Back in October of last year, I looked at what inTrade was predicting for the results of the upcoming 2008 US elections.

There has been a lot of press and a lot of drama, but the result have not changed much.   In a winner take all prediction, here is what inTrade is  predicting now:

If you take the contracts with the highest price in each area, here is what the market is predicting today (Jan 18, 2007)

• Hillary Clinton is going to be the next President of the United States
• Someone from the Democratic field (not any of the Presidential Candidates) will be Vice President
• The Clinton / ??? Democratic ticket will defeat the McCain / Huckabee Republican ticket
• The Democrats will control the US Senate after the 2008 elections
• The Democrats will control the US House of Representatives after the 2008 elections

There have only been two changes.   First, the market is predicting that Obama is no longer going to be the Democratic VP candidate.   Second, the market predicting that McCain is going to lead a loosing Republican ticket, instead of Guliani.

The market behaved very strangely, and very poorly when predicting the New Hampshire outcome for the Democratic field.

The Clinton and Obama contract swung wildly in value, indicating a lack of “wisdom”.

inTrade is also currently predicting a recession in 2008, but only with a 70% chance.   My guess is that we are currently in one, so that might be easy money.

Oh, and to be open about any bias I have, I support Obama.

I love Highrise . For a small fast growing start-up, the workflow is wonderful.

The problem with most CRM systems, including Sugar and Salesforce.com is that they are not designed to help you get work done. They are simply designed help gather and organize data for upper management.

Here is a workflow that I do ever day, and something that is really painful in Sugar.

• Someone emails our support address. They clearly want to be a customer.
• I have to create an opportunity in Sugar - but I can’t because opportunities require accounts
• So, I create an account
• Then I create the opportunity
• Then I email the client using my regular email client
• Then I copy the email into Sugar. I could have used Sugar’s email client, but it is DOG SLOW.
• Then I create a follow-on task

This takes 20 minutes of data entry. In Highrise, it would be 30 seconds to cc the special email address.

It gets worse when I want to quickly review the status of each of our top accounts.   When you open an account in Sugar, you then have to click on every action item and click on every note just to see the current status.   In Highrise, you see that all right away.

Why aren’t we using Highrise now?   We’d like to extend it in some ways, customize it in others and integrate it with many aspects of our operations.   For our purposes, an open source solution would work better.

Sugar is open source, but it’s work flow sucks.   I would hate to have to build a clone of Highrise from scratch…

It would certainly be worth it to us to pay for a license to source code.   We’d pay more than it costs to on the site.