
AWS Start-Up Challenge - terpua
http://aws.amazon.com/startupchallenge/
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flooha
Not trying to be negative here, but if you just have an idea, forget it. All
of the companies selected last year seemed to be already launched and
profitable. Even if you are in the alpha or beta stage, I get the impression
that you won't even be in the running.

Amazon touts this as though teams with great ideas have a chance, but they are
really looking for companies who are already writing large checks to Amazon.

YMMV and I could be wrong, but last year I was astonished and disappointed by
the lack of real, early stage startups.

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MicahWedemeyer
Just dash off an application and get the $25 in free AWS credit. Spend less
than 10 minutes on it and it's a pretty good rate of return.

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terpua
You have to be from the US, UK, Germany or Israel to qualify. That sucks.
You'd think that Amazon would at least cover the countries they are selling
in.

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ScottWhigham
No, I wouldn't think that actually. Can you imagine how much legal wrangling
it would take to understand the law in 100+ countries? I don't make any
guesses as to the size of amazon's legal team nor to their scope in terms of
country coverage but really - that's a massive job. Just take the USA for
example - Amazon's legal team is working overtime dealing with taxes. Should
they hire 60 new attorneys just so that they can make this content utterly
global? At that point, they'd probably say, "Let's just forget the entire
thing. If people are gonna complain about it, then we just won't do it."

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terpua
If you are selling something in another country, I would understand your point
but this is a startup challenge. The onus is on the participants to see if
their country will allow them legally. I would say that this would apply to
over 90% of the civilized world.

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anamax
> The onus is on the participants to see if their country will allow them
> legally.

You typically can't shift liability that way. In particular, Amazon can't. If
there's a problem and someone has the choice of going after Amazon or some
local little guy, Amazon gets it, especially if said someone is said little
guy.

Plus there will be arguments like "if you just changed {rule}, everything
would be okay", and different groups from the same country would name
different rules.

FWIW, this is an example of the constant yet mostly invisible drag of
"consumer protection".

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MicahWedemeyer
Your chance of winning is tiny, but unlike other competitions, the $25 in free
AWS credit is a nice bonus for all applicants.

We submit an application pretty much every year, and it covers a good chunk of
our S3/Cloudfront costs for the rest of the year :)

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shizcakes
This is the real deal - my company works with one of last year's finalists,
encoding.com, and they are pretty great. Not perfect, but it's a small company
using AWS as their infrastructure - and everything has worked so far.

