Winner Chosen from over 900 Entries from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Israel; Finalists Pitched to a Panel of VCs and Amazon ExecutivesSEATTLE, Dec 10, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today
announced GoodData as the winner of the third annual AWS Start-Up
Challenge. At an awards ceremony at the Plug and Play Tech Center in
Sunnyvale, California, GoodData was awarded $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in
AWS service credits and an investment offer from Amazon. During the
final round of judging, seven finalists presented their businesses to
judges from Amazon and venture capital firms. The winner was chosen
based on the originality of their idea, marketplace need, ability to
execute,and their implementation of AWS. Amazon Web
Services provides reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure services
on demand. To learn more about AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com.
GoodData uses the economic advantages of cloud computing to let
companies start business intelligence projects for free, and spend a
fraction of the traditional cost of comprehensive BI. The company
provides a cloud-based service that provides dashboards & reports, deep
ad hoc analysis and powerful data warehousing. GoodData is built
completely on Amazon Web Services.
"We are honored and excited to win the AWS Start-Up Challenge," said
Roman Stanek, Founder and CEO of GoodData. "In 2007, we bet on Amazon
Web Services to build our Cloud BI Platform. Today, AWS enables us to
pass on the huge economic advantages and scalability of cloud computing
to our customers."
Bizo was chosen as runner-up in this year's challenge and will receive
$25,000 in AWS service credits. Bizo delivers the ability to target
specific business audiences on publisher sites across the web, with
precise ad targeting based on a prospect's business and non-personally
identifiable attributes and behaviors. Leveraging AWS, Bizo has been
able to scale to 45 million business users with over 1 billion
impressions a month within 15 months of launch.
Finally, as part of this year's AWS Start-Up Challenge, finalists also
competed for the most creative monetization model using Amazon Payments.
An award of $5,000 in cash and $5,000 in Amazon Payments credits was
awarded to FlightCaster, a company that helps travelers evaluate travel
options by predicting flight delays using an advanced algorithm to match
flight history with real-time conditions.
"We're continually amazed by the innovation and creativity of our
start-up customers, and by the exciting businesses they are building,"
said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. "The finalists
in the AWS Start-Up Challenge represent a rapidly growing number of
companies that are utilizing AWS to get to market faster, avoid capital
expenditure and focus on ideas rather than technology infrastructure."
Over 900 applications from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany
and Israel were submitted and reviewed. For the Final Round, AWS brought
the seven finalists to Silicon Valley, California to present their ideas
to a judging panel of representatives from Amazon. Finalists then
participated in "Lightning Round" sessions where they presented their
ideas to representatives from leading venture capital firms. At the end
of the day, the judges selected the winners who were announced at a
final event and awards ceremony with an audience of hundreds.
AWS congratulates all seven finalists in the 2009 AWS Start-Up Challenge:
Bizo
Bizo has created a cutting-edge approach to online B2B marketing by
building a platform for data collection and precise ad targeting based
on a prospect's business and non-personally identifiable attributes and
behaviors.
FlightCaster
FlightCaster predicts flight delays using an advanced algorithm that
scours data on every domestic flight for the past 10 years and matches
it to real-time conditions in order to help travelers evaluate
alternative travel options.
Gazaro
Gazaro develops mobile shopping applications for smart phones that help
consumers identify when to buy electronics and computer products. Gazaro
helps customers determine when to make a purchase by providing
notifications of great new deals as well as by examining price trends on
electronics and computer products.
GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud.
Their Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach
to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data
that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and
servicing. GoodData is free to start, simple to use, and affordable.
Involver
Involver's vision is to help companies use social media as a powerful
CRM platform to build and monetize direct relationships with their
customers.
Motally
Motally is a mobile analytics tracking and reporting service. Motally
technology successfully handles the nuances of mobile tracking -
including accurately tracking users and visits and identifying the
underlying operator and country when a user accesses a site through
operator gateways.
ReTel Technologies
ReTel Technologies empowers retailers and restaurants with data that
enables them to improve sales and cut costs. ReTel's system accomplishes
this by integrating with existing security cameras and constantly
monitoring customer and operational factors, such as speed of service,
store appearance, and retail sales conversion funnels.
Participating venture capitalists included CMEA Capital, Emergence
Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Hummer Winblad Partners, Matrix
Partners and Madrona Venture Group.
About Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle,
opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's
Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most
customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything
they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the
lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of
unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books;
Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home
& Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel; Shoes & Jewelry; Health &
Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial.
Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to
in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end
technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any
type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web
Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple
Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue
Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS),
Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon CloudFront.
Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com,
www.amazon.co.uk,
www.amazon.de,
www.amazon.co.jp,
www.amazon.fr,
www.amazon.ca,
and www.amazon.cn.
As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include
Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates
otherwise.
Forward-Looking Statements
This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning
of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly
from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve
risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to
competition, management of growth, new products, services and
technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international
expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center
optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and
strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption,
inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More
information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's
financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the
Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual
Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.
SOURCE: Amazon.com, Inc.
Amazon.com, Inc.
Amazon Media Hotline, 206-266-7180
