Congratulations to all the March Top Ten, including Helmut Schwarzin who posted a healthy 81% monthly gain.   Don't forget, if you have an idea for a new prediction you think the rest of the community would enjoy betting on, send us a Suggestion today!

Edward Beckham has won the top spot for the second time in the last three months! 

Edward's incredible 355% gain for the month of February is impressive indeed - congrats, Edward!  Cheers to all of the new top-ten players as well as some familiar names and faces.  And thanks for all who help to make the Prediction Market the engaging forum and tool it has become.

Why not invite your friends and colleagues to compete against you this time?  

January 2009's top % gainer was Marc Chiang, posting a fat 83% monthly gain. Marc has been working hard over several months to achieve this goal, and in January he made that final leap forward in impressive fashion.

Congratulations, Marc!!

Decmber 2008's top % gainer was Edward Beckham, posting a respectable 61% monthly gain to his overall score (87% monthly gain in net worth).

Congratulations, Edward!

November 2008's top % gainer was Brendan Davis slotting a respectable 63% monthly gain. Props to David Kuan for pulling into second place with his hefty networth.

Congrats, Brendan!

For the last 6 weeks, you've probably noticed a serious lack in responsiveness to the Prediction Market's prize program.  Behind the scenes, we had some unexpected bug issues that have delayed the awarding of prizes to players of the Prediction Market in a serious way.  This bug was serious enough to require extensive work to simply get accurate reports for November (and October).

The good news is, the bug has been repaired, so December will bring the awards back to a normal release schedule.  The bad news is, we won't get November finalized until the end of this week.  Even though the bug has been repaired, our previous database numbers are having to be recreated for the month of November, and it's having to be done manually.  

During all of this chaos these last six weeks, I've come to ask myself (probably out of frustration, but it's worth asking), "Do people care about the prizes?"

I know for a fact everyone cares about the ranking, and their performance.  I check mine daily, and I use my networth at the top of the page to quickly guage if any of my predictions have swung wildly overnight.

But, some of our montly winners have confided to me that they didn't even know there was a prize program. 

We've enlisted some serious firepower to make the gaming aspects of the prediction market our next major push in early 2009. Some time between March and May (we're finalizing the calendar now) we'll be rolling out a series of pure-gaming updates that we believe will make the markets a total blast to play, and increase engagement several fold.  I'm not going to go into details here right now, but rest assured, I can't wait until we can get these new pieces in place.

But, I digress... I ask you, for those that care to read this: Do you really play for prizes?  Did you start playing only because of them?  Would you even notice if they disappeared?

Just curious. . .

(photo credit: CBS Interactive)

October's prize winner for having the top % gain month/month is Tom Holowka with a healthy 201% monthly gain (off of one massive bet).  Some of the leaderboard regulars have crept into the mix again, too, which is nice to see.  Below is a breakdown of the top ten performers for the month.  

Congrats Tom!  Check back soon for the November totals. We'll be updating the other relevant prize pages to record this win shortly.

Apologies to all who have been dialing in to find out who won October, and who won November.

The winner for October was incredibly difficult to contact - something we've never experienced before.  Usually, players are eager to send over the required paperwork so we can ship things off in a timely manner. 

This time around, however, we had an excrutianingly difficult time communicating with some of the players, which slowed the entire process down to a gringing halt.

The winners of the last two months will be posted here in the next 24 hours.

Thanks for your patience.

Last night we rolled out charts for the predictions.  The charts show the price history, or the community consensus, across a horizontal timescale.  The graphs default to the monthly view, but may be rebuilt using different time ranges.  If you run your mouse across the blue line in the chart, you'll see the price reflected for that time period.

There is a known bug in Firefox 3 on Macs (only) that causes the chart to display incorrectly when it first loads.  Upon refresh, the chart repairs itself.  After much research, it appears to be a defect found in the Flash plugin for FF3/Mac users.  There is no known fix that we're aware of, so hopefully a future Flash update will rectify the issue.

On Tuesday, October 7, we rolled out a major release with several important site enhancements.  It has taken a little while for the dust to settle here, so apologies for the delay in the official announcement. 

Here is what is new on thestandard.com:

Story “Carousel”
Across the top of nearly every page on the site, we now have an area directly under the site navigation where we can promote important news and predictions that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle.  The tool is capable of holding an infinite amount of content, but we generally keep ours loaded with about 10 pieces of content.  

Home and News pages
The most obvious update for most users was the new homepage update.  The news stories now all contain graphical components, which are actually attached at the article level, yet used in multiple places (Home, News, Article and Carousel).  This new image system gives our editors much more power to add visual interest to the stories they publish.

We’ve also added the Associated Press as a content partner to add additional scope to our tech coverage.

Article level
As I mentioned earlier, we now have an image system in place that makes adding images to content incredibly easy for our editors.  Any image can be put into an article and it will automatically become resized, and compressed, appropriately.  At the same time, all of the necessary thumbnails are generated on the fly should the article be promoted elsewhere on the site.  And, most importantly, if a user is at the article level and he/she clicks the image, the original will be put into a modal window to allow for closer inspection.  This is especially important for information-rich graphs and charts.

Misc
There was a lot of optimization done under the hood and CSS cleanup, which was unnoticed by 99.9% of our users (the other .01% being ourselves).  Know that we are always striving to optimize and improve the site to ultimately improve everyone's experience.

(photo credit: mugley)