Startup Challenge. Amazon Web Service. | Hacker News Reader

Startup Challenge. Amazon Web Service.

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50 pointsrokhayakebe13 comments

Having checked the T&Cs, this is US only

That totally sucks, but it's no surprise really...

Probably worth filling out the form just to get the free $25 in Amazon Web Services credit.

We are thinking about entering. We are already built on top of AWS. We have been incredibly happy about our uses of AWS (except SQS which was way to slow).

Definitely not counting on the challenge in anyway but could make for some nice publicity and give us good reason to post about some of the work we have been doing.

What are you using instead of SQS, if you don't mind me asking?

I've looked at Starling (Twitter's message queue written in Ruby) but not much else (besides SQS).

We looked at Starling but it wasn't as fast as Beanstalk. We ended up using Beanstalk and the Ruby client for our queues. I recommend it, but it doesn't persist to disk it is memory only, so if you have to guarantee jobs complete it not work for your situation. In our case if beanstalk goes down all the jobs are useless anyways so we can just restart.

Starling was a close contender, but it looks like twitter won't be working on it anymore as they are going to be moving to a different system. The beanstalk group is pretty active and has been very helpful.

Stomp also looks interesting, but we didn't try it out...

Why are these competitions always restricted to the US? I'm in the UK; Amazon sells European-based S3 storage and they have offices in the UK. What's the problem?

I'm working on a cracking idea that I'm sure would arouse their interest. It's so disheartening when I see these kinds of competitions and then realise I'm disqualified for being a dirty European.

Perhaps there's somebody who could demonstrate trustworthiness on here who would allow non-US residents to enter this competition (and others) by proxy through them?

pg - Would you be interested in doing this?

blame the lawyers.

Why does the cash prize halve in size by the end of the article?

It doesn't. The first line is "The grand prize is $100,000 in cash and AWS credits and a potential investment offer from Amazon."

The $100k amount is split between those two.

At the beginning its a bit ambiguous. It could be either $100,000 in cash. With some undefined amount of AWS credits, or, $100,000 worth in cash and AWS credits.

Nevertheless, they didn't contradict themselves.

Not a bad deal - a lot of big companies are really starting to embrace startups and openness. Hopefully this isn't just a trend.

how messed up is it, that Amazon's contest gets you more benefits than a TC50 finalist. And I'm not talking about the money.

How hard would it be for techcrunch to throw in some free hosting for people? Or how about a few counseling sessions from one of the judges?(i.e. like apprenticeship)

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