Amazon Web Services, a fascinating division of the company offering a collection of commodity computing services, data storage and more - all sold in the cloud - is about to conclude their Start-up Challenge contest. The contest will award one start-up that uses Amazon Web Services a $50k cash prize, $50k worth of AWS credit and "an investment offer from Amazon." Seven startups remain and the voting (including your vote, if you'd like) ends Thursday December 6th.
Because video is generally the best medium for demonstrating anything, Amazon has made nice videos about all the finalists' companies. We've got all 7 videos embedded here below the fold. Since we were apparently unavailable to be poked in the eye with a sharp stick, the next best thing Amazon could do to us was offer embedded videos all stuck on autoplay. You'll have to pause them yourself and then watch them one at a time. (If I'm wrong, please tell me otherwise - I added autoplay=false to these silly iframe embeds - but we're still rolling!) The cognitive power to watch 7 videos concurrently is currently not available from AWS. That said, which of the following real-live startups do you think ought to win the prize?
]]>