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The uneasiness we’ve heard for months in the voices of some of our mortgage clients has rippled around the world’s financial markets in the past week, and with analysis from the investment banks like the kind that Marc Andreessen revealed in his blog the other day, it’s no wonder. 

While the Fed’s discount rate cut this morning promises to ease the short-term credit crunch,  a welcome shard of clarity from Tyler Cowen this morning (with links to other sound commentary) speaks to the underlying issues in the mortgage arena.    I’m reading his newly published Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist right now, and may well end up at George Mason to do my Economics PhD. thanks to it and his ethnic food guide to the greater DC metro area. Viva la Marginal Revolution!

eStara issued a press release today announcing the launch of its Form to Phone service, which provides consumer data from online form submissions to sales professionals via phone in addition to email.  ”The solution has been proven to shorten response times for lead generation marketers and improve customer satisfaction by delivering prompt responses to online inquiries, ” the release states, and goes on to provide statistics on how Autobytel’s use of the service has increased the qualified leads delivered to dealers while improving conversion rates, in one case by 300%.   

“Time is of the essence in any sales transaction, and online merchants who are able to connect with customers while their interest is high are more likely to close the sale.  eStara Form to Phone is an effective tool for delivering timely, personalized service and tracking lead generation performance,” says eStara’s John Federman in the requisite CEO quote.

So how about this, Mr. (or Ms.) Auto Dealer–or Real Estate Agent, or Other Sales Pro:  instead of getting a phone call providing online form data, how about a phone call with the live consumer on the other end whose online form data went in real time to a call center agent, who phoned them immediately, verified their interest and qualifications, and then if appropriate, called you and personally introduced them to you?  

 Which would you prefer?  Whom should we call at Autobytel?

I don’t know what rock I’ve been hiding under, but I just came across this post on The Official Google Blog about the prediction market that Bo Cowgill and other employees set up years ago to forecast internal events of strategic importance at Google.  (It  was originally posted back in 2005, but for some reason it came up in my Attensa “River of News” view the other day.)  No payment is required to play at Google, but the market predictions are quite accurate.  According to Cowgill, social and reputational rewards work better; players in his prediction market were “more concerned about their ranking and tee shirts than the large cash prizes awarded. ” (That’s why none of us work for Google.)

The New York Times ran a story last spring about another company running an internal prediction market.  At Rite-Solutions, employees can make proposals for, say, the company to enter a new line of business or make an operational improvement or acquire a new technology.  The proposals become stocks that are bought and sold, and  though employees get funny money to invest, they share in real-money proceeds if the stock delivers.   According to Rite-Solutions management, the market has paid big dividends:  “it removes the terrible burden of us always having to be right…[and] it finds good ideas from unlikely sources.”

Here at DoublePositive, we’re all about the wisdom of markets AND the large cash prizes.  Although we’re growing, our staff is small enough that those buying into the market would themselves decide the outcome, so it would become self-fulfilling…which sort of defeats the purpose.   (If we did have the critical mass to make a prediction market viable, though, you can bet there’d be a whole lotta skin in the game–we have a former professional bookie on staff, after all).  But small as we are, we would benefit greatly from aggregating knowledge and opinions from all corners of the organization.  I’m fired up to create some sort of mechanism to harness that wisdom in a way that encourages everyone to participate.  Any ideas out there?