news
Big Data Week 2013 is over and so is our challenge. Here are the three winners:
- 1st place: Bro - 1.65%
- 2nd place: bozel - 1.52%
- 3rd place: CORE - 1.31%
Congratulations to all three!
We are currently planning more special hackathons and are in the meantime continuing with our regular plista contest, where we give away 250 € each week to the best performing recommender team. If you would like to partake in this contest, switch your team over using the online interface.
Good luck to everyone!
Big Data Week 2013 is next week already and we are getting ready for the Big Data Week 2013 challenge.
When you log in to your account you will find a new option on the Status page, allowing you to switch between the plista contest and the Big Data Week 2013 challenge. Everyone wanting to participate in this challenge will have to make the switch on Monday. The regular contest will be paused for that time, so no teams will receive any messages.
In the meantime we have increased the amount of training messages every team receives. We have also added new publishers, so expect to see more traffic in the following days and once the regular contest resumes.
If you would like to come to our hackathon on Wednesday, April 24th, remember to register on our amiando page.
Happy coding and good luck!
As the Big Data Week 2013 is coming closer, we have set up a hackathon for everyone interested in real-time recommendation challenges!
Our hackathon will take place on Wednesday, April 24th here at our office in Berlin. You can find all relevant information on our website or on the official Big Data Week web page.
The challenge will use the same API as the plista contest does, so if you're already familiar with the contest and would like to compete for some sweet prizes, make sure to sign up, as the number of participants is limited. Also, if you haven't had a chance to take part in the contest, this is your chance to get some hands-on experience directly from our developers.
Looking forward to seeing you in three weeks!
As we continue with the development of the contest platform, we occasionally introduce new features and improvements. Today we have a new feature that appears rather small but may be quite useful for developers: live statistics.
In the statistics section of the administration interface you will now not only see the results for the previous days of the week, but also the results for the current day. They update in real-time (although you will still need to refresh the page to see them change).
The statistics graph further uses a static scale now, so it should be easier to spot performance changes.
Have fun developing and good luck!
The last update is a couple of months old already, but fear not, fellow programmers, the contest is still up and running! We have had some changes in the team surrounding the contest, but everything is back on track now and we are busier than ever.
There have been various bugfixes on the site and we are continually open for suggestions and comments. If you have questions of problems with anything, please don't hesitate to contact us trough the forum or by email.
Keep those recommendations coming, remember, we are giving away 250 € each week!
We are currently restructuring the website backend, that's why the ranking and stats pages show no useful information. The contest is still running though and you can still control your instances through the website interface.
Once the changes have gone live, all stats will become available again. Additionally, there will be live stats that reflect the data of the current day.
Please hold on for now!
Starting this week we are increasing the prize money from 100 to a staggering 250 Euros! The first winner is team carlos22. Congratulations!
To all the other teams: Oil up your servers and get coding!
While most people here in Berlin are out enjoying the sun, we are working on making the contest an even better experience (while also enjoying the sun once the work day is over, of course).
Recently we have added new partner websites, so all teams should be seeing requests from multiple new domains now. This also means that the volume of messages has increased considerably. Make sure your recommenders only return items from the same domain the request came from, otherwise your result will be marked invalid, which has a negative impact on your overall CTR. The CTR is still calculated as (# of feedback)/(# of requests), regardless of domains.
More good news: We will also raise the weekly prize money to 250 Euros in a few weeks! So make sure your recommender is on top of its game!
The partner web site using the plista contest recommendations was recently relaunched and now features a much larger plista widget displaying the recommendations to its visitors.
This has resulted in two developments:
Since the widget they are using is now much larger, users are more likely to click on a recommendation, which has already had a huge positive influence on the CTR of all competing teams!
Unfortunately though, as users are still getting used to the new design of the page, overall visits have dropped, which the teams might have noticed as they are receiving less impressions. We are positive they will be up to previous levels shortly.
We wish all teams the best of luck under these changed conditions!
After a few requests from participating teams we have decided to increase the traffic the participating teams receive. We are rolling out the changes this week, so by the end of the week every team should receive around 7000 recommendations requests every day.
Remember, these are live requests from actual users on an actual website, so our admins only let us do this in return for the promise of delivering even better recommendations even faster. We are counting on you to deliver on that promise!
We will also be reducing the maximum response time to 200ms. So make sure your server is up to the task!
