The Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge that kicked off last September has narrowed it down to a few finalists. There are 7 companies left in the running. As you may recall from our previous coverage, the participating startups had to have originality, be creative, diverse and of course utilize Amazon's Web Services.
So who made the final cut?
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]Ooyala, the video advertising system, Justin.tv, which has recently expanded to become a self-broadcasting video blog network, WeoGeo, Commerce360, Brainscape, MileMeter, and UserTesting, which is a network for pre-launch testing of websites.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]As you can see, the 7 finalists offer an array of startups for the types of services they represent, and each poses its own scalability needs. With a total of $100,000 in prizes for the first place winner, Amazon's pay-as-you-go model could require some hefty bills once a service is large enough. Amazon will be uploading videos for each finalist, where the community at large will get to vote for their favorites. These finalists will then be heading over to Amazon headquarters in Seattle next month to present their entries to the judges, and a winner will be chosen.