SEATTLE, Nov. 21 -- Amazon Web Services LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., today announced that Yieldex is the winner of the second annual Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge.

Yieldex, a company providing forecasting for online advertising inventory, will receive $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Service credits and an opportunity for an investment offer from Amazon.com. Today’s announcement at a celebration in Seattle capped off an exciting final round of the contest in which seven finalists presented their businesses to judges from Amazon.com and venture capital firms. The winner was chosen based on the originality of their idea, marketplace need, and their implementation of AWS. Amazon Web Services provides reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure services on demand. To learn more about Amazon Web Services, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

Yieldex forecasts online advertising inventory and optimizes advertising campaign allocation placement for online publishers. Yieldex has built its DynamicIQ platform on top of Amazon Web Services, using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to address online publishers' growing need for accurate forecasting of overlapping inventory, optimal campaign allocation and revenue operations. Yieldex tools help publishers maximize advertising revenue from their premium inventory with in-depth proposal analysis, scenario planning, and their proprietary yield index.

“Yieldex needed an infrastructure solution hosting provider that would allow us to focus on our core value proposition without having to invest significant resources into operations that do not differentiate us from our competitors,” said John Barr, vice president of engineering for Yieldex. “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.”

“Yieldex is a great example of the type of dynamic new business leveraging AWS to meet the needs of their rapidly growing business,” said Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services. “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.”

The Start-Up Challenge began on Sept. 3 with a call for entries. Hundreds of applications were reviewed and seven finalists were chosen. For the Final Round, AWS flew finalists to Amazon headquarters in Seattle to present their ideas to a judging panel of representatives from Amazon.com. To complete the competition, finalists participated in “Fast Pitch” sessions, where they each had 10 minutes to present their ideas to representatives from venture capital firms. Participating venture capital firms included BlueRun Ventures, CMEA Ventures, Greylock Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Madrona Venture Group. At the end of the day, the judges selected the winner, who was announced at an event with 200 members of the start-up community.

Details on the six runners up for the AWS Start-Up Challenge follow.

Encoding.com

Encoding.com makes video encoding accessible and scalable for video Web sites of all sizes. Encoding.com combines the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with cutting-edge video encoding software and makes it available to clients via a Web interface, Watch Folder or XML API. Delivering video encoding as a Web service reduces the barrier of entry and provides limitless scalability to fuel the growth of Internet and mobile video applications.

Knewton

Knewton breaks down content to the most granular components possible, tags it in rich detail, and dynamically reassembles the material to adapt to the precise needs of each student at each moment. From textbooks to test prep, Knewton delivers content matching each student's ideal learning arc and preferred medium. Amazon Web Services provides Knewton's technology infrastructure: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) powers adaptive learning and testing engines, the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) stores tens of thousands of learning objects in multiple media, and Amazon Mechanical Turk is the on-demand workforce delivering test-question calibration, usability analysis, and quality assurance.

MedCommons

MedCommons provides cloud-based Health 2.0 application services for patients and doctors, and enables third parties to customize and extend the MedCommons Platform for their own needs. MedCommons utilizes the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon DevPay, and the Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) to provide support of the MedCommons FPS Marketplace, where patients can purchase services directly from doctors, both onsite, and over the Internet, as well as MedCommons Family Accounts, where patients can maintain their family's health records, X-rays, MRI, and CT scans in a secure, comprehensive and friendly environment.

Sonian

Sonian created its industry-leading hosted email archiving IP stack to take advantage of the various Amazon Web Services and operates the entire infrastructure on the AWS cloud platform. Sonian utilizes the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for storage, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for on-demand scalable compute, Amazon SimpleDB for meta-data storage and the Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for job control.

Pixily

Pixily is an interactive document management service that organizes paper and electronic materials online so people can instantly find and share information whenever and wherever they need it. For consumers, Pixily serves as a digital organization assistant that reduces paper clutter and helps manage personal information more efficiently. Businesses rely on Pixily as an affordable on-demand document management service to streamline daily operations and be more productive.

Zephyr

Zephyr’s flexible Test Management Platform enables enterprises to manage their test departments more efficiently, boost productivity, reduce costs and provide IT leaders with real-time visibility into all aspects of their software quality cycle. Zephyr utilizes the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to deliver an enterprise test management solution to global companies in a SaaS model. Additionally Zephyr leverages AWS for running backend operations and business processes.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com Inc., a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, and tools, auto & industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), and Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS).

Amazon and its affiliates operate Web sites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and the Joyo Amazon websites at www.joyo.cn and www.amazon.cn.