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In Japan, cellular storytelling is all the rage - Mobiles & Handhelds

Criticker - The TCI Explained

Don’t you hate it when you hire a DVD and it’s just not your kind of movie.

Social networks such Criticker and Filmtrust are helping and it’s no surprise that a company who’s very business is about renting movies is trying to improve the “success rate” of hire versus like ratio.

Netflix have announced a contest where the prize is $1 million, to the person or team that can create a better system for improving their movie predictions system.

I love their contest and they describe it here.

Netflix is all about connecting people to the movies they love. To help customers find those movies, we’ve developed our world-class movie recommendation system: Cinematch. Now there are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to how Cinematch works that we haven’t tried. We’re curious whether any of these can beat Cinematch by making better predictions.

So, we thought we’d make a contest out of finding the answer. It’s ‘easy’, really. We provide you with a lot of anonymous rating data, and a prediction accuracy bar that is 10% better than what Cinematch can do on the same training data set. If you develop a system that we judge most beats that bar on the qualifying test set we provide, you get serious money and the bragging rights. But (and you knew there would be a catch, right?) only if you share your method with us and describe to the world how you did it and why it works. To keep things interesting, in addition to the Grand Prize, we’re also offering a USD 50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs. It goes to the team whose system we judge shows the most improvement over the previous year’s best accuracy bar on the same qualifying test set. No improvement, no prize.

They even have a leader board to ensure transparency of the competition, and the 2007 winner was recently announced providing a 8.43% improvement on Cinematch.

Perspective: It’s great to see companies outsource innovation in this way, and rewarding the successful innovators. There are many ways to tap into the wisdom of consumers to help with solving challenges like this, it’s just that most brands / companies aren’t prepared to let consumers in.

A new study commissioned by Nokia suggests that as much as 25% of entertainment will be created and consumed within peer communities. Coined “Circular Entertainment” by Nokia, the research interviewed 9000 trend-setting consumers in 17 countries about their digital behaviors. The study entitled ‘A Glimpse of the Next Episode’ was conducted by The Future Laboratory.

Tom Savigar, Trends Director at The Future Laboratory suggests

Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative. Whereas once the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment. Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate. We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of.”

Some of the key results were

Of the 9,000 consumers we surveyed:
- 23% buy movies in digital format
- 35% buy music on MP3 files
- 25% buy music on mobile devices
- 39% watch TV on the internet
- 23% watch TV on mobile devices
- 46% regularly use IM, 37% on a mobile device
- 29% regularly blog
- 28% regularly access social networking sites
- 22% connect using technologies such as Skype
- 17% take part in Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
- 17% upload to the internet from a mobile device

These results are not surprising, and it does suggest that it will be more difficult for brands to communicate as these trends grow.
Certainly the methods used will have to change, and recommendations from trusted communities will surely play an increased role in driving behaviour.

Listening to consumers is a key prerequisite before brands can be effective in “Joining the Conversations”.

Here’s a video poking fun at fortunes being made in Silicon valley and suggesting that the bubble is about to burst.

I know there are some crazy valuations at the moment in the technology sector, but I do feel that many of the so called web 2.0 companies have solid business plans in comparison to the first dot com boom.
Enjoy the video