IEEE Spectrum: The Million Dollar Programming Prize
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may09/8788

year-old Netflix Prize competition, offers a grand prize of US $1 million for an algorithm that’s 10 percent more accurate than the one Netflix uses to predict customers’ movie preferences.

Netflix's bounty for improving its movie-recommendation software is almost in the bag. Here is one team's account

Bell Labs explains their strategy for solving Netflix's collaborative filtering problem.