I’m thrilled to report that Predictalot had an Indian makeover, launching as Predictopus* for the ICC Cricket World Cup. The Yahoo! India team did an incredible job, leveraging the idea and some of the code base of Predictalot, yet making it their own. Predictopus is not a YAP — it lives right on the Yahoo! Cricket website, the official homepage for the ICC Cricket World Cup. They’re also giving away Rs 10 lakhs — or about $22,000 if my calculations are correct — in prizes. Everything is bigger in India, including the crowds and the wisdom thereof. It will be great to see the game played out on a scale that dwarfs our college basketball silliness in the US.
The Y! India team reused some of the backend code but redid the frontend almost entirely. To adapt the game to cricket, among other chores, we had to modify our simulation code to estimate the starting probabilities that any team would win against any other team, even in the middle of a game. (How likely is it for India to come back at home from down 100 runs with 10 overs left and 5 wickets lost? About 25%, we think.) These starting probabilities are then refined further by the game-playing crowds.
It’s great to see an experiment from Labs grow into a full-fledged product run by a real product team in Yahoo!, a prime example of technology transfer at its best. In the meantime, we (Labs) are still gunning for a relaunch of Predictalot itself for March Madness 2011, the second year in a row. Stay tuned.
2011/02/24 Update: An eye-catching India-wide ad campaign for predictopus is live, including homepage, finance, movies, OMG, answers, mail, everywhere! Oh, and one of the prizes is a Hyundai.
* Yes, that’s a reference to legendary Paul the Octopus, RIP.