September's prize winner for having the top % gain month/month is Chris Sternal-Johnson.  Below is a breakdown of the top ten performers for the month.

Congratulations, Chris!  We hope you enjoy your Dash Express GPS Navigator.  You'll be eligible to win another prize in three months.

While we prep the site for a major site update tonight, let me tell you all ahead of time that October's prize will the sweet Logitech Squeezebox Boom.  Here's a review.

Today we rolled out a new E-mail alert so that when a prediction is judged on the site, players that had open bets with the prediction that was judged will be notified. 

For example, let's say I had bet S$10,000 on the Dow Jones Index prediction.   Then, something occurred in the market that triggered an early judgment, but I was away from the site that day.  I would then receive an E-mail within a ten minute timeframe of the judgment letting me know that the prediction had been decided.  If I'm curious as to how I performed, I can go to the site to learn the results by clicking a handy link in the E-mail.

If, for some reason, I didn't want this type of E-mail alert, I could always go to my notifications screen and disable the service.  We plan on making a mobile version of the same alert in the very near future.

The August 2008 winner of The Standard's prediction market prize is Kevin Railsback.  He made one all-or-nothing bet on the 3G jailbroken iPhone prediction, while others exercised caution.  Kevin's big gamble proved to be fruitful.

"I could have either been in the top few, or the bottom few, depending on how that went," Kevin told me earlier today after learning of August's outcome.  "I would have had -49995 if I lost that [bet]."

Until we have a leaderboard on-site that shows everyone's percentage gain day-to-day, I'll be posting the top-ten gainers here at the end of each month.  

Here's how August fared:

David Kuan was not eligible to win the August prize according to the rules of the game (David won in June, so he has to wait 3 months before he can be eligible to win again).  You'll probably notice that I'm on the list, too, but I'm also not eligible to win any prizes for obvious reasons.

Congrats, Kevin, and congrats to David and everyone else on this list on your really outstanding performance!

After a bit of a delay, The Standard’s team blog is finally here.  FTW!

Over the past six months, we have found ourselves time and time again discussing various aspects of the PM (prediction market) with some of our top players.  We never really had a good place to do it, however.  One minute the discussion would cover the intricacies or semantics of, say, jailbreaking an iPhone, the next we would be creating PM wishlists and sharing product enhancement ideas back and forth.

So, until we have a proper forum, right now we’ll be doing a lot of the PM functionality discussions with core users over here.  We really value your feedback and look forward to the future discussions we’ll have.

Also, the Team Blog will be a place where we announce new site features, events, programs, jobs, and other tidbits as they relate to the site, the team, and your experiences at thestandard.com.

Image Credit: NASA