As the GroupLens research blog is reporting, MyStrands have announced a $100,000 investment for the winner of the recommender startup competition. The winners will be announced at RecSys 2008. On a side note, any UCL-ers interested in entrepreneurship might also be interested in this course run by the UCL graduate school.

Update: it seems that tapping into any wisdom hidden in the masses is the new source of ideas (crowdsourcing): don’t come up with ideas, just make a means for the ideas to come to you. A new competition is adding its name to the Netflix prize, this previous post on evaluating algorithms with the masses, and the above competition: semantihacker is offerring $1 million to anyone who can put their semantic-analysis engine to good use!