Consider how many ways are available to become a millionaire, quickly or not.

You can play the lottery year in and year out and maybe become that one in 10 million that wins something, if not the full million; you can get on a whacky game show program and hope that you get as lucky as the guy in Slum Dog Millionaire, when he got asked the exact questions for which he knew the answers; or enter the Publishers Clearing House contest or, if qualified, participate in an unusual contest where innovation and brains become the entry ticket to becoming a millionaire.

Netflix did just that… It set up a contest back in 2006 to improve the video rental and streaming service’s recommendations engine by 10% or more and offered $1,000,000 to whoever managed to get there first. And this week, out of the 40,000 teams, from 186 countries, who competed, Netflix announced a winning team.

Why a contest? They could have gone the conventional route, as in — hire a team of experts, give them a deservedly high salary and let them do their own thing over the next three years to meet company directives.

Instead, Netflix tapped a global village of PhDs — a collaborative effort by teams of statisticians and computer engineers, all of whom devoted their time and brains, certainly not for the purpose of winning the $1,000,000 prize, but to win much more – a chance to grapple with a huge data set and the challenges of large-scale modeling. Basically, any team, winner or loser would benefit, and so would Netflix of course, as well as countless of other entities where the winning data technology could be applied — across the fields of science, commerce and politics.

Netflix won far more than a new winning technology, which will be used to further improve Netflix’s recommendation system. For its $1,000,000 investment, it received the attention of the worldwide media, hailing its model as a potential for an “emerging prize economy” now closely watched by international corporations. No advertising or any other promotional efforts could have achieved this for that dollar investment.

Basically it was a marketing feat.

Promotionally, Netflix did something else very clever. It intentionally prolonged worldwide media attention by ruling that the winning team was too close to call and thereby forced a 30-day challenge run, which caused teams to scramble and merge in an effort to beat out the winner, intensifying the media frenzy.

Although Netflix got the attention, there are other groups offering cash payments or prizes for product development or applied sciences, such as InnoCentive and X Prize Foundation. They have Netflix to thank for bringing attention to the prize model.

Still, amidst all this positive news, it was Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings who put his foot in his mouth when he said, (as quoted in Steve Lohr’s article), ”You look at the cumulative hours and you’re getting PHDs for a dollar an hour.”

Might have been prudent to re-think that message…

Google’s tug of war with the publishing industry plays out everyday. It’s familiar and goes like this… Google offers free search tools that allow people to find content that publishers publish, while publishers want to get paid for the content offered. It’s that simple. But once the cat is out of the bag, what’s there to do? Say no, no, you can’t read this for free anymore?

So somebody in that very smart organization figured out as to what remains attractive to readers in actually reading a newspaper offline, say over a morning cup of coffee or on a commuter ride to work. It turns out that it is not the rustling or feel of the pages as one might have thought, but rather the freedom to flip pages at will, that matters to readers.

The silliness of this boggles the mind, but apparently it is true that being able to read a paragraph or two of an article before flipping pages to read the rest of it, is what makes newspaper reading satisfying and efficient of a reader’s time.

So being a clever player, Google took this tidbit of information seriously enough to create the experimental news hub called Fast Flip in Google Labs, a visual search engine that lets readers flip through webpages of more than three dozen magazines and newspapers – of course, hosted on Google. In return for permission from publishers to show full pages, rather than short snippets, Google agrees to share advertising revenue with publishers.

Fast Flip is an outcome of what Google had considered a major problem with news sites: slow to load, and as such, potentially turn off many readers. They reasoned that browsing news on the web is slow and that when it is fast people will look at more news and more ads. Really?

The service is being initiated with the cooperation of about three dozen publishers, including major news outlets like BBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek; magazines like Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic, Esquire and Good Housekeeping; and Web-only publications like TechCrunch, Salon.com and Slate.

Ok, they may have cleverly found a way to flip pages online, but no one can seriously think that this will present a new revenue model for publishers or replace newspapers’ plunging advertising revenues. It is a pittance and a nod to the publishing industry that Google wants to stay wedged in as publishers continue to search various models under which they would charge for content. Apparently Google wants to be a player in those plans, too.

With Fast Flip, Google aimed at getting closer to the experience of scanning through physical newspapers or magazines. What they have done in fact, and with much hullabaloo, is simulated online what we already have offline.

That’s the real tug of war…

Labor Day is usually the marker for the end of summertime. Still, reflecting on summer there are good memories that we can retain through the photos taken, videos shot and books read. And then there are the not-so-good memories of having lost the drag-along-must-have gadgets that we were “stupid” enough to leave behind on planes, cruise lines, car seats and what not.

Oh well, in this digital age, manufacturers can keep tabs on them, so chances of retrieval are high – you would think.

Not so quick…

According to the New York Times, September 7 article titled Gadget Makers Can Find Thief, but Don’t Ask, manufacturers know exactly who has a missing or stolen device, because in many instances it has been registered to a new user – but they won’t do anything about it.

The problem escalated recently with the loss of an Amazon e-reader, Kindle. Obviously the owner asked to have his account canceled so that nobody could charge books to his credit card. Then he asked Amazon to put the serial number of his wayward device on a kind of do-not-register list that would render it inoperable — to “brick it” in tech speak. He got no response.

Apparently Amazon’s policy on stolen Kindles insists on a “police call with a search warrant,” before they disclose any information about who the owners are of the missing devices. It goes so far that even that in this case the owner’s simple request to shut down the service so that thieves could not use his stolen gadget, was turned down.

You go figure as to whether a police officer is going to go to the trouble to create a search warrant for gadgets that may cost a few hundred dollars.

Amazon clearly has a new public relations dilemma. It’s not the first time. Last July, Amazon had its customers in a rowdy snit when it remotely deleted titles from Kindles, citing copyright reasons. Now Amazon is playing it safe, but that’s no way to endear it to its e-reader community.

Here’s public relations advice to Amazon: it will be far cheaper in the long run for you to keep your customers loyal and happy, which can be done by simply having a blacklist of registered devices. Or you could include a request form with every Kindle sale, to inform Amazon within 24 hours when a Kindle is sold to a new user. Or you could forget about hiding behind the useless “legal “route (seeking a police report) and find a myriad of ways to show your concern to your customer.

C’mon, if you could catch the thief, would you? So should Amazon…