Normally I don't like to discuss new features until I'm ready to launch them but I've been pretty excited about this as I've been working on it so I figured I would give a heads up to everyone. By far the most requested feature to RealityMarkets.com has been short sales, but unfortunately I wasn't able to introduce it before now due to limitations in the previous pricing system. Now that the new system is up I've been revisiting Short Sales and after some work I'm happy to report the addition is nearly finished. I'm hoping to roll it out in the next few days after I wrap up the testing.

The Industry Standard has written up an overview on the prediction markets Google runs internally to improve their business decisions as well as learn how employees exchange information. A little tidbit caught my eye:

With about 1,500 employees making 80,000 "trades" over the past two and a half years, Google officials say it's the largest corporate experiment with prediction markets they are aware of.

The reason this caught my eye was because we have about a third of the users but have done about 180,000 trades in a year and a half. It's interesting to see the differences in trade volume between our groups of people.

Some of you may have noticed a change this week to the account portfolio page that added a short position category to your portfolio and were wondering how to actually short a stock. Starting today you will be able to enter short orders on the trade screens where all your other orders are entered. Just select it from the drop down menu where you normally select buy or sell. A Short is how you open a short position and a Cover is how you close out a short position. Beware, if you Cover a short position and the price is higher than when you opened the short position, you will owe money to close it out.

It seems RealityMarkets traders aren't the only ones predicting David Archuleta will win American Idol 7. Here's an excerpt from the American Idle blog:

Trade publications are beginning to admit that David Archuleta has Idol 7 in the bag. While I wouldn't go that far in proclaiming him the winner, I will say he has a good chance. Just look at his target audience and the sheer numbers below. This is a really flippin' long story but I'll give you the highlights. The story makes sense.

Read the rest here.