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To get the best predictions about when your company's latest product will ship or how it will sell, you might try asking your employees - anonymouslyA start-up, Crowdcast, began selling corporate forecasting software on Thursday that does just that

The employees on the front lines - the sales team talking to customers or the people packaging new products - have firsthand information that could be valuable to executivesBut top management do not always get the most accurate information, because employees do not want to tell them the bad news, or they want to underpromise so the boss thinks they are outperforming

"It's a huge problem in corporations - by the time information gets to the top, it's meaningless or too late," said Mat Fogarty, Crowdcast's founder and chief executiveMrFogarty spent a decade doing corporate forecasting at Electronic Arts and Unilever, where he saw how inaccurate official corporate forecasts could be"There is a lot of information not getting to decision-makers, and that's expensive," he said.

At Electronic Arts, MrFogarty said, the most junior people often had the most insight into the quality of new video games, and he picked up the best information about the latest version of Madden while playing soccer games on the company lawn

Often the administrative assistant who books meetings has valuable inside information, but no one ever asks for it, said Leslie RFine, Crowdcast's chief scientistShe came from Hewlett-Packard Labs, where she led the development of Brain, which H.Pused internally to predict things like printer sales and memory pricing

Other companies, including Google, have developed internal marketsSome start-ups have also tried this, including Spigit and NewsFutures

Crowdcast's mission, said MsFine, who has a doctorate in economics, was to "take the promise of prediction markets and the wisdom-of-crowds stuff and make it applicable inside businesses." The start-up has been financed with $3 million from Alsop Louie Partners

Here's how it works: companies pay an annual fee for the Web-based software and employees start out with a certain amount of virtual moneyWhen people inside the company pose a question - such as when a new game will be ready to ship or whether a competitor's new drug will get regulatory approval - employees offer a response and choose an amount to bet on its accuracyIn comments, they can anonymously explain their reasoningThen, if they are right, they get more money and a louder voice in the future; if they are wrong, they lose money and do not have as much to bet later on

Star predictors get real prizes, like gift cards or lunch with the bossGift cards are sent anonymously through the Crowdcast systemEven if the names of star predictors are revealed for prizes like a lunch, managers do not know which bets they made on which questions, only that they were highly accurate

During a pilot period, five large companies, including Warner Brothers and General Motors, have been using Crowdcast to predict revenue, ship dates or new products from competitorsAbout 4,000 bets have been placed, and predictions have been about 50 percent more accurate than official forecasts, MsFine said

At a media company with a new product to ship, 1,200 employees predicted a ship date and sales figures that resulted in 61 percent less error than executives' previous prediction, according to CrowdcastA pharmaceutical company asked a panel of scientists and doctors to predict regulatory decisions and new drug sales using Crowdcast, and they were more accurate than the company's original prediction 86 percent of the time.