Down to the Wire at Netflix

After a three-year long competition, the winning team won with less than 10 minutes to spare. In a true testament to the power of collaboration, open door innovation, and global teams, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos won the $1 million dollar Netflix Prize for improving the search results on the popular movie rental company's website.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced the results today. The winning team consists of two researchers at AT&T Inc., two engineers from Montreal, a research scientist at Yahoo Inc. and two machine-learning researchers from Austria.

Not only was the fact that the winning solution was submitted with nearly 10 minutes to go, Netflix said all seven met in person as a group for the first time Monday.

In true Open Door Innovation fashion, here's how they won (and how the second place team was so successful) from Wired Magazine:

"The secret sauce for both Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos and The Ensemble was collaboration between diverse ideas, and not in some touchy-feely, unquantifiable, “when people work together things are better” sort of way. The top two teams beat the challenge by combining teams and their algorithms into more complex algorithms incorporating everybody’s work. The more people joined, the more the resulting team’s score would increase."

Want to see what collaboration looks like?



Click here to read the Wall Street Journal article.

Click here to read the Wired article.