Monday, May 16, 2011

Overstock.com Dangles $1M Prize For Personalization Software

Salt Lake City-based Overstock.com is dangling a $1 million prize to software developers, as part of a new effort to spur the development of retail personalization software, the firm said last week. Overstock said last week that it has launched the RecLab Prize, which will provide $1 million in cash to the researcher or research team who can achieve a measurable lift over existing product recommendations on its website. Overstock said teams can develop algorithms, using both synthetic and real data. The firm is running the contest along with RichRelavance, who the firm currently uses for product recommendations. The contest looks to be similar to the Netflix Prize, which awarded $1M to a team in 2009 for improving that firm's own recommendations engine.