Amazon Web Services (AWS) group has recently launched a competition for startups, with the prize being $100,000; $50k in cash and $50k in web service credits. If you are a startup that is bootstrapping your company I would encourage you to take a look at the competition and AWS.
Disclaimer: I am an indirect user of AWS as the company that handles the transcriptions for our interviews, CastingWords, uses the AWS Mechanical Turk service.
I used to work at a company called United Devices in Austin, TX , which was looking to provide grid computing. They had a very similar vision to what AWS is looking to do, but didn’t have the scale that AWS has gotten. This type of service allows companies to scale as they need the resources and simply pay as they go. This is pretty powerful. Especially with how quickly traffic / usage can occur and take down a site.
I am completely fascinated with the availability of open source technologies and scalable web services that allow companies to be built and launched quickly and with minimal $$. Tech entrepreneurship is changing, and it is going to be very exciting when anyone with an idea can build innovative and disruptive technologies. More on that later…
