The concept of a 'prediction market' is nothing new, and has been around for some time. However, probably for a much longer time than most of you know. Because DARPA (who also shut down their project 'LifeLog' the same day Facebook went live) started experimenting with prediction markets already back in 2001. According to CIA documents, the most notable effort was the 2003 Policy Analysis Market (PAM) (FutureMAP), designed to predict Middle Eastern political instability, but it was cancelled due to controversy: