• Enhanced Market Creation
  The market creation wizard has been enhanced with the ability to fetch background information about a news topic by simply providing an url to an article on a news site. The wizard automatically reads the keywords from the given page, a summary and an image – if provided by the website.
• Market Sponsoring
  Knew The News introduces the sponsoring of markets by promoters of the site. On a promoted market, a prize is raffled among the players who’s first, unsold prediction was made on the winning outcome.
• Design Changes
  Among others, instead of the colored bubble, the users avatar is shown along with his name throughout the site.
• New categories in Sports
  A number of sub categories have been added to the Sports category: Boxing, Cricket, Golf and Cycling.

Knew The News, the free online news prediction game, introduces a new way to promote products and companies on their site. In addition to common, content related advertisements provided by affiliate programs and add networks, advertisers act as site sponsors, providing incentives for players on the site.

In contrast to advertisement forms used on the site so far, the relationship between advertiser and site user in this case is much closer. Sponsoring content and supplying prizes for raffles is something a user will actually appreciate – and not annoying. The user will recognize the effort of the sponsor and will connect positive and sympathetic feelings towards the entity offering the incentive.

“Knew The News chose to additionally support a positive user experience, by directly inserting the promotions into the content area of the page in an eye-catching, yet consistent way,”, explains Constantinus van der Kruijs, founder of Knew The News and adds, “and to prevent any detraction from it, no other advertisement is being displayed concurrently”.

Advertisers may freely chose on which of the user generated questions they wish to supply a promotion, with only few exceptions. Knew The News offers plenty diversified content, rich in variation of topics and aspiration.

To support advertisement promotions even further, they are being mentioned in newsletters as well as in social media postings from Knew The News.

“Although the supplied prizes may be small in value, the total effort to create an effective promotion is clearly remarkably higher. This is where Knew The News offers an easy way and a worthy channel to reach out to a dedicated user community and to a large number of occasional visitors to the site on current news topics,” emphasize van der Kruijs.

To start with, Knew The News partnered with Whatabeautifullife (http://www.whatabeautifullife.com/), A platform for online shopping of stylish fashion, Evening & Party Dresses and club wear, among others and own promotion prizes.

After a few months of reduced development on the site, some new features and improvements have been implemented during the last month:

• Subscribe to markets
  A digest notification message is send to users periodically containing information on developments in markets to which the user subscribed. Subscription to a market is independent from making predictions.
• Short selling
  Expert mode users may bet against options. Players are able to predict that a certain outcome may not occur in their opinion, without the need to buy stakes on each of the other options.
• Track your invitations to Knew The News
  Whenever you send an invitation, you are now able to track the invitations state, and eventually resend the invitation.
• Improvements on market details
  Knew The News tracks the number of visits on a market page, and now allows more suitable news stories related to the market topic to be displayed on the page.

Right now, the GOP primaries are a hot topic in US politics. Follow the candidate nomination on Knew The News:
http://www.knewthenews.com/Tag/GOP

Coming up: The 2012 Formula 1 season. Will Sebastian Vettel (Red Bull) be able to win again?
http://www.knewthenews.com/Tag/formula+1

March Madness: NCAA Basketball will freak out!
http://www.knewthenews.com/Tag/ncaab

Long term: UEFA Soccer European Championship:
http://www.knewthenews.com/Tag/euro+2012

During the last several months, I have been busy relocating. As you may see, this is a very time consuming matter. Nevertheless, most of you may not even have noticed that I’ve been around less once in a while – which is a good thing! As you know, Knew The News aims to be self-organizing, and this goal appears to be met yet. In case you’d like to know: I’ve moved from Switzerland back to Germany, back to the city where I’ve lived before I went to Switzerland.

Time to introduce me to anyone who has joined the site recently. My name is Stijn (that’s dutch), I am the founder, owner and developer of the Knew The News site. You may know me already from the site: I am the user “kruijs” there.

First of all, I would like to thank you for joining the site and I hope you’re doing fine so far. I assume you already had the opportunity to make yourself familiar with how the site works to some extend but if not, please don’t hesitate to contact me using the contact page of the website (or post a shout on my profile page).

The website has been publicly available for a little more than one year now and I’ve been experiencing huge members efforts and contributions throughout the last year. Many people provided great feedback previously, but I think it would be appropriate to ask you directly for some thoughts.

Feedback from the users is something I highly appreciate. It’s the most valuable input I can get, and it allows me to directly address any problems or wishes from the users.

Therefor: Anyone who responds to this request with any kind of reasonable info will be awarded 1,000 virtual bucks on Knew The News.

Please take a minute to answer some or all of the following questions by sending me an email:

– What do you think about Knew The News, in general?
– To what extend do you think you understand the purpose and the functionality of the site?
– Have you noticed any problems while using the website? If so: What kind of problems?
– What functionality or features do you miss most on the site? What could be better?
– Is there anything else you’d like to let me know?

Thank you very much for participating,
Enjoy predicting!