Netflix Prize Competitor Already Beats Netflix

Baldrson writes "Within the first week of the announcement of The Netflix Prize a team has already beaten Netflix's own movie recommendation algorithm. This is pretty impressive given the previously quoted researcher who said: 'You're competing with 15 years of really smart people banging away at the problem.' The team is WXYZConsulting.com apparently registered by a data mining professor named Yi Zhang. Congratulations are in order for Netflix and Prof. Zhang's team who are demonstrating, yet again, the power of prizes to accelerate progress."

Comments

Just another proof that IT depts aren't that smart

[haggie]

I've been selling technology for almost two decades and one thing that I see over and over is that internal IT departments either a.) vastly overestimate their abilities b.) prevent introduction of outside techology providers for political reasons or c.) both. There are several companies where the CIO told me "oh, we're already building that in-house. it will be live next quarter" and years later they still have not successfully implemented that technology. Kudos to Netflix for acknowledging that somebody outside their company might be able to do it better. At most companies, the CIO would have never let this happen and/or the CEO wouldn't have the business sense to challenge internal assumptions.

Re:Upon further consideration...

[heinousjay]

So your advice is to be somebody else entirely in an attempt to please someone? That's the foundation of a healthy relationship if I ever saw one.