Netflix Offers $1M For Innovation By Nicholas Carlson
What do Netflix and the early 18th century British government have in common? Here's a hint: it's not Georgian architecture. Netflix today announced the Netflix Prize, an award of $1 million dollars to the first person to improve Netflix's movie recommendation system's accuracy by at least 10 percent. And according to a statement, the decision to offer the prize was inspired by the Longitude Prize, created in 1714 by the British government to solve the problem of how to determine a ship's longitude. Netflix will make 100 million anonymous movie ratings ranging from one to five stars available to contestants. Currently, when renters watch recommended movies from Netflix, they rate them on average of a half star higher than the other movies they rent, Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey told internetnews.com. Swasey said the Netflix recommendation system uses proprietary algorithms to process the more than 2 million new ratings a day in order to pair users with patterns found in the over 1.5 billion ratings already noted. But if a contestant can bump that half star up another 10 percent, Netflix will license the technology and publish a detailed description of the winning approach. If no one can meet that threshold, the company will annually award a $50,000 progress prize to whomever makes the most "significant advancement" toward that goal until someone does meet it. In order to avoid the scandal that sometimes accompanies the release of user data, Netflix has removed all personal information from the 100 million ratings, scrubbing them clean of everything but their dates. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3635411 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:216775 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
