Who knew statistical computing competitions could be so cut throat? Since we reported on the contest last night, two teams in the Netflix Prize have spent the last few hours jumping back and forth on the Netflix leaderboard as the three-year-long competition ticked into its final moments, with last minute sniping submissions coming from both sides. Finally, the results are in: The Ensemble has managed to come from behind to upset BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos with a top submission of 10.10% — an improvement of .01% — only 4 minutes before the contest closed.
It’s been a long road to get here. Over the last three years computer science teams around the world have been vying for the Netflix Prize — a competition that invited teams to try to improve on Netflix’s movie recommendation algorithm by 10%, with a reward of $1 million to the best submission. Since then teams have gotten progressively closer to the magical 10% mark, but it wasn’t until last month when a number of top teams joined forces to form BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos that the barrier was finally broken, with a score of 10.08%. However, their announcement kicked off a 30 day last call period where other teams were invited to make their final submissions. → Read More
Imagine you’re sitting at the dining table reading the latest Wrestling Observer, as you do from time to time. Nothing too crazy, just minding your own business. Then, suddenly—it’s always suddenly—the microwave hops off the counter, wielding a knife, and comes charging after you. Oh, dear! → Read More
Last week saw an unusual burst of acquisition activity among Web companies. Yahoo bought email add-on Xoopit for about $20 million, Nokia bought social address book provider Cellity, and overshadowing them all was Amazon’s $928 million purchase of Zappos.
But the week started off with another acquisition which quickly got lost in all the subsequent news. Advertising network Adknowledge bought KITN Media for its flagship virtual currency product, Super Rewards. The acquisition price was undisclosed, but Eric Eldon at VentureBeat noted that the rumored price was $30 million (he also noted that AdKnowledge disputed that number as “patently inaccurate.”)
I heard the same number the night before the acquisition was announced. It was being floated by one of AdKnowledge’s competitors. When I asked Adknowledge and Super Rewards about it, they gave me the same line: that it “was incorrect and it would be a material misrepresentation of the transaction.” I dug around a little more and found out that the price was actually more than $30 million. A source with direct knowledge of the deal told me that it was closer to $50 million. → Read More
Squash The Street by Last Legion Games, is the latest iPhone/iPod Touch game to be chronicled in my “Gaming on the Throne” series at CrunchGear (see explanation). Initially when I played STS I was a little underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, the execution was solid, but it seemed kind of repetitive to me. Then something happened that changed my mind and ultimately led to me giving it a thumbs up. We’ll come back to that. First let’s look at the game synopsis, directly from Last Legion’s website: Financial Crisis? Let your rage rain down on the crooks and swindlers who caused it. → Read More
I don’t know about you, but I give this ridiculously misguided experiment three weeks. Three weeks until – at best – Arrington comes to his senses and realises that there’s a reason why I’ve been fired from every job I’ve had, most recently as a columnist for the Guardian. Three weeks until – at worst – I say something so insanely actionable about a deep-pocketed venture capitalist that TechCrunch finds itself sued out of existence. But in the meantime, here I am, and it’s traditional in the opening episode of a new column for the writer to introduce himself and to generally sketch out his plans for the column. So here we go… READ MORE… → Read More
News aggregator site and Digg-competitor Mixx had a rough June. Traffic to the site took a 68 percent nosedive in the U.S. from May to June, according to comScore (see chart). Compete shows a similar trend.
Wondering if Mixx had maybe been paying for traffic and had now stopped, I asked CEO Chris McGill if this was the case. Absolutely not. He replied: “We have never paid for traffic… Not once. How could we? … We have operated for two years on almost no money.” Hard to argue with that. Mixx has only raised $3.5 million to Digg’s $40 million, and is “nine guys sitting in a boiler room.”
So what happened? → Read More
Last month news broke that a team of computer scientists had finally managed to improve Netflix’s recommendation algorithm by 10%, making them eligible to win the $1 million Netflix Prize, a competition that began back in 2006. The team, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, is composed of two former leaders in the competition who banded together in attempt to finally break the 10% barrier and managed to succeed with a score of 10.08%. However, their announcement kicked off a 30 day window where other teams were invited to make their final submissions and potentially take the prize. Tonight, with just one day remaining, a team called The Ensemble has managed to overtake BellKor with a score of 10.09% — an improvement of .01% over the former leaders. You can see the full leaderboard here.
According to its homepage, the Ensemble is made up of two teams who chose to join forces: “Grand Prize Team” and “Opera Solutions and Vandelay United”. The Ensemble has just posted the following blog post to its official site:
We are happy today to have made a submission which surpasses Netflix’s 10% Grand Prize target. The Ensemble is the second team to do this in less than a month. We are very proud of our achievements, and those of our top competitor, Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos.
