ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.
The professors say they believe the study, scheduled for release on Wednesday, is the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioral advertising.
The topic may be technical, but it has become a hot political issue. Privacy advocates are telling Congress and the Federal Trade Commission that tracking of online activities by Web sites and advertisers has gone too far, and the lawmakers seem to be listening. Representative Rick Boucher, Democrat of Virginia, wrote in an article for The Hill last week that he planned to introduce privacy legislation. And David Vladeck, head of consumer protection for the F.T.C., has signaled that he will examine data privacy issues closely.
Marketers are arguing that advertising supports free online content. Major advertising trade groups proposed in Julysome measures that they hoped would fend off regulation, like a clear notice to consumers when they were being tracked.
The data in this area, however, has been largely limited to company-financed research or Internet-based research, which survey experts say they believe is not representative of all Americans. So the study — among the first independent surveys to examine this issue — has attracted widespread interest.
“This research is going to ignite an intense debate on both sides of the Atlantic on what the appropriate policy should be,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the privacy group Center for Digital Democracy, which did not work on the study.
The study’s authors hired a survey company to conduct interviews with 1,000 adult Internet users. The interview, which lasted about 20 minutes, included questions like “Please tell me whether or not you want the Web sites you visit to give you discounts that are tailored to your interests.” The results were later adjusted to reflect Census Bureau patterns in categories like sex, age, population density and telephone usage.
Tailored ads in general did not appeal to 66 percent of respondents. Then the respondents were told about different ways companies tailor ads: by following what someone does on the company’s site, on other sites and in offline places like stores.
The respondents’ aversion to tailored ads increased once they learned about targeting methods. In addition to the original 66 percent that said tailored ads were “not O.K.,” an additional 7 percent said such ads were not O.K. when they were tracked on the site. An additional 18 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked via other Web sites, and an additional 20 percent said it was not O.K. when they were tracked offline.
The survey company also asked about customized discounts and customized news. Fifty-one percent of respondents said that tailored discounts were O.K., and 58 percent said that customized news was fine.
On the advertising question, there was not a big difference between age groups. Marketers often use teenagers’ behavior on Facebook as anecdotal evidence that they do not mind handing over information. But 55 percent of respondents from 18 to 24 objected to tailored advertising.
“We sometimes think that the younger adults in the United States don’t care about this stuff, and I would suggest that’s an exaggeration,” said Joseph Turow, lead author of the study and a professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His co-authors are professors at Berkeley’s law school and at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
The survey also asked nine true-or-false questions about privacy laws to see how knowledgeable Americans were about protection, including “If a Web site has a privacy policy, it means that the site cannot share information about you with other companies, unless you give the Web site your permission.” (The correct answer is “false.”) On only one question, regarding sweepstakes, was answered correctly by more than half of respondents.
Finally, the survey sought opinions on laws regarding tracking, asking if there should be a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knew about them. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said yes. Respondents also overwhelmingly supported a hypothetical law that required Web sites and advertising companies to delete all information about an individual upon request; 92 percent endorsed it.
“I don’t think that behavioral targeting is something that we should eliminate, but I do think that we’re at a cusp of a new era, and the kinds of information that companies share and have today is nothing like we’ll see 10 years from now,” Professor Turow said. He said he would like “a regime in which people feel they have control over the data that marketers collect about them. The most important thing is to bring the public into the picture, which is not going on right now.”
Stuart P. Ingis, a partner at the law firm Venable who represents the industry trade groups’ self-regulation coalition, said that the industry was taking steps to explain to consumers how behavioral targeting worked.
“The more people understand the practices and how the data is actually being used, that’s when the concerns disappear,” he said. Just because many Americans are not in favor of something does not mean it should be banned, he said, citing negative feelings about taxes.
But Mr. Chester, whose group is part of a privacy coalition calling for Congressional action, said the survey would be helpful. “This research gives the F.T.C. and Congress a political green light to go ahead and enact effective, but reasonable, rules and policies,” he said.
Source: New York Times
by STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
2 Billion iPhone Apps Downloaded, Apple Says
If there was any doubt that Apple’s Apps Store was a monster hit, today’s news should put that to rest. A mere four months after the company announced that a billion apps had been downloaded in the store, Apple today said that the number of downloads had crossed the two billion mark.
