wallstreetsports, Intrade, and an untimely death
 

Some of you remember....at least a fuzzy memory....that back in 2001 I had attempted to purchase wallstreetsports.com unsuccessfully. The eventual buyer was a company called Intrade.

If you remember that much, you may remember, too, that I was in contact with Intrade soon after, knowing the main piece they had purchased wasn't the game (which Larry Cotter simply let die) but the member database (filled with massive duplication and bogus emails, but not all were worthless). While I had some idea of that, Intrade didn't really believe that to be true, even after I explained my thoughts on the situation to them.

We'd set up a phone call to talk about it because they had interest in my plans to start Jockstocks. One afternoon, back in early 2002, I received a phone call direct from Dublin, Ireland and 2 people were on the line- Ron Bernstein from New Jersey and John Delaney from Dublin. In that call I agreed to make mention of their plans for wallstreetsports.com (predictive market game) in exchange for them including a blurb about Jockstocks including a link when they emailed the entire WSS database. Corrupt tho it was, many of the 1st 1000 people that signed up here did so as a direct result of that email.

So, today I was puttering with some research and decided to check in on them, having had no real thought about them for years.

I found two things I did not expect. First, John Delaney met a tragic death just short of the summit of Mt Everest back in 2011. Second, the company no longer exists, having run into various issues including regulatory issues with the government and ceased operations about 2 years after John died. Ron Bernstein now runs a cryptocurrency website. He still owns the domain wallstreetsports.com but it lies dead. For a brief moment I thought maybe we should try to buy it then thought....why..

Anyway, that's part of how I've spent my president's day....you?

http://fortune.com/2014/11/17/what-t...-your-startup/

http://fortune.com/2013/10/10/the-my...-intrades-ceo/

worked

me too.


Discovered a WSS polo shirt the other day while cleaning out my closet, didn't realize it was that old.

I'm a little surprised that's what you guys got out of my post.
I was also feeling a little weird to realize a company that helped us get started is gone and that a guy I had a phone call with died at 28,000 feet 8 years ago.
And it also made me think more about what all has transpired since JS started.

2 terms of President Bush
2 terms of President Obama
and we're still going....
I actually can't remember what life was like when I didn't have stats and/or picks to do virtually every day, all year long. I wonder how many picks I've put in, how many sets of stats.

A WSS polo, eh? Won in a competition I assume?
Got a notification from Facebook the other day that Dean Browne had gone to Red Lobster....and remembered Dean winning a trip to DC to meet Tracy McGrady from WSS.

Then thought of the Wayback Machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20020124...eetsports.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20020605...ockstocks.com/

your last sentence:
"Anyway, that's part of how I've spent my president's day....you?"

my answer:
"worked"

ahh, I misread, my bad...was my wistful mood I guess

Was scrolling thru the web archive links- pretty cool that you can still pull up old market pages! Didn't research too much, but Patrick marleau seemed to be the only hockey player still active in J$ that was active at wss.

So that's what I've done so far this president week vacation.�� (besides ice fishing)

I was wondering why you would ask a question off topic in the original post.
And here we are not talking about wss. :faint: