movies and cars

Good article in Wired about progress on the Netflix Prize, a million-dollar challenge to improve the accuracy of their suggestion algorithm by ten percent. Mathematically, it lost me after k-nearest-neighbor, but the rest is very interesting and supports the currently popular conversations around smart mobs and black swans: if all you have are one type of person working on a problem, you'll only ever get one type of solution, which will likely not be as good as it could be. In this case the non-mathematician taking the crowd by storm is a bit of a polymath named Gavin Potter who has the only-obvious-after-you-hear-it quote of the article (and probably of the industry):

"The 20th century was about sorting out supply," Potter says. "The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand."

Just a short way into the article, I was reminded of both today's X Prize and 1924's Orteig Prize and started to wonder why the American auto industry hasn't done something similar. If you found that you were heavily invested in the infrastructure and history of just one industry yet you were being beaten in both the fundamentals and the new concepts by your competitors and couldn't picture what the next step was, what would you do? Would you heavily invest in marketing and lobbying to flatten the playing field for your same-old product which you know has a limited life anyway (due in this case to increasing gas prices), or would you pony up some cash for the best next big idea? Crowdsource that contest to the internet and not only do you get a few good ideas for which you offer smaller payouts, but you could easily glean priceless marketing info (Mr. Lutz, you can paste a job offer in a comment to this post).