Three years and one million dollers later, Netflix has an improved ratings and recommendation system, and months of free advertising in the lead up to a jubuilent conclusion for the BellKore Pragmatic Chaos team. Thousands of teams from across the world submitted their ideas, ultimately leading to a final round of mergings which brought team BellKore across the finish line 20 minutes before their primary competitor, Ensemble.
The experiment is a three-fold triumph: For Netflix (the company’s stock has been steadily climbing over this year and was up .30 on Monday when the results were announced); For the wider technology community who will get to benefit from the winning team’s algorithms–publishing methods was one of the stated requirements of the competition; and for the infinite possibilities of crowdsourcing–both as a problem solving and a marketing tool. Continue reading “Netflix’s crowdsourced victory”
One of the challenges of working in digital media is feeling like a blind man. You can hear, smell, taste the changes happening around you–but it always feels like you’re missing part of the equation; where is this going, what is happening next, what is at the horizon line? That’s how most of us who are honest about it feel anyway. It took 
The green marketing space is exploding with new opportunities for brands to make their mark. And it’s no surprise why: According to a study released by Strategic Oxygen, GCI Group and Cohn & Wolfe more than 70 percent of global respondents said they “probably†or “definitely†would increase their preference for a brand’s green products if they were convinced of the positive impact on the environment and business. Almost 60% said they would expect to pay a premium for green products.
When clients visit the Lab, they always want to know:Â But what does social media mean to me? And ultimately, they want what Cuba Gooding Jr.’s 
Recently, I began to notice that 
As new media marketers, we know what our clients should be doing, what spaces they should be playing in; we have a whole laundry list of items we’d like them to implement. But too often, we don’t apply the same standards and strategies to our own online spaces and digital publishing faces. 
The personal digital publishing revolution has been happening for awhile. But a few announcements today make it clear that the wheels of progress are turning faster than ever before. And, that we’re getting closer to the plug-and-play-don’t-make-me-think-open-standards era.
“Your tech savvy intern.” These were the words on the email subject line in response to a Craigslist ad we’d posted to fill an intern position. Needless to say, she got the job. As we come to the end of another semester, it seems fitting to reexamine the role of the intern in the new media marketing space. Because interns are not just a cheap way to fill labor needs. 
April 1, 2009–It’s time to get real: the future of new media is not happening. We at the 
