Workers, Place Your Bets  A little over a month ago, a group of
Yahoo! executives faced an enviable challenge. More than 200
employees had just completed the company's annual Hack Day,
where small teams have 24 hours to create, refine, and then
pitch new products or services that they hope Yahoo will bring
to market. Judges picked their favorites, but the company needed
to decide which ones merited further development.  In years
past, that decision was left to Yahoo (YHOO) executives. But
this time, the company wanted help from the rank and file. So it
doled out wads of play money and encouraged employees to place
bets on which products would fly with the public. It used a
system customized by Yahoo principal research scientist David
Pennock, one that works a lot like a stock market. Yahoo used
the data to help identify which ideas could be made into more
complete prototypes. "As a product organization, you hope to
remove the burden of predicting from one product manager," says
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yah