Last year Netflix offered programmers a challenge, and dangled a $1 million reward as incentive. The task was to improve upon the company's recommendation system by at least 10%, and to date none of the more than 27,000 entries have succeeded. In order to keep developers interested Netflix is awarding it's first annual prize of $50,000 to the team that achieved the closest margin of 8.5%. The team is composed of 3 employees of AT&T who were paid to work on the project by their employer, the company is being awarded the prize and plans to donate the proceeds. Kudos AT&T! It's nice to see companies embrace these challenges and allow employees to follow such pursuits! CNN story here.
