Tech Buzz Game

The Tech Buzz Game -- a collaboration between Yahoo! Research and O'Reilly Media -- is a fantasy prediction market launched in March 2005 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California.

The game consists of multiple submarkets that pit a handful of rival technologies, each represented by a stock, against one another. Players have access to the current "buzz" around each technology, as measured by the number of Yahoo! Search users seeking information on it.

The game's object is to anticipate future search buzz and buy and sell stocks accordingly. Thus, a player who believes BitTorrent stock is undervalued might buy shares, while a player who thinks BitTorrent is overpriced might sell the stock or instead purchase shares in a competing peer-to-peer technology.