Woz: "Dancing with the Stars" victory possible with geek support

Melissa Chang — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:18:08 -0400

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple Computer, is living the geek dream. Not only is he smart, rich and wildly popular in the high-tech community for his ground-breaking design of the Apple I and II, but he’s currently spending six hours per day belly-to-belly with a incredibly beautiful Russian dancer.

Eat your heart out, hackers.

There is one tiny little drawback. The Woz is about to participate in a competitive dancing competition -- in front of more than 20 million viewers.

Woz makes his debut on the reality television show Dancing with the Stars tonight on ABC. He’ll be dancing the cha-cha with partner Karina Smirnoff to the song "You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet."

The song title seems vastly appropriate. But the real question on everyone’s minds -- even perplexing The Woz himself -- is how long he’ll stay alive. Dancing with the Stars uses a mixture of judges’ scores and viewer voting to come up with a final score. The couple with the lowest combined score from judges and viewer votes is eliminated from the competition.

According to an interview The Woz did with Wired, he’s working out the math.

"Mark Cuban, the guy who referred me to the show, did the calculations and figured out even if the judges gave you zero and every other dancing partner got a perfect 300, if you got 6 percent more of the viewer vote you'd still win. So even if I do totally flub it, if I have a whole bunch of supporters coming from the geek world, I can win."

Will the geek community help Woz hold on until at least the top 10? There’s a Facebook Group "Vote for Woz," and he is calling on the Mac community to cast their votes in his favor. According to his Website, there will even be an iPhone app coming soon that will help fans cast their positive votes.

Prediction markets everywhere aren’t holding out too much hope that The Woz will join the ranks of the victorious, however. The Industry Standard’s prediction market currently puts his chances at 71% that he will not make it to the top 10. HubDub’s market shows that 26% of its voters believe that Woz will be the first dancer voted off the show. (Steve-O is in second place with 15% of the vote.) Predictify gives The Woz a better chance, however, with only 7% of voters believing he will be the first voted off the show.

So what tricks does Wozniak have up his sleeve to help him win? "I can count to 4 and I think that skill helps," he told CNET in the following video interview, which includes footage of a dance practice session (well worth a watch!).

Melissa Chang (@mchang16) is the president of Pure Incubation, and her blog can be found at www.16thletter.com. Chang writes about The Industry Standard Prediction Market as part of an ongoing series. She’s reluctantly betting The Woz will be seated before he makes it to the top 10.