Wisdom of crowds - the update

[JW]

hi steve & community

once upon a time a long, long time ago tim kersten set up a site to track
"the wisdom of crowds" [1] with regard to the question "how many freerunners
will FIC sell in the first two months"

the answer can be seen here (click the stats tab)
http://openmoko.hobby-site.com/ and is remarkably consistent at a median
value of 4000 after over 1000 people voted.    In fact this number has
stayed very close to 4000 since the low hundreds of votes.

so are you going to ask the webshop/pulster/trisoft/whoever to keep track of
the real number for you?  .....after all, if it turns out to be accurate you
can use this method for planning your next product!

and are you going to tell us how accurate it was :-) ?

actually the rules for the "wisdom of a crowd" to be accurate demand that
each guess is independent..... and here we have a little pollution in that
it is possible for you to see others votes before you vote yourself
(although many will not have bothered)

anyway.... it gave us something to do while you folks were busy making
phones....

i reckon it saved at least 12 useless messages to list by frustrated
geeks......  (and oops  created only 9 more....)

actually next time we could always use it to guess the release date for son
of freerunner ....

jw

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds
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