Friday, September 14, 2012

Amazon Web Services Offers Up $100,000 Prizes In Developer Contest

Seattle-based Amazon Web Services is dangling a number of $100,000 prizes in its sixth annual AWS Global Start-Up Challenge contest, its annual effort to drum up interest in using its online, cloud-based infrastructure services. Amazon said it has opened up entries for this year's contest, and will award $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits to each of the four grand prize winners in the areas of Big Data and High Performance Computing; Gaming; Consumer Applications; and Business Applications. Entries are due November 9th, and must come from companies with less than $10M in gross annual revenues and no more than $10M in outside funding. Amazon's various web services have become a key part of the surge in Internet related startups in recent years; the firm's services allow those startups to establish and quickly scale their Internet services without investing in their own data centers.