Apple said there are more than 85,000 apps available to the more than 50 million iPhone and iPod touch owners worldwide and over 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program. As for downloads, it took nine months for Apple to hit the first billion. On April 24, 2009, there were 35,000 applications in the iTunes app store, showing that despite new competition from folks like Google’s Android, the company is not losing traction with developers.
As the Apple App Store grows bigger and bigger, the company faces newer challenges, especially those of discoverability. This is a recurring problem faced by app developers who are trying to build a business. (Related research from GigaOM Pro, sub required: Is Marketing Key to Mobile App Success? and Surveying the Mobile App Store Landscape.)
While many of the apps on the Apple platform are gimmicky and don’t retain much traction, a growing number of games and news applications are fast becoming constant features in the lives of iPhone/iPod touch owners.
by Om Malik of GigaOm blog
Apple said there are more than 85,000 apps available to the more than 50 million iPhone and iPod touch owners worldwide and over 125,000 developers in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program. As for downloads, it took nine months for Apple to hit the first billion. On April 24, 2009, there were 35,000 applications in the iTunes app store, showing that despite new competition from folks like Google’s Android, the company is not losing traction with developers.
As the Apple App Store grows bigger and bigger, the company faces newer challenges, especially those of discoverability. This is a recurring problem faced by app developers who are trying to build a business. (Related research from GigaOM Pro, sub required: Is Marketing Key to Mobile App Success? and Surveying the Mobile App Store Landscape.)
While many of the apps on the Apple platform are gimmicky and don’t retain much traction, a growing number of games and news applications are fast becoming constant features in the lives of iPhone/iPod touch owners.
by Om Malik of GigaOm blog
Friday, September 25, 2009
Twitter Appears Set to Raise $100 Million, Valuing It at $1 Billion
SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter has trained people to compress their thoughts into 140 characters and given a public stage to both dissidents in Iran and voluble stars like Shaquille O’Neal.
Now the start-up appears to have chalked up another achievement. Twitter, which has no discernible revenue, is set to raise about $100 million of new funding that would value the company at around $1 billion, a person briefed on the company’s plans said Thursday.
For context, that is almost double the market capitalization of Domino’s Pizza, which has 10,500 employees and had $1.4 billion in sales last year. Twitter has some 60 employees, and although it is experimenting with running advertisements on its Web site, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, said this week at an industry conference that the company had no plans to begin widely running ads until 2010.
But Twitter’s cash infusion and exospheric valuation are not easily reduced to the level of the blind bets of past dot-com bubbles. In its three and a half years, Twitter has become a magnet for media attention, and its Web site now attracts 54 million visitors a month, according to comScore, the tracking firm. Along with Facebook, it is helping to remake the Web as a forum for the perpetual sharing of even the most trivial bits of information about people’s lives.
“There have probably been less than five examples of companies that have grown like Twitter has,” said John Borthwick, the chief executive of Betaworks, which created the link-shortening service Bit.ly. (Betaworks also invested in Summize, a Twitter search engine that Twitter acquired last year, and it now owns a small stake in the company.)
Mr. Borthwick lists Google and Facebook as other examples. Twitter “represents a next layer of innovation on the Internet,” he said. “This investment is happening because it represents a shift.”
The new investors include Insight Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in New York; T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund company, which is not normally known for placing such bets; and the current Twitter backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.
The investment is likely to kick off more discussion about the heady valuations investors are assigning to some Internet start-ups, even as the United States economy struggles to emerge from a deep recession and the window for initial public offerings remains weak.
Twitter is what insiders charitably describe as pre-revenue, and the service has become known for going down periodically, although its reliability record has been improving lately.
To some, Twitter’s new valuation makes sense. Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all reportedly made entreaties to acquire the company, and its desirability to the Internet giants elevates its value.
Then there is the nonstop media attention, with everyone from Oprah Winfrey to local radio stations increasingly using the service to communicate with fans. “There is so much media hype around them, it was probably easy to go to mainstream investors and find someone who would be interested,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a social media analyst at the Altimeter Group.
Twitter has not yet commented on the investment, so it is not clear how it will use the new cash. The company does not appear to need the capital. It previously raised $55 million and has said it still has $25 million of that in the bank. But it is known to have wide aspirations to ultimately reach one billion users and become “the pulse of the planet,” according to internal documents that were illicitly obtained by a hacker and published on the blog TechCrunch earlier this year.
