The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) prizes.

The Grand Prize is $1,000,000. To qualify for the Grand Prize, there must be at least a 10% improvement over Netflix’s current Cinematch system. To keep things interesting, in addition to the Grand Prize, Netflix is offering a $50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs. It goes to the team whose design shows the most improvement over the previous year’s.

The Contest entry period commences on October 2, 2006 (00:00:00 UTC) and continues until the Grand Prize is awarded (the “Contest Term”). No additional registrations or Contest submissions of qualifying set predictions will be accepted after the close of the Contest Term. Netflix reserves the right to cancel the Contest after October 2, 2011 in its sole discretion.

Read more about it.

ShareYourLook is an online community for fashion addicts, trendsetters, shoppers, and designers from around the world to share looks and ideas about personal style.

See how people in Tokyo, Stockholm, or Idaho are putting their own spin on the latest trends. Discover what men and women in London and New York are coveting this season. Best of all, discover how other people’s style can influence your look. ShareYourLook is designed to inspire and inform, so we encourage helpful comments and thoughtful critiques.

Check out the site.

FashMatch is an online community for anyone who shares a love for clothes, fashion and dressing stylishly.

FashMatch is based on two things: The first one is fun. Creating your own looks via the terrific brands FashMatch not only provides you with an endless source of entertainment, but also saves you time finding the look that is right for you. The second one is sharing the fun! Like a great friend, FashMatch is the ideal companion, offering to the visitors an opportunity not to only be their own stylist but also an influence and inspiration someone else.

Check out the site.

Tough travelers are always looking further.
And now the new frontier of travel is out of our world.
It is hidden in the invisible geography of the cyberspace.

In a few years, this geography has been expanding, broadening in every direction, configuring new territories, inhabited by new societies.
These are the territories of virtual worlds, synthetic places that exists only in cyberspace, but that exist 24 hours a day.

In virtual worlds you can find everything, the good and the bad, the poor and the rich, sumptuous castles and futuristic space bases, luscious women and rough warriors. But, most of all, you can find many lands to discover, extraordinary places to visit, that will ravish your imagination. Traveling in these territories will be like dreaming: you will see exotic landscapes where among prehistoric trees break out bizarre surrealistic architectures, strange fantasy regions where the elves built astonishing temples, synthetic deserts covered with post-atomic ruins, seas of pixels where float ghostly vessels, organic architectures that conceal undercover avatars.

Discovering these territories is a great deal, but it is not so easy.
Many worlds request specific skills to be seen in their integrity, and if you want to discover the best, you must pass many hours in front of your monitor, accomplishing weary tasks. Many problems for people who want just enjoy a trip in a virtual world, just to see how it is made, to try a new experience and tell friends about it.

Synthravels is the first organization to offer a complete guide service to all the people who want to make a tour in virtual worlds without knowing these new realities, even if they have never put their feet in these strange, synthetic grounds.

The tours and the destinations are chosen by the staff of Synthravels, composed by programmers, architects, experienced video gamers.

Check out the site.

[from internet retailer]
Microsoft Corp.’s new service for uploading product data to its Internet search index is designed to make an e-retailer’s products easier to find in the company’s new shopping search engine, Windows Live Product Search.

The new product uploading service, code-named Agora, could make it more likely that shoppers will find what they want within Windows Live Product Search, says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp., which provides services and technology to online retailers. Using Agora should also boost retailers’ natural and paid-search rankings in Windows Live Product Search, he adds.

Search engine spiders often miss products when crawling retail web sites to capture data for a search index, leaving some shoppers unable to find what they want, Wingo adds. “So some shoppers may go instead to a comparison shopping engine,” where retailers pay listing fees, he says.

Agora is similar in function to Google Inc.’s Google Base, which retailers can use to load product data to Google’s search index. The use of both Agora and Google Base could increase online shopping directly through Microsoft and Google search engines, reducing the amount of traffic to comparison shopping engines, says Wingo, who today launched a comparison shopping engine blog, CSEStrategies.com.

Google Base has already proved to be lucrative to retailers who have used it to boost their product presence in Google searches, which enables them to cut back on the more costly route of listing products in comparison search engines, Wingo says, adding that Agora can be expected to have the same effect.

“Comparison shopping engines are at risk, because they’re used to getting a lot of traffic through search engines,” Wingo says. “If shoppers find what they need at the search engine layer, they may not need to go to the comparison search engines.”