November 25, 2008
Yieldex Wins Amazon Web Services Contest
By Narayan Bhat, TMCnet Contributing Editor
Boulder, Colorado-based Yieldex has won the second annual Start-Up Challenge organized by the Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of online retailing giant Amazon.com (News - Alert).
Yieldex's DynamicIQ service runs on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service, helping publishers maximize advertising revenue from their premium inventory with in-depth proposal analysis, scenario planning, and their proprietary yield index.
The victory can prove to be quite the windfall as Yieldex will receive $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in Amazon Web Service credits and perhaps even an investment offer from Amazon.com.
“The ability to systematically scale our server capacity up and down is ideal for the massive amounts of data we process to meet our customers' needs. Amazon Web Services is the perfect cost-effective, scalable and flexible solution for us as a start-up company,” said John Barr, Vice President of Engineering for Yieldex.
Amazon said the winner was chosen based on the originality of their idea, marketplace need, and their implementation of Amazon Web Services.
Amazon's Start-up Challenge begins in September and typically sees hundreds of contestants battling for the top prize. From the list of applicants, Amazon chose seven finalists to fly to Amazon headquarters in Seattle and present their ideas in front of a panel of judges.
“Our seven exciting finalists demonstrate the innovation happening throughout our community – companies who are avoiding capital expenditure, focusing on ideas rather than on infrastructure, and getting to market faster,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services.
The victory may even prompt Amazon to invest in Yieldex. Other investors in Yieldex include Sequel Venture Partners of Colorado, First Round Capital and Woodside Fun.
Narayan Bhat is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Narayan's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Greg Galitzine