Yieldex Chosen As AWS StartUp Challenge Winner

As further evidence that many VC’s are still a step behind market and economic trends, Yieldex was chosen as the winner of the 2008 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge.

I am surprised that a startup that has developed a solution for managing online advertising (In the middle of a huge economic and online advertising downturn) won the challenge over companies with more pragmatic solutions such as Pixily and Knewton.

Pixily’s solution actually ended up with 38% of respondent votes while Knewton edged out all 7 finalists with 39% of the vote.  Check out the videos for Pixily and Knewton and judge for yourself if these solutions seem more fitting for our current economic environment.

1. Harry Milrose , November 23, 2008:

   These challenges often end up being a “beauty” contest where the best presenter and not the best solution win. The proof nowadays will be in what company survives next year and is still around in 2010.

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   Arthur Mueller reply on November 23rd, 2008 :

   The Yieldex CEO indicates that the judging is a two step process with most of the weight of the judging going to the company that uses Amazon Web Services in “innovative ways”. (Whatever that means to Amazon)

   http://www.oxyfish.com/wordpress/2008/11/21/yieldex-wins-amazon-aws-start-up-challenge/

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   Ameed Taylor reply on November 24th, 2008 :

   @Arthur Mueller,
   It does look like most of the weighting went to how the companies used AWS.

2. Rizwan , November 24, 2008:

   I like pixily’s concept. They have something similar to cloud contact except that this ones for documents.

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   Ameed Taylor reply on November 24th, 2008 :

   @Rizwan,
   Thanks for stopping by

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3. MIcheal , December 2, 2008:

   What better than an economic downturn to help publishers squeeze out every bit of revenue from their advertising operations?

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