2 posts tagged “wisdom of crowds”
Looks like a team broke the 10% barrier...
http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard
(( More about the Netflix prize here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize ))
PS: The entrant "Just a guy in a garage" is still in the top 20...
At first, it seemed some geeked-out supercoder was going to make an easy million.
In October 2006, Netflix announced it would give a cool seven figures to whoever created a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal.
...
"Just a guy in a garage" was the exception to all this openness. He didn't even have a link attached to his screen name, which kept creeping higher and higher on the leaderboard. By mid-January, there were just five teams, out of 25,000 entrants, ahead of him. And still, no one knew who he was or by what statistical magic he kept improving. "He's very mysterious," says Koren with unconcealed interest. "I hope you will at least be able to find out his name."
His name is Gavin Potter. He's a 48-year-old Englishman, a retired management consultant with an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master's in operations research. He has worked for Shell, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and IBM. In 2006, he left his job at IBM to explore the idea of starting a PhD in machine learning, a field in which he has no formal training. When he read about the Netflix Prize, he decided to give it a shot — what better way to find out just how serious about the topic he really was?
In 2001, Potter cowrote a book called Business in a Virtual World that described how companies could best take advantage of new technology. So he's well aware of the commercial value of improving recommender systems, which tend to perform poorly, sometimes comically so. (You liked The Squid and the Whale? Try this Jacques Cousteau documentary.) "The 20th century was about sorting out supply," Potter says. "The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand." The Internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-03/mf_netflix?currentPage=all
There are so many Web 2.0 sites ((but few good business models)) out there that I tried to find some interesting new concepts...
1. Ponoko BYOG ((Build Your Own Gadget or http://www.theoscarproject.org/ 2.0 ))
http://www.ponoko.com/howponokoworks
2. Get the Glass ((Flash 2.0 browser games, looks really GREAT as ad-based/sponsored game))
http://www.gettheglass.com/
3. We All Are Michael Pachters - or Jim Cramers ((Democratic Market Analysis aka Wisdom of Game Crowds))
http://www.thesimexchange.com/
If you are not into videogames, you can alternatively look at shares trading...
http://www.marketocracy.com
For a perspective on the dangers of day-trading ((especially in the currencies market))...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/business/worldbusiness/16housewives.html?em&ex=1190088000&en=c48c75979d83a654&ei=5087%0A
...but that doesn't deny the wisdom of crowds in general, especially in creative tribe markets not associated with the average analyst lifestyles ((the video games market is a good example, so are niche movies)).
None of the above sites or concepts ((with the exception of Ponoko, but even there we had projects like OScar)) are really new. But they are still interesting, because they may be here to stay.
