Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Netflix, the movie rental company, has decided its million-dollar-prize competition was such a good investment that it is planning another one.
The company’s challenge, begun in October 2006, was both geeky and formidable: come up with a recommendation software that could more accurately predict the movies customers would like than Netflix’s in-house software, Cinematch. To qualify for the prize, contestants had to be at least 10 percent better than Cinematch.
The winner, formally announced Monday morning, is a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. The multinational team calls itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos. The group — a merger of teams — was the longtime frontrunner in the contest, and in late June it finally surpassed the 10-percent barrier. Under the rules of the contest, that set off a 30-day period in which other teams could try to beat them.
crowd sourcing for a better product. wonder how else this technique could be applied?