Twitter could use the investment to build the technology infrastructure required to grow to that scale. It also might use the cash to acquire one or more of the companies that are writing Twitter programs for mobile phones and computer desktops.
Twitter could even find a business model for itself if it were to buy one of the several start-ups devoted to helping companies manage their Twitter presence and monitor how their brands are being discussed.
But close followers of Twitter do not sense that the company is in any great rush to prove itself as a profitable venture.
“It would be trivially easy for them to turn on a revenue source today,” said Steve Broback, founder of the Parnassus Group, which runs conferences on Twitter and other business topics. “I don’t see that they are in a big hurry to start generating revenues, mostly because they want to minimize any sort of negative effect on their community.”
Twitter’s newly lined pockets may have the biggest impact on its chief rival, Facebook. Executives from the two companies often claim that their services do not quite overlap and can peacefully coexist. But both firms are essentially on the same mission: to allow people to share with friends and fans what they are doing now, in real life and on the Web.
Despite their protestations, the companies appear, especially recently, to be taking swipes at each other. Last week, when Facebook announced that it had signed up its 300 millionth member and that its finances were strengthening, executives used the occasion to play down any threat posed by Twitter. Chamath Palihapitiya, a Facebook vice president, told the technology blog VentureBeat that Twitter was now in “the rearview mirror.”
Even more pointedly, earlier this year Facebook redesigned the stream of updates from friends that each user sees to be more of a constant flow of information, similar to Twitter. And earlier this month, Facebook began allowing users to “tag” messages about particular friends with the @ symbol, a familiar convention on Twitter.
For its part, Twitter has previewed a new way to allow people to see when other Twitter users have “retweeted” or relayed their messages. The feature looks eerily similar to the display of friends who have commented on, or indicated that they liked, an update on Facebook.
Twitter’s ascension has clearly clouded Facebook’s aspirations to dominate the market for sharing over the Web, said Keith Rabois, an Internet entrepreneur and vice president of strategy at Slide, a Web social entertainment firm.
“Twitter is so likely to be successful at this point, it is almost impossible to envision a way in which Facebook can truly monopolize online content-sharing,” he said.
Now the start-up appears to have chalked up another achievement. Twitter, which has no discernible revenue, is set to raise about $100 million of new funding that would value the company at around $1 billion, a person briefed on the company’s plans said Thursday.
For context, that is almost double the market capitalization of Domino’s Pizza, which has 10,500 employees and had $1.4 billion in sales last year. Twitter has some 60 employees, and although it is experimenting with running advertisements on its Web site, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, said this week at an industry conference that the company had no plans to begin widely running ads until 2010.
But Twitter’s cash infusion and exospheric valuation are not easily reduced to the level of the blind bets of past dot-com bubbles. In its three and a half years, Twitter has become a magnet for media attention, and its Web site now attracts 54 million visitors a month, according to comScore, the tracking firm. Along with Facebook, it is helping to remake the Web as a forum for the perpetual sharing of even the most trivial bits of information about people’s lives.
“There have probably been less than five examples of companies that have grown like Twitter has,” said John Borthwick, the chief executive of Betaworks, which created the link-shortening service Bit.ly. (Betaworks also invested in Summize, a Twitter search engine that Twitter acquired last year, and it now owns a small stake in the company.)
Mr. Borthwick lists Google and Facebook as other examples. Twitter “represents a next layer of innovation on the Internet,” he said. “This investment is happening because it represents a shift.”
The new investors include Insight Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in New York; T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund company, which is not normally known for placing such bets; and the current Twitter backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.
The investment is likely to kick off more discussion about the heady valuations investors are assigning to some Internet start-ups, even as the United States economy struggles to emerge from a deep recession and the window for initial public offerings remains weak.
Twitter is what insiders charitably describe as pre-revenue, and the service has become known for going down periodically, although its reliability record has been improving lately.
To some, Twitter’s new valuation makes sense. Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all reportedly made entreaties to acquire the company, and its desirability to the Internet giants elevates its value.
Then there is the nonstop media attention, with everyone from Oprah Winfrey to local radio stations increasingly using the service to communicate with fans. “There is so much media hype around them, it was probably easy to go to mainstream investors and find someone who would be interested,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a social media analyst at the Altimeter Group.
