[tel]

I think the Netflix prize is a pretty bad comparison since it fueled years of active research from top machine learning and data mining people. It's great work, but if you're trying to find new hires the time scale is quite a ways off.

[mayank]

On the contrary, within a few days of the Netflix prize challenge being launched, a guy put up a detailed blog post with a simple linear algebra method that could beat Netflix's system at the time (link below). It didn't come anywhere near the 10% improvement threshold, but it beat Netflix's system with a handful of lines of C code, and it ran off his laptop. Sounds like he would have made an excellent hire.

http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html

[tel]

Haha, I stand very well corrected!