Not many companies would give an employee a pair of dice and take them to the gambling room, but this is 2007, in the decade called the "noughties" where odd things occur in workplaces. While not as experimental as they were in the 1960s, businesses are willing to try new things in this decade that the conservative '90s would not have allowed.

One new business process is called a prediction market.

Prediction markets exploit the personal knowledge of a group of people or employees to predict future outcomes for a company or a system. Google, Microsoft, HP, Eli Lilly, Masterfoods and dozens more companies are now encouraging employees to put small bets on products and processes to see if they will work or get released on time.

Microsoft was an early users of prediction markets;

in 2004 it set up a system for employees to bet on whether they would reach a deadline on a internal product that was to be released. Each employee in the betting system had $50 to spend on buying shares of completion dates. Within hours of the system going live, it was predicting that the deadline would not be reached. While some managers freaked, the share price predictions proved to be quite accurate.

Google also used prediction markets designed to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things Google thought strategically important.

Prediction markets are also known as "inkling markets" and for good reason. They can help you find crucial information about a system that you might not have heard through official channels.

Computers are honest and don't care about causing upset. They express facts.

Humans have the wonderful trait of wanting to make people happy and keep them in a positive mood.

The betting system Microsoft put in place used humans to show that humans can be unreliable when communicating to superiors. In an anonymous system, where there's a small reward for being brutally honest, people will respond to it. In prediction markets, you are rewarded for saying the equivalent of "Yes, your bum looks big in that", but it is not the brutality that is rewarded but the exactness of your prediction - or, better put, the honesty.

Robert Hanson, who could be classed as the leading expert in this area, was savaged by politicians in the US when he suggested using a prediction market for terrorist attacks, a system that could have worked very well when there were so many information dissemination issues in the intelligence industry. It might have worked better than the current coloured threat warnings.

Prediction markets that are open to the public and give a chance of making real profits are also available. These virtual markets, using real money, seem to follow their markets quite well but, as usual, another human quality, this time greed, comes into play. Some of these markets, including ones on US presidential races, saw some forms of gaming happening to get better odds on outcomes.

In private companies, if the incentive for winning in a prediction market is too great, it could inspire staff to rig the system so a product fails to reach a deadline. Most studies, though, have shown that the monetary reward is nothing compared to the satisfaction of being right. If the National Lottery could only convince Lotto winners of the same, it would have even more money to spend on worthy causes.

ALL THIS FOR PACMAN?

WITHmore power than any of the computers that did the special effects for Star Wars and the ability to render images so lifelike that you think you really are on an alien planet, the Xbox 360 is one powerful games console.

So when PR people told the worldwide press about the release of a new groundbreaking game for the 360, the press sat up and listened. But when Microsoft announced that Pacman was coming to its gaming platform, the company got an earful.

Microsoft is now hyping up another new game that will change the world. We'll check the prediction market on Space Invaders.