Twitter has not yet commented on the investment, so it is not clear how it will use the new cash. The company does not appear to need the capital. It previously raised $55 million and has said it still has $25 million of that in the bank. But it is known to have wide aspirations to ultimately reach one billion users and become “the pulse of the planet,” according to internal documents that were illicitly obtained by a hacker and published on the blog TechCrunch earlier this year.
Twitter could use the investment to build the technology infrastructure required to grow to that scale. It also might use the cash to acquire one or more of the companies that are writing Twitter programs for mobile phones and computer desktops.
Twitter could even find a business model for itself if it were to buy one of the several start-ups devoted to helping companies manage their Twitter presence and monitor how their brands are being discussed.
But close followers of Twitter do not sense that the company is in any great rush to prove itself as a profitable venture.
“It would be trivially easy for them to turn on a revenue source today,” said Steve Broback, founder of the Parnassus Group, which runs conferences on Twitter and other business topics. “I don’t see that they are in a big hurry to start generating revenues, mostly because they want to minimize any sort of negative effect on their community.”
Twitter’s newly lined pockets may have the biggest impact on its chief rival, Facebook. Executives from the two companies often claim that their services do not quite overlap and can peacefully coexist. But both firms are essentially on the same mission: to allow people to share with friends and fans what they are doing now, in real life and on the Web.
Despite their protestations, the companies appear, especially recently, to be taking swipes at each other. Last week, when Facebook announced that it had signed up its 300 millionth member and that its finances were strengthening, executives used the occasion to play down any threat posed by Twitter. Chamath Palihapitiya, a Facebook vice president, told the technology blog VentureBeat that Twitter was now in “the rearview mirror.”
Even more pointedly, earlier this year Facebook redesigned the stream of updates from friends that each user sees to be more of a constant flow of information, similar to Twitter. And earlier this month, Facebook began allowing users to “tag” messages about particular friends with the @ symbol, a familiar convention on Twitter.
For its part, Twitter has previewed a new way to allow people to see when other Twitter users have “retweeted” or relayed their messages. The feature looks eerily similar to the display of friends who have commented on, or indicated that they liked, an update on Facebook.
Twitter’s ascension has clearly clouded Facebook’s aspirations to dominate the market for sharing over the Web, said Keith Rabois, an Internet entrepreneur and vice president of strategy at Slide, a Web social entertainment firm.
“Twitter is so likely to be successful at this point, it is almost impossible to envision a way in which Facebook can truly monopolize online content-sharing,” he said.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Starbucks Turns an iPhone Screen into a Gift Card
Starbucks is introducing two new applications for the iPhone that will make it easier for java junkies to get their fix—and make it possible to pay right from the phone, which has broad implications for mobile commerce.
The myStarbucks application has a slew of features that make it easier to remember your friend’s favorite drinks and to locate nearby Starbucks stores. More interesting is a test of a Starbucks card, which will allow people in select West Coast stores to pay for coffee using a bar code on a phone’s screen.
The myStarbucks app, which is usable anywhere, lets you store the recipe for your favorite coffee concoction and to share it with other people. You can send your request for a Grande Skinny Caramel Macchiato with two sugars to the office coffee slave and be assured that they get it right.
Don’t know what you want to drink? A flavor selector helps you choose a coffee based on flavors like earthy, balanced or nutty. You can also look up the nutritional information, like the calorie count of your drink (you’ll soon be switching to skim).
The myStarbucks application has a slew of features that make it easier to remember your friend’s favorite drinks and to locate nearby Starbucks stores. More interesting is a test of a Starbucks card, which will allow people in select West Coast stores to pay for coffee using a bar code on a phone’s screen.
The myStarbucks app, which is usable anywhere, lets you store the recipe for your favorite coffee concoction and to share it with other people. You can send your request for a Grande Skinny Caramel Macchiato with two sugars to the office coffee slave and be assured that they get it right.
Don’t know what you want to drink? A flavor selector helps you choose a coffee based on flavors like earthy, balanced or nutty. You can also look up the nutritional information, like the calorie count of your drink (you’ll soon be switching to skim).
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Intel Shows Off Future Technology
At the Intel Developer Forum, CEO Paul Otellini demonstrates 32-nm Sandy Bridge microarchitecture running Microsoft Windows 7.
