I got an invite out of the blue to sit down with Charlotte Ziems of the Guidewire Group a couple of weeks ago. Basically, it was a chance to offer "perspective" on an "effort" (no NDA, but why be rude) they have underway, as well as their approach to said.

Meeting Charlotte was fantastic. Eminently personable (and obviously smart and experienced), we hit it off quickly. I looked down to check the time only once during the conversation (a rarity these days given everything going down), and found that our hour had elapsed before I could finish my coffee (surely a sign I was talking too much!). Hopefully it won't be the last meet-up.

Guidewire's got a lot going on, not the least of which is an upcoming Leadership Forum, which looks excellent, not only for its beautiful location, but also because friend and fellow PointCast alum Don Albert will be speaking in his new role as GM Sky, North America. Congrats Don!

Contents of this post have been removed at the company's request (no drama, they're just uncomfortable announcing their investors broadly at this stage).

I noted Dave's post link to an NYTimes story about NFLX publishing 100MM movie ratings, and thought to myself, "they finally listened... can't wait to see how SEO effects their acquisition numbers".

Instead, it turns out they're publishing a huge dataset (not SEOed pages) for all takers to play with (and for which someone can win a $1MM prize). I immediately thought of Pandora, Aggregate Knowledge and StumbleUpon (and, if I read the tea leaves correctly from the takeaways from a recent "Social Search" conference, perhaps Digg too...); could any of these guys walk away with a cool million and some great publicity for work they've already got (largely or in partly) in the bag? Hmm...

Hacking Netflix (truly living up to its name in this instance!) has more, as does TechMeme.