

Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest - asnyder
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/netflix-awards-1-million-prize-and-starts-a-new-contest

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PowderAlarm
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.

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baran
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.

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

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pronoiac
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?

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pronoiac
It's enough to identify 87% of the people, apparently: [http://www.freedom-to-
tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impendin...](http://www.freedom-to-
tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impending-still-avoidable-multi-million-dollar-
privacy-blunder)

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>

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jodrellblank
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.

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

~~~
jodrellblank
Worse - error 500. ;)

~~~
raghus
Hmm - it works fine now. Sorry about that hiccup.

