I really feel like the story behind the Netflix Prize particularly towards the final days would be a fascinating read. Three college friends of mine were also o

I really feel like the story behind the Netflix Prize particularly towards the final days would be a fascinating read. Three college friends of mine were also on the 2nd place team so I had some visibility into what was going from the start, and one of the interesting things that happened was that the teams kept merging over and over in an effort to beat the whizzes at AT&T labs (who got 1st place in the end by the slimmest of margins). By the end of it the 2nd place team was a very geographically distributed team, a conglomeration of several originally separate teams that had joined forces and shared their algorithms and techniques with one another to inch themselves forward. http://www.the-ensemble.com/content/meet-team http://www.the-ensemble.com/content/meet-team