Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)

Crowdsourcing is customer development to the extreme. By placing R&D in control of the customers, only products which are useful are likely to emerge. More companies (especially those which high brand recognition) should be using this technique. It generates quality products for relatively low costs.

Another $1M prize fund? Why don't they spend a few thousand tidying up their awful website?

They claim "You can browse, search or see our recommendations for you. [..] Over 100,000 titles on DVD"

But when I try to browse their selection they show three pages of seven movies per section, with mystery-meat navigation (hover to get more details). That's 441 difficult to browse films.

Netflix has definitely got their ROI from free marketing alone. How many articles have you read about this from Wired, Washingtonpost, NYTimes, etc in the 2 years?

This could definitely be a good marketing strategy for a startup with low marketing costs. $100,000 programming prize might be one method for getting your name out in the press, and get you some free work.

I read this, curious when the new rating system would be in place, but the next contest info surprised me:

"The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes..."

Isn't that enough to identify many of the raters?