Box office boffo for brainiacs: The Netflix Prize
How To Recommend Movies (and Win $1 million)
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
It was like the machine learning world’s version of “American Idol” Monday in New York: A seven-man multinational group dubbed BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos was awarded $1 million by Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings as the winners of the Netflix Prize.
Cooked up three years ago by Hastings, the Netflix Prize challenged all comers to improve the recommendation technology used by the online movie rental company by 10%.
As they clutched the Ed McMahon-style check, and slung enormous gold medallions stamped with “Netflix Prize 2009” around their necks, it was the first time the winning team – a collection of computer scientists, electrical engineers and statisticians – had actually ever physically been in the same place at the same time. More
The Netflix Playbook
Finally, a Powerpoint presentation worth reading
Hastings' "deck" is a how-to guide for startups. Image: Netflix
It isn’t often that I get convinced to read through a slide deck 128 images long. But after the fourth startup CEO, in this case Jonathan Sposato, CEO of online photo-editing service Picnik brought it to my attention; I sat down to give “Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture” a gander.
The slide deck, which can be found here, contains the distilled thinking of Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings about how to run a company. More
