Netflix could be awarding $1 Million soon

About a year ago I read a Wired story about a Netflix contest with a million dollar prize attached.  The contest was to try to improve their recommendation system, and I was interested in the crowd-sourced and intelligent-search implications.  For anyone who's been following it, it looks like this week there might be a winner, barring any competing teams being able to outdo their result (a recommendation improvement of 10.05%) over the next 30 days.  Over the years, competing factions began to collaborate, and once some collaborated, others had to join, feeling they couldn't compete against the larger group.  That, for now, seems to be how a team ended up winning.  (For more, here are two Wired blog entries, one when the eventual collaborators were still competing, and the second announcing the probable winner).