GoodData Wins Third Annual Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge
Receives $100,000 in Cash and Service Credits Plus Investment Offer from Amazon
Winner Chosen from over 900 Entries from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Israel; Finalists Pitched to a Panel of VCs and Amazon Executives
SEATTLE—(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 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 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 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 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’s vision is to help companies use social media as a powerful CRM platform to build and monetize direct relationships with their customers.
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 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.
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2 Comments
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[...] came early for GoodData. In case you haven’t heard, we were recently named winner of the third annual Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge. GoodData was selected from over 1,000 entries as the startup building the most impressive business [...]
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