This past November 20th, Amazon announced the winner of the AWS Start-Up Challenge for $100,000 in cash and AWS credits. Amazon Web Services or AWS is searching for the next hot start-up that uses AWS to build its business.

Yieldex was chosen as the winner of the 2008 AWS Start-Up Challenge! Yieldex delivers “advertising inventory and optimal campaign allocation for online publishers.”

The finalists in the running were:

	Encoding.com Encoding.com has transformed video encoding from a traditional software model to a software as a service (SaaS) platform. Encoding.com combines elastic computing resources with cutting edge video encoding software.
	Knewton Knewton supercharges any education content by teaching the exact concepts students need, in the medium and pacing best for each. Knewton’s self-optimizing “Darwinian” engine grows increasingly effective as each new student joins the network – so the learning plan of the 50 millionth student is powered by the combined data of all the others.
	MedCommons MedCommons provides cloud-based Health 2.0 application services for patients and doctors, and enables third parties to customize and extend the MedCommons Platform for their own needs.
	Sonian Sonian is a cloud compute email productivity service. Each day, 86 billion emails and IMs are created and most of this information needs to be saved and indexed for compliance and personal productivity. Sonian solves this problem with next generation software running on the Amazon Web Services cloud. Sonian archives electronic communications, files and unstructured content to unlock the actionable intelligence stored in this “dark data.”
	Pixily Pixily is an interactive document management service that organizes paper and electronic materials online so people can instantly find and share information whenever and wherever they need it. For consumers, Pixily serves as a digital organization assistant that reduces paper clutter and helps manage personal information more efficiently. Businesses rely on Pixily as an affordable on-demand document management service to streamline daily operations and be more productive.
	Yieldex Yieldex delivers accurate forecasting of overlapping online advertising inventory and optimal campaign allocation for online publishers. Our tools help publishers get more revenue from their premium inventory through in-depth proposal analysis, scenario planning, and Yieldex’s proprietary yield index.
	Zephyr Zephyr enables enterprises to manage their test departments more efficiently, boost productivity, reduce costs and provide IT leaders with real-time visibility into all aspects of their software quality cycle.

Although Yieldex does not seem that attrative to me, I can see how media objects could be stored in the AWS cloud and even though online advertising providers have closely integrated management tools, smartly storing those media objects and using its metadata to provide forecasting and scenario planning could have a market.

My favorite is encoding.com and with the boom in IPTV, anyone wanting to deliver quality video in a variety of formats can do so very cheaply.

Knewton and Pixily, I see as having a hard time making it. Knewton is up against with widespread access to information; Knowledge is everywhere for the taking with the advent of the Internet and as Higher Education Institutions take their knowledge online by joining the Open Courseware Consortium, I wouldn’t know why anyone would pay for this.

As for Pixily (a document management system), providing the ability to go paperless has two shortfalls in my view. I am not sure I am ready to store sensitive, confidential information online just yet and then there’s other providers like Scribd which allows you to publish documents for free.

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