Demonstrating that it remains on schedule for developing smaller and faster chips, Intel (NSDQ: INTC) on Tuesday showed off technology not due until 2011 and demonstrated a desktop chip due in about a year, that will run Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Windows 7 operating system.
During his opening keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Paul Otellini, president and chief executive of Intel, held up a silicon wafer of SRAM chips, a type of semiconductor memory, built with Intel's not-yet available 22-nanometer technology.
With 2.9 billion transistors, the chips contain the "smallest SRAM cell ever invented," Otellini told attendees. Intel isn't scheduled to begin production of the 22-nm processors until the second half of 2011.
Closer to production, but still a year away, is Intel's 32-nm Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. In showing that Intel remains ahead of the curve, Otellini demonstrated a desktop running Windows 7 on a Sandy Bridge chip.
Along with Sandy Bridge, Otellini also showed off notebooks running Westmere, a 32-nm processor based on Intel's current Nehalem microarchitecture. The company plans to begin revenue production of Westmere in the fourth quarter.
While PC products continue to drive most of Intel's revenue, the company is clearly focused on moving beyond its traditional market to consumer electronics and handheld devices, such as smartphones. In those markets, Intel is focusing on its Atom processor, which currently dominates the netbook market, inexpensive mini-laptops that are the fastest growing segment of the PC market.
In discussing Atom, Otellini touched on upcoming technology codenamed Moorestown and Medfield. Moorestown, scheduled to ship in 2010, is a platform that consists of a system on a chip, code-named Lincroft, which integrates a 45-nm Atom processor, graphics, memory controller and video encode/decode onto a single chip.
The Medfield SoC, scheduled for release in 2011, will mark Atom's move to 32 nanometers and will be the first time the technology is ready for smartphones and other small handhelds. Moorestown and Medfield will each provide improvements in power consumption that is multiple times better than previous-generation technologies, according to Otellini.
To jump start development on Atom-based technology, Intel on Tuesday launched a developer program that offers a framework for creating and selling software for Atom-powered netbooks today and handeld devices and smartphones in the future.
Otellini announced that computer makers Asus, Acer, and Dell have joined Intel in the developer program, which will include software development kits for building applications on Atom. In addition, Intel is promoting Moblin, an Intel-developed Linux-based operating system for handheld devices.
Otellini also announced that car makers BMW and Daimler, which makes Mercedes-Benz, plan to offer in-vehicle entertainment systems based on Atom. By 2012, BMW is expected to have the systems available across its product line, while Daimler plans to introduce the systems in its C- and S-class series.
InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on application development. Download the report here (registration required).
By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
Demonstrating that it remains on schedule for developing smaller and faster chips, Intel (NSDQ: INTC) on Tuesday showed off technology not due until 2011 and demonstrated a desktop chip due in about a year, that will run Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Windows 7 operating system.
During his opening keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Paul Otellini, president and chief executive of Intel, held up a silicon wafer of SRAM chips, a type of semiconductor memory, built with Intel's not-yet available 22-nanometer technology.
With 2.9 billion transistors, the chips contain the "smallest SRAM cell ever invented," Otellini told attendees. Intel isn't scheduled to begin production of the 22-nm processors until the second half of 2011.
Closer to production, but still a year away, is Intel's 32-nm Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. In showing that Intel remains ahead of the curve, Otellini demonstrated a desktop running Windows 7 on a Sandy Bridge chip.
Along with Sandy Bridge, Otellini also showed off notebooks running Westmere, a 32-nm processor based on Intel's current Nehalem microarchitecture. The company plans to begin revenue production of Westmere in the fourth quarter.
While PC products continue to drive most of Intel's revenue, the company is clearly focused on moving beyond its traditional market to consumer electronics and handheld devices, such as smartphones. In those markets, Intel is focusing on its Atom processor, which currently dominates the netbook market, inexpensive mini-laptops that are the fastest growing segment of the PC market.
In discussing Atom, Otellini touched on upcoming technology codenamed Moorestown and Medfield. Moorestown, scheduled to ship in 2010, is a platform that consists of a system on a chip, code-named Lincroft, which integrates a 45-nm Atom processor, graphics, memory controller and video encode/decode onto a single chip.