We actually have two reviews in one in this case; the Joby Gorillapod SLR-Zoom, and the optional ballhead mount. Do I recommend you trust your expensive camera gear to this device? Simply put, yes. I have a Nikon D300, and I put my precious on the Gorillapod with it’s 18-200mm lens on it, and it didn’t buckle. → Read More
Can it be done? Does it not look as impressive as you’d think? Do you feel sorry for this guy and then suddenly say “Holy Wow! He’s playing the bass, guitar, drums, and singing vocals all at once! I want some of his meth?” Yes! Yes! Yes! via JRob → Read More
In the last few days we’ve gotten multiple tips about a seemingly new phenomenon on Facebook: people are receiving status updates from people they’ve attempted to add as friends, but who have not yet accepted their friend request. In effect, they’re seeing these users’ status updates without being able to see their profiles — something that hasn’t previously happened on Facebook, at least not until very recently. So has Facebook finally turned on the Twitter-like ‘follow’ feature it promised months ago, which would allow users to start receiving status updates from people they aren’t friends with?
Not exactly. As it turns out, this feature was first announced in late June, nestled in Facebook’s blog post about the beta rollout of its Publisher upgrade, which lets you choose who you’d like a given update to be visible to. Now, any time you add a Facebook friend who has set their status updates to ‘Everyone’, you’ll start receiving those updates in your News Feed, even if they never accept your friend request. → Read More
When I first moved to Silicon Valley there was no such thing as “geek chic.” A trip through Frye’s Electronics told you everything you needed to know about engineer culture: It was a one-stop-shop for circuits and motherboards, huge bags of candy, cases of Jolt, and porn.
Things have changed a bit. Today, the hair is purposely disheveled and coders not only get out in the fresh air– they go climbing. Some even drink green tea instead of coffee. (Cough, cough, Kevin Rose.) And, increasingly, I’m seeing start-up kitchens with — gasp– no junk food. Some have even called full-on bans against soda and RedBull. In short, we’ve gone all California on ourselves.
It’s kinda lame, but in an employer’s best interest to swap out carb-crashing junk food for more sustainable fare. Enter Blueprint Cleanse– a company that’s opening San Francisco operations in the next few months and, IMHO, is going to absolutely clean up, literally and figuratively. And in August, California residents can try it for $20 cheaper per day.
We’re already huge fans at TechCrunch: I’ve done it, Leena has done it, Heather is doing it next week and even Arrington has put down his Chipotle burrito for a few days to cleanse. Yes, Arrington. → Read More
Our post last week on AT&T’s failures inspired a lot of people to voice their displeasure (to put it kindly) with the service over its poor network performance, particularly with the iPhone. It also inspired one professional video editor, Pat Lee, to make the following truly awesome AT&T/Apple ad parody.
Lee tells us that he hopes the video inspires people “to contact Apple to let them know about their issues with AT&T’s atrocious service.” The end goal is to put pressure on Apple not to renew its exclusive deal with AT&T here in the U.S. → Read More
This weekend just turned into an early Christmas for Android hackers everywhere. Google just dropped an early alpha version of the upcoming major Android update, “Donut”, into the code repository. User Cyanogen of xda-developers was the first to notice the new code lingering, and is already hard at work getting it up and running currently available hardware. Just from playing with it in the emulator, a number of new features have been uncovered: Support for CDMA phones (Hello, Sprint!) Text-to-speech Loads of new widgets, including one that allows for WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS/Email toggling and Brightness adjustment right from the homescreen. Official support for multitouch (This was previously available through hackery – we’re not sure yet if this will be in the final build) “Search integrated into everything” WPA Enterprise WiFi encryption support VPN support Automated backups “Tons of performance [tweaks]“ Check after the jump for a gallery of the first screenshots to have made their way out – we’ll keep you updated as more goodies get unearthed. → Read More
Looking over the top 10 paid iPhone apps list today, the list appeared pretty typical: A bunch of games, a camera app, etc. Then I noticed one called Offender Locator [iTunes link], mostly because it has a creepy icon. I figured it was a game — it’s anything but. It’s an app to show you registered sex offenders living around you.
While all 50 states require that sexual offenders register themselves, and allow anyone to access the information online, most people never look at it. That’s why it’s surprising that this app is a top seller — especially considering that it’s not free (it’s $0.99). Certainly, it’s good to be aware of these people living around you — especially if they have committed acts against children, and you have children — but it’s interesting that it’s the iPhone that is making such information “popular.” → Read More
http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?umid=324932 Do you want to waste 6:14 of your boring Saturday. Watch this Steet Fighter mashup of massive Ryu combos. Ever seen a 50 hit combo that lasts 15? There are a couple in the video. You really should watch it. → Read More
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