Tuesday, September 22, 2009

A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others - NYTimes.com

Another example of Netflix innovation

Indeed, since it began in October 2006, the Netflix contest was significant less for the prize money than as a test case for new ideas about how to efficiently foster innovation in the Internet era — notably, offering prizes as an incentive and encouraging online collaboration to tap minds worldwide.

The lessons of the Netflix contest could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set — 100 million movie ratings — and the challenges of large-scale modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.

A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others - NYTimes.com

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