SEATTLE, Wash., Jan. 25 – Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced the winners of the sixth AWS Global Start-Up Challenge. Grand Cru, LogMyCalls, MortarData and TraceLink were each awarded $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits, AWS Support services at the Business-level tier for one year and technical mentorship from AWS. The four winners were selected based on their originality and creativity, likelihood of long-term success and scalability, how well the business addresses a need in the marketplace, and implementation of AWS solutions.

This year, AWS selected four grand prize winners – one from each of the following categories:

Grand Cru – Gaming

LogMyCalls – Consumer Applications

MortarData – Big Data & High Performance Computing

TraceLink – Business Applications

“We are very happy, proud and honored to have been named the best Gaming start-up in the 2012 Amazon Web Services Global Startup Challenge,” said Markus Pasula, CEO and Co-Founder of Grand Cru. “Being a mobile free-to-play gaming company, having a great cloud based server and storage solution is critical for our success and a key component of everything we do. Only AWS fulfills our demands and provides the scalability and flexibility we require.”

"We are elated to be a Grand Prize Winner. The market values what LogMyCalls delivers--cloud-based analytics of phone conversations so businesses can optimize their marketing, automate marketing, and make more money from phone calls," said Jason Wells, CEO of ContactPoint, maker of LogMyCalls. "Our platform and our capabilities are built on AWS and they are central to our expansion strategy as we grow and require seamless scalability. It's an honor to be selected out of 2500 companies from 85 countries and we’re excited to work with AWS for the long-term.”

“We are humbled that AWS has selected us from such a large pool of impressive startups,” said K Young, CEO of MortarData. “Our mission is to make big data accessible to companies of all sizes - allowing them to analyze data and build complex big data apps with ease. We've combined the Mortar open source frameworks' focus on collaboration and simplicity with our Hadoop platform-as-a-service built on AWS's Elastic MapReduce service. Using Mortar, our customers take on machine learning, natural language processing, regression analysis, and much more using their existing skills—and because we build on AWS, our customers never have to worry about scaling or operations.”

The TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud protects life and enables health by creating complete global connectivity, traceability and visibility of pharmaceuticals from raw materials through production, distribution and delivery to the patient. “Counterfeit drugs threaten the safety of millions of people each year. Eighty percent of medicines are consumed by only 15 percent of the global population. Over 2 billion patients lack access to essential medicines,” said Shabbir Dahod, President and CEO, TraceLink. “The AWS platform is fundamental in giving us the scale and reach we need to help the global Life Sciences supply network address these critical issues and securely track and trace the billions of pharmaceutical products produced each year. With a single point and click connection, we enable shared visibility and complete collaboration across all supply, production and distribution processes that a company executes with each and every partner in their network.”

New to the Global Start-up Challenge this year was an Audience Favorite award. Finalists made short presentations at the finale event and the audience voted for their favorite finalist. This year’s Audience Favorite went to Poikos, who earned $5,000 in AWS credits.

Amazon Web Services recognized twenty-four semi-finalists from around the world. From these, twelve finalists were selected to move into the final round and were flown to San Francisco, California to attend the AWS Start-Up Challenge finale event. At the event, each finalist presented their ideas to a panel of judges with representatives from AWS. The finalists also had the opportunity to present their business to venture capitalists during "lightning round" sessions. At the end of the day, the judges selected the winners and announced the results at the evening awards ceremony. After accepting their award, the four winners were presented with the coveted "Golden Hammer," and then partook in the annual AWS Start-Up Challenge ritual of using the hammer to demolish a real server, symbolizing how companies no longer need to own servers when they operate in the cloud.

Big Data & High Performance Computing Finalists:

• Demyst Data (Hong Kong) - Real-time analysis of consumer and small business profiles to improve decision making.
• MortarData (USA) - Open source framework and runtime environment for building big data pipelines on Elastic MapReduce.
• QMedic (USA) - A wearable sensing platform that monitors physical activity, sleep, and falls for older adults.

Business Applications Finalists:

• PlanGrid (USA) - A mobile replacement for construction blueprints.
• Poikos (Netherlands) - Imaging and measurement of the human body in 3D using consumer-grade hardware.
• TraceLink (USA) - Connect people, processes, and information across a global supply network.

About Amazon Web Services

Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services -- now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia.

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Source: Amazon Web Services