Amazon is launching AWS Start-Up Challenge, a competition that should entice developers to present their best applications that use Amazon’s Computing Services. The best application will win a $50K cash prize, plus another $50K in Amazon Web Services credits (developers get charged an amount every time their apps use AWS). There are also four second-place prizes in the amount of $5000 in cash. Apart from the prizes, the winner also gets investment capital from Amazon, under the condition that the company is US based with less than $10M in annual revenue. The investment is to be deemed as start-up aid for further development, not as acquisition.

If you are going to participate you have to sign-up and fill an application by October 28, 2007. Finalists will be announced in November. Amazon will produce a video of each finalist whcih will be posted on aws.amazon.com, where the community can vote for their favorite.

Amazon execs feel this to be a move in the right direction, judging applications based on AWS to be a significant source of income for the company in the coming times. The company aims to develop an environment of third-party tools, a model used already by more traditional companies using developer-tools.

So, do you feel lucky?

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Pikiwiki is a new project bringing some very interesting advanced functionality. This is a self funded, Santa Clara (CA) based operation and it brings a new way to share your multimedia content as well as interesting content from other sources on the web. in short, you see something in your browser or on your desktop, do a drag and drop and it’s there, on a page you’re creating on Pikiwiki! You can insert audio, video, images, text, links from whatever source you’ve found. The interface allows you to quickly setup almost any usual page layout in seconds, and insert content created on the spot, such as text boxes and titles. Just watch the demo (click on the top right demo link on the homepage).

Sign-up is free so give PikiWiki a try.

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Ok, so I am actually watching videos on MyStrands.tv and writing this. Interesting idea - find music videos, make your own favorite list and see people (members) who also like similar music. The core of the whole thing is that the site actually shows music videos that are available on YouTube. There are recommendations for similar artists and genres, and also avatars of members of the MyStrands community who also listen to a particular artist being viewed. You can rate each video in five different ways - favorite, like it, indifferent, sucks, and don’t show this crap to me again :), but you have to be registered in order to access this feature. I was wondering about the income stream for the site, when I noticed they show Amazon links towards albums for a particular artist matching genre of the video(s) you are watching at that moment, so this is a great example of a simple, but clever implementation of the free APIs abundant on the internet nowadays.

MyStrands just raised $25 million in Series B funding by Antonio Asensio, a 25 year old Spanish media mogul and CEO of Grupo Zeta, third largest media group in Spain. Existing investors Debaeque and Sequel backed this investment which brings total amount to $31 million.

In a world of content overload, aggregating and understanding people’s preferences is going to be key to personalizing the way people access and enjoy digital content… The new funds will allow us to remain independent and continue investing in developing technologies and new services to help people organize and explore digital media.

Recommendation technologies will allow media companies to deliver personalized content and targeted advertising to consumers… MyStrands technologies could become the standard for content personalization on the Internet.

MyStrands is a company that develops social recommendation technologies that help people organize and discover digital media, products and services they like. Technologies employed by MyStrands work on various devices like desktops, mobile devices, and other internet capable devices.

So, go and share your taste in music with others on MyStrands.tv

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I must admit I’m running a bit late with catching this one - Scrybe.com, a project by Scrybe Corporation founded by Faizan Buzdar (31), based in Islamabad, Pakistan. He and his three friends developed, under “improvised” working conditions I might add, a personal information manager called Scrybe that just might change the way we look at organizers. I won’t go into too much detail about Scrybe Corporation and authors (you can see more here), except to say they received an undisclosed amount of funding from Adobe Systems and LMKR. What I want you to do is take a couple of minutes and watch their demo video below, or on their site if you prefer.

I am truly amazed by what I saw on the demo. What do you think? Is Scrybe something you’ll definitely try. Although Beta testing is in progress, they are not taking any more sign-ups (like I said, I’m running late with this), but new users can still get in if they receive invitations from existing users.

So, dearest existing Scrybe user, please send me an invitation

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