Here's the Inkling interview:

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Adam Siegel, 33, founder of Inkling at inklingmarkets.com, an online predictive market.

Didn't the Internet craze die back in 2001? Why launch an Internet business?

The Internet craze didn't die in 2001. Companies with no path to profitability, no plan, and excessive irrational behavior died in 2001. The possibilities of the Internet in relation to consumer behavior and transforming business are still as potent as ever.

Where did your idea come from?

Our idea came from doing consulting for several large companies and working in one for several years. We watched the lack of quality information flow between the hierarchies. We saw how people with relevant knowledge, whose input should be key in strategic decisions, were completely left out of the process, and we saw broken business processes for innovation and coming up with new ideas. We also read a lot about collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds, paired our understanding of those two worlds, and out came the idea to do Inkling. We certainly weren't the first to say prediction markets should be used by corporations, but we think we're taking an approach that sets us apart from our predecessors and current competitors.

What is your elevator pitch?

Inkling helps you capture the collective wisdom of a diverse group of people to give you insight about what may happen in the future vs. relying solely on high paid consultants or individual experts. This is important because it can help you mitigate risk, make better strategic decisions, spawn innovation and entrepreneurship, and change your corporate culture.

How is your proposition different from earlier generations of online business?

Online business services, beyond eCommerce solutions, still usually required an expensive consulting component. There also was not traditionally a focus on ease of use. We've tried to address both by creating "do it yourself" tools to allow anyone to manage their own prediction marketplace. We've taken something as complex as trading in a stock market mechanism and made it easy enough for our Mom's to use. Related we've obsessed on our user-interface and iterate on it constantly to make sure people can use it. After all, you can't say you sell software that helps you capture the wisdom of a crowd if the crowd canÃ‚Â’t use your software.

How will you make money?

We make money by selling service agreements to large and small businesses to set up and maintain prediction marketplaces. We also do a fair amount of customization work for our larger clients.

Why will you succeed? What are your biggest successes so far?

In less than a year we have attracted several thousand users to our public marketplace and have about 20 clients. We are working with Abbott Labs here in Chicago, ABC-KGO in San Francisco, the Government of Singapore, AlderTrack, think tanks, a video game maker, and an array array of small businesses and non-profits. We think we will continue to see success because of our well designed product and because we think this is a blue sky market that people are just beginning to think about as a way to changing the way they do business. We also think we're going to be successful because we are largely self-funded. When the success of your business means you can or cannot pay the mortgage and your bills, it makes you a little hungrier.

What is your age and previous business experience?

The two co-founders of Inkling are Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny. We are 33 and 29 respectively. Adam worked at Accenture here in Chicago for 10 years in the Accenture Technology Labs and was a senior manager when he left. Nate worked at Accenture as well in the same group and left as a consultant to work as a senior developer at Digital River.

Have you received funding? If so, how much and from whom?

We received a small amount of funding (18k) from yCombinator when we incorporated but have taken no funding since.