NERA and Crowdcast Partner to Launch First Ever Clean Energy Forecasting Platform

New Project Taps Clean Energy Experts to Provide Insight Into Future of the Industry


SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - June 11, 2010) -  NERA, a leading economic consulting firm, today announced the launch of the Clean Energy Exchange, where clean energy experts pool their knowledge to produce more useful forecasts regarding the future of the industry. The Exchange uses Crowdcast Social BI (SBI) technology to collect and aggregate participants' insights.

"Clean energy is an emerging industry with little historical data to draw upon to make informed decisions about investments, technologies and policies. The Clean Energy Exchange addresses this critical need," said Adam Borison, senior vice president at NERA and project leader of the Clean Energy Exchange. "It is a uniquely powerful way to capture business intelligence about trends and developments in this fast-moving field. We are excited to provide investors, developers and policy makers with a new tool to improve decision-making in this critical area."

Participants in the Clean Energy Exchange include business leaders, investors, technologists and academics. Clean energy professionals from around the world are invited to join the Exchange, share insights and help fill the information gap in the industry. Participants will use Crowdcast SBI to bet virtual money on outcomes of key industry events. Bets are then aggregated into crowd forecasts, which are timely, unbiased and shown to be more reliable than forecasts from traditional methods.

"As the leader of the SBI market, our mission is to add people-driven intelligence to data to help businesses in clean energy and other industries achieve outstanding forecasting accuracy. Through our partnership with NERA, we're drawing on an untapped expert pool in a vital industry," said Mat Fogarty, CEO of Crowdcast. "Clean energy is an exploding market, rich in opportunities for a broad range of technologies and constantly in flux from economic, political and social forces. With fresh knowledge surfacing every day, the Exchange will help industry participants use that knowledge for a better understanding of the future of clean energy."

About NERA
NERA Economic Consulting is a global firm of experts dedicated to applying economic, finance and quantitative principles to complex business and legal challenges. The Energy Group is at the forefront of the continuing transformation of the energy industries, working with companies, governmental bodies and regulators worldwide. For more information, visit: http://www.nera.com.

About Crowdcast
Crowdcast leads the Social BI market, bridging the gap between traditional business intelligence and enterprise social network applications. Crowdcast provides a new outlet that aligns people and purpose, where insight, plans and experience come together, creating insanely accurate business outcomes. Some of the world's most innovative companies rely on Crowdcast to improve project and portfolio management and to uncover and mitigate strategic and operational risk. Now future business is everyone's business. For more information, visit http://www.crowdcast.com.

Follow Crowdcast on Twitter: http://twitter.com/crowdcastinc
Read the Crowdcast blog: http://crowdcast.com/wordpress/

Contact Information:

Contact:
Dana Zemack or Megan Soto
LaunchSquad
Crowdcast@launchsquad.com
415-625-8555