For startups, finding the most cost-effective means of building and distributing your product can be the difference between life and death. That’s why using the Web has been such a benefit to small startups. As have Web services—like Amazon Web Services (AWS)—that allow those startups to get big time functionality for a fraction of the cost of maintaining their own infrastructure.
But no matter how efficient the startup, a little extra cash can always help. So if you’ve built something interesting on AWS, consider throwing your hat in the ring to win the Amazon Web Services Start-up Challenge.
The AWS Start-up Challenge is an annual competition designed for young, promising start-ups to get noticed and compete for a chance to win $100,000 in cash and credits. Start-ups that are using the AWS cloud computing platform can submit an application which describes their business plan and their use of AWS.
The contest is open to start-ups located in the eligible countries that are currently using or are in the process of using Amazon Web Services. Entrepreneurs or privately held businesses are invited to apply that have not generated more than $10 million USD in gross annual revenues or outside funding.
Wait. Cash and credits? How’s that work out? Well, one grand prize winner will receive $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, mentoring sessions from AWS technical experts, AWS Premium Support Gold for one year, and Inclusion in press release and media coverage. So it might actually figure to be more than $100,000 in value. And even finalists get a nice chunk of AWS credit.
And don’t just think you’re limited to some EC2 or S3 deployment. Amazon Web Services include all of the following:
- Alexa Top Sites
- Alexa Web Information Service
- Auto Scaling
- CloudFront
- CloudWatch
- DevPay
- Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Elastic Load Balancing
- Elastic MapReduce
- Flexible Payments Service (FPS)
- Fulfillment Web Service (FWS)
- Import/Export
- Relational Database Service (RDS)
- SimpleDB
- Simple Notification Service (SNS)
- Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- Simple Storage Service (S3)
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
And yes, even Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Well what are you waiting for? They’re waiting to give you money. And AWS credits. Contest entries close at the stroke of midnight on October 31, 2010.
For more information, visit the Amazon Web Services Start-up Challenge. To apply, complete the entry form before November 1, 2010. To keep up with what’s happening, follow @AWSstartups on Twitter.
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[…] a webinar on the Scalable Cloud. And at the risk of pissing of our hard-working sales team, Amazon is offering a $100,000 prize for a startup using Amazon Web Services to power its application…. Us? We just offer stuff like service, security, performance and […]
[…] Didn’t I just write about Amazon, Facebook, and Zynga? […]
$100,000 is cool but how about tapping in to $250,000,000? The guys at Kleiner Perkins this morning announced what they called an sFund – a fund for social app development. Amazon is an investor on in the fund and Jive (shameless plug) is one of the companies highlighted at the event.
I’d encourage all entrepreneurs to check it out:
http://www.kpcb.com/initiatives/sfund/
[…] Building your startup using Amazon Web Services? Would $100,000 in prizes help? « Silicon Florist October 21st, 2010 For startups, finding the most cost-effective means of building and distributing your product can be the difference between life and death. That’s why using the Web has been such… […]