In 2006, the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, was determining the approach to reduce the uncomfort level among customers. Netflix’s exclusive motion picture proposal software, Cinematch, was the approach that it had used for promoting people decided best-fit movies among customers. While evaluating various alternatives, Hastings figure out that improvement only by 10% in the Cinematch algorithm would not only generate the annual income by upto $89 million, but also reduce the existing issue. Hastings chose the crowdsourcing for the improvement of Netflix’s software, Cinematch, rather than the conventional techniques of appointing and training new employees which may cause the huge utilization of resources. He started an open contest, Netflix Prize, exploring for a 10% improvement to Netflix’s software. The case traces the challenges encountered by Hasting while planning the contest, including whether he should develop his own crowdsourcing platform or use the current one, what should be the limit in disclosing the company data, what are the factors he should focus to ensure customer privacy during internal datasets making public, what could be the ways to designate IP, along all this, he required effective management of crowd.
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Arcadian Microarray Technologies Inc.
