Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/netflix-awards-1-million-prize-and-starts-a-new-contest

by asnyder • 17 years ago

31 9 17 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

baran• 17 years ago

Crowdsourcing is customer development to the extreme. By placing R&D in control of the customers, only products which are useful are likely to emerge. More companies (especially those which high brand recognition) should be using this technique. It generates quality products for relatively low costs.

cma• 17 years ago

As long as they utilize the inherent synergies to be found in surfing the cloud.

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

Another $1M prize fund? Why don't they spend a few thousand tidying up their awful website?

They claim "You can browse, search or see our recommendations for you. [..] Over 100,000 titles on DVD"

But when I try to browse their selection they show three pages of seven movies per section, with mystery-meat navigation (hover to get more details). That's 441 difficult to browse films.

raghus2• 17 years ago

Hopefully http://feedfliks.com/search is a little better?

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

Worse - error 500. ;)

PowderAlarm• 17 years ago

Netflix has definitely got their ROI from free marketing alone. How many articles have you read about this from Wired, Washingtonpost, NYTimes, etc in the 2 years?

This could definitely be a good marketing strategy for a startup with low marketing costs. $100,000 programming prize might be one method for getting your name out in the press, and get you some free work.

pronoiac2• 17 years ago

I read this, curious when the new rating system would be in place, but the next contest info surprised me:

"The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes..."

Isn't that enough to identify many of the raters?

pronoiac2• 17 years ago

It's enough to identify 87% of the people, apparently: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impendin...

I hadn't realized that someone identified some of the raters in the previous contest with their imdb ratings: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/netflix-faq.html

(I hope it's not bad form to reply to myself.)

edit: Also, why this matters, page 44 of a research paper (PDF): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006

Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest

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