Netflix offers $1 million prize for a better way to recommend movies

For those of you who don’t know, Netflix is the online DVD movie rental company that now sport 5.2 million subscribers. They are looking for ways to improve their movie recommendation system and have announced a $1 million prize for a software application that improves the accuracy of Netflix’ current system by at least 10%. To help developers, Netflix is releasing 100 million movie ratings, with all personal information removed.

Why do I post about this here, you ask? Because geography and location play a role in culture, of course, and I’m guessing that a solution that involves the locations of rental subscribers would be a pretty strong candidate. Unfortunately, that’s way beyond my skills, but some of you out there might be able to tackle such a herculean task (Clearly it’s not easy, or they wouldn’t be offering $1 million!)

Via MSNBC