I love Amazon Web Services. I do. They are beyond cool in concept. I also like Amazon as a shopping experience.
But as I mentioned before, I thought the Amazon Startup Challenge was a crock. And by "crock" I mean it was advertised as being all about "the next hot start-up" and was designed to "encourage more people to pursue their ideas and to
give an additional jumpstart to the winners". In reality, many of the finalists were well funded and far beyond the "early stage" point that the competition appeared to be aimed at. In fact, of the seven finalists, only two actually seemed to meet Amazon’s own criteria.
So who was the illustrious winner? Apparently it was Ooyala. Yeah. The "tiny" company founded by ex-Google guys that has allegedly raised over $10M (see this link) already. These folks that really need a jump start to help maintain their THREE OFFICES in Mountain View, Los Angeles and New York.
I just can’t see what tangible benefit $50k brings to a company that already raised $10M.
Did I mention that disruptorMonkey is building a really cool video service? We’ll show you a demo, but it’s by invitation only… And invites are $1M each 🙂