If you have a startup idea and you believe that you can build it on top of Amazon Web Services infrastructure, then maybe you should take a look at this new competition. $50k cash + $50k AWS credits for top winner and $5k AWS credits for four second-place winners. Great way to bootstrap! Two Amazon Web Services which are most famous at the moment are probably Amazon S3 for data storage and Amazon Ec2 for "in-the-cloud" computing. While the latter may not be as robust as the former service, with the competitive pricing structure and on-the-fly and on-demand scalability and , I certainly believe they are feasible options for startuppers to consider and deploy their applications on. From the terms & conditions page here, it seems that you won't lose any copyrights or patents or ownership of your startup if you apply to the challenge. Here are a couple of examples of AWS usage by startups like Smugmug and Pownce. Too bad only US residents are eligible though, otherwise I may have a couple of ideas or two that can be applicable... p.s. This is probably the first post of this blog that's related to startup :)