watch it on opening weekend!

Prediction isn't new; there are plenty of people predicting already and it has proven that it is a fun and engaging activity. For example, it is estimated that Fantasy Football had 35 million people involved and American Idol had over 122 million votes! This would be another fun way they could get into the game of predicting.

We put together a Business Canvas. As you can see there are a few ways to make money here.

As we took a look at the evolution of media, from cave drawings, to social media. We can honestly see a predicting platform like Call-it to be the next step because as media evolves, consumers want to become more and more involved. Regular people like you and I are becoming the stars and experts. Call-it would be a common equalizer, one that enables you to go up against the so called experts of the world and allows you show them that you are smarter than they are!