Netflix Prize

Prize: $1 million for improving online predictions
Sponsor: Netflix

On the margins of the serious contests, the popular mail-order movie service offered seven figures to someone who could improve the prediction of a film's popularity. A melding of Hollywood and technology, this has proved to be among the most popular prize competitions to date, attracting some 42,000 entries. On June 26, 2009, the company said a team known as BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos had written code that finally met the goal, meaning it might just split the $1 million.