The Medfield SoC, scheduled for release in 2011, will mark Atom's move to 32 nanometers and will be the first time the technology is ready for smartphones and other small handhelds. Moorestown and Medfield will each provide improvements in power consumption that is multiple times better than previous-generation technologies, according to Otellini.
To jump start development on Atom-based technology, Intel on Tuesday launched a developer program that offers a framework for creating and selling software for Atom-powered netbooks today and handeld devices and smartphones in the future.
Otellini announced that computer makers Asus, Acer, and Dell have joined Intel in the developer program, which will include software development kits for building applications on Atom. In addition, Intel is promoting Moblin, an Intel-developed Linux-based operating system for handheld devices.
Otellini also announced that car makers BMW and Daimler, which makes Mercedes-Benz, plan to offer in-vehicle entertainment systems based on Atom. By 2012, BMW is expected to have the systems available across its product line, while Daimler plans to introduce the systems in its C- and S-class series.
InformationWeek has published an in-depth report on application development. Download the report here (registration required).
By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest
Netflix, the movie rental company, has decided its million-dollar-prize competition was such a good investment that it is planning another one.
The company’s challenge, begun in October 2006, was both geeky and formidable: come up with a recommendation software that could do a better job accurately predicting the movies customers would like than Netflix’s in-house software, Cinematch. To qualify for the prize, entries had to be at least 10 percent better than Cinematch.
The winner, formally announced Monday morning, is a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. The multinational team calls itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos. The group — a merger of teams — was the longtime frontrunner in the contest, and in late June it finally surpassed the 10 percent barrier. Under the rules of the contest, that set off a 30-day period in which other teams could try to beat them.
That, in turn, prompted a wave of mergers among competing teams, who joined forces at the last minute to try to top the leader. In late July, Netflix declared the contest over and said two teams had passed the 10-percent threshold, BellKor and the Ensemble, a global alliance with some 30 members. Netflix publicly said the finish was too close to call. But Netflix officials at the time privately informed BellKor it had won. Though further review of the algorithms by expert judges was needed, it certainly seemed BellKor was the winner, as it turned out to be.
But the race was even closer than had been thought, as Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, explained for the first time at a press conference in New York on Monday. The BellKor team presented its final submission 20 minutes before the deadline, Mr. Hastings said. Then, just before time ran out, The Ensemble made its last entry. The two were a dead tie, mathematically. But under contest rules, when there is a tie, the first team past the post wins.
“That 20 minutes was worth $1 million,” Mr. Hastings said.
The Netflix contest has been widely followed because its lessons could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set — 100 million movie ratings — and the challenges of large-scale predictive modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.
The way teams came together, especially late in the contest, and the improved results that were achieved suggest that this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex scientific and business challenges.
That certainly seemed to be a principal lesson for the winners. The blending of different statistical and machine-learning techniques “only works well if you combine models that approach the problem differently,” said Chris Volinsky, a scientist at AT&T Research and a leader of the Bellkor team. “That’s why collaboration has been so effective, because different people approach problems differently.”
Yet the sort of sophisticated teamwork deployed in the Netflix contest, it seems, is a tricky business. Over three years, thousands of teams from 186 countries made submissions. Yet only two could breach the 10-percent hurdle. “Having these big collaborations may be great for innovation, but it’s very, very difficult,” said Greg McAlpin, a software consultant and a leader of the Ensemble. “Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded. The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don’t work.”
The data set for the first contest was 100 million movie ratings, with the personally identifying information stripped off. Contestants worked with the data to try to predict what movies particular customers would prefer, and then their predictions were compared with how the customers actually did rate those movies later, on a scale of one to five stars.
The new contest is going to present the contestants with demographic and behavioral data, and they will be asked to model individuals’ “taste profiles,” the company said. The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies. Unlike the first challenge, the contest will have no specific accuracy target. Instead, $500,000 will be awarded to the team in the lead after six months, and $500,000 to the leader after 18 months.
The payoff for Netflix? “Accurately predicting the movies Netflix members will love is a key component of our service,” said Neil Hunt, chief product officer.
The company’s challenge, begun in October 2006, was both geeky and formidable: come up with a recommendation software that could do a better job accurately predicting the movies customers would like than Netflix’s in-house software, Cinematch. To qualify for the prize, entries had to be at least 10 percent better than Cinematch.
