Amazon Web Services LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. has awarded Ooyala video company, as the winner of the its Start-Up Challenge.Ooyala delivers interactive video experience with monetization and analytics tools for video publishers and advertisers. As the grand prize winner, Ooyala will receive $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in Amazon Web Service credits and an investment offer from Amazon.com. The announcement was made at a celebration in Seattle after the final round of the contest in which seven finalists presented their businesses to judges from Amazon.com and venture capital firms.

Sean Knapp, Founder and President of Technology for Ooyala noted, ”When we started Ooyala, we were warned that we would spend most of our time in datacenters at 2 a.m. making sure everything worked. Very few companies in the world can provide the infrastructure services Amazon can provide. Why would you do it yourself? AWS has enabled Ooyala to build, deploy and scale our product in record time, raising the bar for rapid innovation.”

Ooyala has built a platform to deliver video content for publishers and targeted advertising via an interactive video experience. Ooyala is built on Amazon Web Services including Amazon EC2, used for video and analytics processing, and Amazon S3 for content storage and delivery. Ooyala leverages Amazon FPS to process both content and ad serving payments. Amazon Mechanical Turk and Amazon SQS are also utilized by Ooyala.

Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services noted, ”We were amazed both by the number of entries we received and the creativity of the developers and start-ups who entered. Our finalists ranged from healthcare technology to insurance applications to web and video analytics. It was difficult to narrow such a qualified field and select a single winner. Ooyala is a wonderful example of the innovation and potential we see in so many of the companies adopting AWS.”

The Start-Up Challenge included over 900 applications were reviewed and seven finalists were chosen. Videos of each finalist were then produced and posted to the AWS website where developers casted their votes for the best idea. 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 15 minutes to present their ideas to representatives from venture capital firms. At the end of the day, the judges selected the winner who was announced at an awards dinner.

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