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During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Forget Adderall. Traders now pop chia seeds to stay focused and energized
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
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Ford ran a contest to figure out ways to distinguish an alert driver from a tired driver. More than 200 players spent three months on the challenge. One of the top contestants—who goes by the handle Swedish Chef—was Christopher Hefele, an engineer at the vaunted AT&T Labs who finished second in the Netflix contest. Hefele submitted 25 different entries to the alert-driver competition, which offered up only $950 in total prize money. (He placed fourth.)
By far the most lucrative prize on Kaggle is a $3 million reward offered by Heritage Provider Network to the person who can most accurately forecast which patients will be admitted to a hospital within the next year by looking at their past insurance claims data. More than 1,000 people have downloaded the anonymized data that covers four years of hospital visits, and they have until April 2013 to post answers.
Jeremy Howard, another Aussie, serves as Kaggle’s chief scientist. He’s an entrepreneur who joined Kaggle after doing well in some of its competitions, including one on forecasting chess player ratings. He’s now refining the way the company designs competitions and is hiring sharp data scientists. “The Netflix prize took like a year to set everything up,” Howard says, and Kaggle’s eight-person team has a backlog of 170 proposed contests to work through. “We want to create a system that is more like an EBay auction.” Kaggle currently charges clients fixed fees totaling $20,000 for each contest, plus $10,000 a month.
Moving forward, Kaggle plans to instead take a cut of the prize money and also to emphasize invitation-only competitions. The idea is to let companies put sensitive information on Kaggle and have only 10 to 15 people analyze it. Kaggle will help select the ideal candidates to tackle the problem. “If you want to be invited to these competitions, you have to perform well in the others,” Howard says. The hope is that a biotech company might feel comfortable enough to release data about a potential breakthrough drug that’s still under wraps.
Howard’s dream is for Kaggle to get big enough that some contestants can give up their day jobs. “These guys should be earning as much as hedge fund managers and golfers,” he says.
The bottom line: Kaggle, a startup with $11 million in funding, wants companies to be more comfortable applying the wisdom of crowds to sensitive data.
Vance is a technology writer for Bloomberg Businessweek.
