Netflix Announces Second Data Mining Contest 56
John Snodgrass writes "Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix, has announced on the Netflix Prize Forums that they are planning to hold a new data mining competition. The second competition will have some twists and is expected to be shorter in duration. It will feature two grand prizes, to be awarded in a 6 and 18 month time frame. A previous competitor still active on the board has already dubbed it: 'The Sparse Matrix: Reordered' and 'The Sparse Matrix: Factorizations.'"
Re:Human reaction machines. . . (Score:4, Informative)
There's always going to be an argument which makes a manipulative and self-serving action sound benign and cheerful. I remember watching a news piece about one of the top McDonald's CEO types heading over to Russia to try to establish the golden arches there. In a candid shot, he described McDonald's as a sort of angelic entity whose mission was to bring hungry children meat, bread and milk. I wondered if he had really convinced himself of that horseshit or if it was just a face he put on for others.
It's all about spin. The problem is that when profit is the primary motivator, then you cannot ever trust a seemingly friendly face put forth by a company. They don't want to be your friend. They want you to think that they are your friend in order that you might feel comfortable in giving them your trust, money, time and energy.
Now, if the Netflix guys are actually motivated not by profit, but by an over-riding love of film and the desire to share film with the world, then it's a whole different story. You do see this sometimes. I've known several owners of private shops who really love what they sell, but when you scale things up past a certain number of employees, even a founding love takes a back seat to the corporate need to grow profit share and absorb wealth. It's almost like a company only has a single soul which is shared by every participant in the company and thus gets stretched thin.
-FL