Amazon Web Services (AWS), part of Amazon.com has announced a US$100,000 prize for the winner of its annual “Start-Up Challenge for companies that use Amazon Web Services to develop their business.
Amazon in launching their fourth annual “Start-Up Challenge” will bring the competition for the first time to the Asia-Pacific region (including Australia and New Zealand). Semi-Finalists in the Asia-Pacific region will win US$2,500 in Amazon Web Services credits, global finalists will receive US$10,000 in AWS credits and a trip to Palo Alto, CA., U.S.A for the judging and awards ceremony, with the global grand prize winner taking home US$50,000 in cash and US$50,000 in Amazon Web Services credits, premium support and a possible investment from Amazon to develop the idea further. All qualified contestants will receive US$25 in AWS service credits to kick-start the process of building their businesses on AWS.
Amazon Web Services was launched in 2006 as a platform to run applications that have internet access that Amazon.com offers to other developers and businesses to build products using the Amazon Web Services platform. Amazon Web Services can be used to power the back-end of web sites/services as well as ‘client side applications’ that have internet access. Amazon EC2 or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud which provide virtual servers and Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service which provide simple bulk storage are the most commonly known of the Amazon Web Services.
Australia-based 99designs.com is the largest marketplace for crowd-sourced graphic design and runs entirely on AWS; 99designs utilizes Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) for a cluster of application servers, database servers, proxy servers and Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) to store massive amounts of data. As a new design is uploaded to 99designs.com every seven seconds, the company requires infrastructure that is highly scalable and reliable. AWS has eliminated their infrastructure concern and allowed them to focus on their core business.
“We are excited to extend the AWS annual ‘Start-Up Challenge’ for the first time to Asia Pacific, which is especially timely with the launch of the first AWS Asia Pacific Region earlier this year. We look forward to helping unleash the talent and innovation of many start-ups and developers in Asia Pacific by providing them with easy access to the pay-as-you-go AWS cloud infrastructure,” said Adam Selipsky, vice president, Amazon Web Services.
For a complete description of the qualifying criteria, contest rules and prize awards, please visit: http://aws.amazon.com/startupchallenge.