The winner, formally announced Monday morning, is a seven-person team of statisticians, machine-learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. The multinational team calls itself BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos. The group — a merger of teams — was the longtime frontrunner in the contest, and in late June it finally surpassed the 10 percent barrier. Under the rules of the contest, that set off a 30-day period in which other teams could try to beat them.
That, in turn, prompted a wave of mergers among competing teams, who joined forces at the last minute to try to top the leader. In late July, Netflix declared the contest over and said two teams had passed the 10-percent threshold, BellKor and the Ensemble, a global alliance with some 30 members. Netflix publicly said the finish was too close to call. But Netflix officials at the time privately informed BellKor it had won. Though further review of the algorithms by expert judges was needed, it certainly seemed BellKor was the winner, as it turned out to be.
But the race was even closer than had been thought, as Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, explained for the first time at a press conference in New York on Monday. The BellKor team presented its final submission 20 minutes before the deadline, Mr. Hastings said. Then, just before time ran out, The Ensemble made its last entry. The two were a dead tie, mathematically. But under contest rules, when there is a tie, the first team past the post wins.
“That 20 minutes was worth $1 million,” Mr. Hastings said.
The Netflix contest has been widely followed because its lessons could extend well beyond improving movie picks. The researchers from around the world were grappling with a huge data set — 100 million movie ratings — and the challenges of large-scale predictive modeling, which can be applied across the fields of science, commerce and politics.
The way teams came together, especially late in the contest, and the improved results that were achieved suggest that this kind of Internet-enabled approach, known as crowdsourcing, can be applied to complex scientific and business challenges.
That certainly seemed to be a principal lesson for the winners. The blending of different statistical and machine-learning techniques “only works well if you combine models that approach the problem differently,” said Chris Volinsky, a scientist at AT&T Research and a leader of the Bellkor team. “That’s why collaboration has been so effective, because different people approach problems differently.”
Yet the sort of sophisticated teamwork deployed in the Netflix contest, it seems, is a tricky business. Over three years, thousands of teams from 186 countries made submissions. Yet only two could breach the 10-percent hurdle. “Having these big collaborations may be great for innovation, but it’s very, very difficult,” said Greg McAlpin, a software consultant and a leader of the Ensemble. “Out of thousands, you have only two that succeeded. The big lesson for me was that most of those collaborations don’t work.”
The data set for the first contest was 100 million movie ratings, with the personally identifying information stripped off. Contestants worked with the data to try to predict what movies particular customers would prefer, and then their predictions were compared with how the customers actually did rate those movies later, on a scale of one to five stars.
The new contest is going to present the contestants with demographic and behavioral data, and they will be asked to model individuals’ “taste profiles,” the company said. The data set of more than 100 million entries will include information about renters’ ages, gender, ZIP codes, genre ratings and previously chosen movies. Unlike the first challenge, the contest will have no specific accuracy target. Instead, $500,000 will be awarded to the team in the lead after six months, and $500,000 to the leader after 18 months.
The payoff for Netflix? “Accurately predicting the movies Netflix members will love is a key component of our service,” said Neil Hunt, chief product officer.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
Most desired gadgets
Some of the most desired gadgets today are:
- iPod
- iPhone
- Global Positioning System
- Blackberry
- Panasonic TH-42PX6OU
- Sony Ericsson Xperia X1
- Sony PS3
- Nintendo Wii
- Xbox
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Top technology & gadget websites
Some of the top technology & gadget websites and magazines of the world today:
- BBC Technology
- Boing Boing
- CNN Technology
- Engadget
- Gizmodo
- Guardian Technology
- Mighty Gadget
- New Scientist Technology
- New York Times Technology
- Tech Crunch
- Technology Review
- Ubergizmo
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Gadgets
Everything you would like to know about gadgets:
- Name: Gadgets
- Other names: Gadzets or gizmos
- Type: Electronic device or appliances
- Most popular gadget: iPhone
- Most desirable gadget: iPod
- Siblings: Mechanical gadgets, Programmable gadgets and Application gadgets
- Most popular Gadget website: Gizmodo.com
- Top companies manufacturing gadgets: Apple, Asus, Blackberry, Bose, Compaq, HP, HTC, Lenovo, LG, Nokia, Philips, Samsung, Sherwood, Sony, Sprint, Zune, etc.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
