I’ve been fascinated with Netflix ever since I did a giant research paper about the company for my senior project for business management. Particularly fascinating to me were the technologies Netflix uses to estimate demand and the Netflix Recommendation Engine (Cinemax), which I have posted about previously.
Well now it looks like Netflix has placed a bounty on an algorithm to make the Recommendation Engine even better. My friend Peter Abilla indicates he might give it a try. He’s also posted about the rules and the $1 million dollar prize. I wish I had more time because this is one problem I would love to help solve. (I’m pretty nerdy like that.) Plus it would be cool to have a million bucks. :)
One thing I would recommend (kind of unrelated to the algorithm) is to allow users to rate movies with half, or even quarter starts. More precise input means better output, and I know I’ve had to round many times when I thought a movie deserved 3 and a half stars, etc.
Netflix has already unknowingly taken some of the advice my group suggested in the paper. We should have sent it Reed Hastings so we could claim credit for some of them. :) On a side note, if you have some free time and enjoy investigating companies and writing about them, there’s a pretty good opportunity for authorship at Startup Review. It’s a non-paid position, but you’d have an automatic audience. (Their readership numbers are pretty darn good.)
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I love wiki technology for its ability to allow collaboration on works in progress. I’ve used numerous wiki for work and on community projects, but nowhere did I find wiki colaboration more useful than on jointly-written college papers.
For my senior year capstone project I worked on a student team to crunch out a daunting 40 page paper analyzing everything about Netflix and its business model. There was no way our team members (who all had full-time work and attended school at night) could arrange our schedules to consistently work together at the same time. We had to do it from home, but we really didn’t want the hassle of losing pieces in email and having to merge 10 different versions of assigned chunks on the last day.
Our project wiki saved our collective butt. With it we could work remotely on one document, editing each other’s errors as we went, making sure we didn’t have duplicate content, patching our work together using a unified tone, etc. If you are a student that has to work on large group papers, please learn how to use wiki.
The only problem we had was that there was a bit of a learning curve, especially for the non-technical members of my group. That’s where a WYSIWYG editor would really have come in handy. I may be off here, but I think the real value of a wiki is the collaboration aspect. Collaboration trumps easy markup syntax, and a WYSIWYG editor would definitely make it easier for more people to contribute to a project. More editors means better content. That’s the real point of wiki, right?
My talented friend Tyler made a really smooth and simple Windows-based wiki that employed this principle. Could anyone recommend any good PHP, Perl, or Python-based WYSIWYG wiki packages for Linux? I wish MediaWiki offered some sweet WYSIWYG, but alas, it doesn’t –although the Wikiwyg project seems to be making some progress in that direction.
Netflix is suing Blockbuster, almost immediately after receiving a long-awaited business model patent. I personally hope the courts reward Netflix; Blockbuster’s imitation is just too flagrant… Plus I just hate Blockbuster. :)
That’s right. I finally broke down and joined Netflix. Actually, I’d already signed on for 2 free weeks during my last semester of college. Of course, I had to drop it right away because of the student budget. I had a series of massive papers and a presentation examining the online DVD rental company and I wanted some real exposure just to make sure I knew what I was talking about.
I was totally fascinated by the company’s business model, blown away by the way it moves DVDs around the country with very little inventory in-house on any given day. My group spend several pages explaining “Long Tail” economics, only we didn’t call it that because we weren’t subscribed to Wired and didn’t know it had a name. It may sound a little trite, but the concepts we learned will revolutionize business and a lot more. Basically Netflix is able to blow Blockbuster out of the water by serving hundreds of very small niches that are very important in the aggregate. Blockbuster (in it’s brick-and-mortar stores) simply can’t supply small niches because a low-demand movie can’t pay the rent on its shelf-space.
And that’s why I’m switching. Netflix has so much more selection than your local brick-and-mortar rental store, and the experience is way better. Instead of looking through the same crappy “hits” at Blockbuster, I go online to Netflix and rate the movies I’ve seen. The Netflix recommendation engine then leads me to other movies. If you Liked “Amadeus” you’ll probably like “Ghandi”. If you liked “Ghandi”, you’ll probably like “Hotel Rwanda”, “Rabbit-Proof Fence”, “Waking Ned Devine”, “The Dish”, “October Sky”, etc.
But there’s so much more. Documentaries. TV shows. Music DVDs from Jethro Tull to Thelonious Monk. RSS feeds make it easy to browse new releases, and I can opt to have R-rated movies not displayed. Can I just tell you how much time that saves? I’m not going to become a movie nut, because I do believe there is such thing as too much entertainment, but for the little time that I have to spend on entertainment, this is just so much better.
All in all, Reed Hastings is a genius. Netflix continues to grow, while Blockbuster (despite it’s copycat online ventures) hasn’t turned a profit in years. Long Tail Economics will change American culture as taste are allowed to become less homogenized. Independent filmmakers and publishers will be able to find an audience without having to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The internet will further this phenomenon as content that was unavailable due to the prohibitive economics of physical distribution channels can be accessed by anyone anytime. These dynamics already affect everything from CD sales, to software, to journalism; and I believe this is only the beginning. Long live the Long Tail!
Business, Technology | Jordy | 
October 18, 2006 10:19 pm | 
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