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GoodData Session at Cloud Expo

Amazon Web Services announced GoodData as the winner of the third annual AWS Start-Up Challenge.

At an awards ceremony at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, California, GoodData was awarded $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS service credits and an investment offer from Amazon.

During the final round of judging, seven finalists presented their businesses to judges from Amazon and venture capital firms. The winner was chosen based on the originality of their idea, marketplace need, ability to execute, and their implementation of AWS. Amazon Web Services provides reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure services on demand.

GoodData Founder and CEO Roman Stanek (http://romanstanek.ulitzer.com) during his Cloud Computing Expo Europe keynote at Hilton Prague

To learn more about AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

GoodData uses the economic advantages of cloud computing to let companies start business intelligence projects for free, and spend a fraction of the traditional cost of comprehensive BI. The company provides a cloud-based service that provides dashboards & reports, deep ad hoc analysis and powerful data warehousing. GoodData is built completely on Amazon Web Services.

"We are honored and excited to win the AWS Start-Up Challenge," said Roman Stanek (http://romanstanek.ulitzer.com), Founder and CEO of GoodData. "In 2007, we bet on Amazon Web Services to build our Cloud BI Platform. Today, AWS enables us to pass on the huge economic advantages and scalability of cloud computing to our customers."

Bizo was chosen as runner-up in this year's challenge and will receive $25,000 in AWS service credits. Bizo delivers the ability to target specific business audiences on publisher sites across the web, with precise ad targeting based on a prospect's business and non-personally identifiable attributes and behaviors. Leveraging AWS, Bizo has been able to scale to 45 million business users with over 1 billion impressions a month within 15 months of launch.

Finally, as part of this year's AWS Start-Up Challenge, finalists also competed for the most creative monetization model using Amazon Payments. An award of $5,000 in cash and $5,000 in Amazon Payments credits was awarded to FlightCaster, a company that helps travelers evaluate travel options by predicting flight delays using an advanced algorithm to match flight history with real-time conditions.

"We're continually amazed by the innovation and creativity of our start-up customers, and by the exciting businesses they are building," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. "The finalists in the AWS Start-Up Challenge represent a rapidly growing number of companies that are utilizing AWS to get to market faster, avoid capital expenditure and focus on ideas rather than technology infrastructure."

Over 900 applications from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Israel were submitted and reviewed. For the Final Round, AWS brought the seven finalists to Silicon Valley, California to present their ideas to a judging panel of representatives from Amazon. Finalists then participated in "Lightning Round" sessions where they presented their ideas to representatives from leading venture capital firms. At the end of the day, the judges selected the winners who were announced at a final event and awards ceremony with an audience of hundreds.

AWS congratulates all seven finalists in the 2009 AWS Start-Up Challenge:

Bizo
Bizo has created a cutting-edge approach to online B2B marketing by building a platform for data collection and precise ad targeting based on a prospect's business and non-personally identifiable attributes and behaviors.

FlightCaster
FlightCaster predicts flight delays using an advanced algorithm that scours data on every domestic flight for the past 10 years and matches it to real-time conditions in order to help travelers evaluate alternative travel options.

Gazaro
Gazaro develops mobile shopping applications for smart phones that help consumers identify when to buy electronics and computer products. Gazaro helps customers determine when to make a purchase by providing notifications of great new deals as well as by examining price trends on electronics and computer products.

GoodData
GoodData is the first business intelligence company born in the cloud. Their Cloud BI Platform encourages companies to take an agile approach to customer analytics by making it easy to access and analyze the data that defines customer relationships across marketing, selling and servicing. GoodData is free to start, simple to use, and affordable.

Involver
Involver's vision is to help companies use social media as a powerful CRM platform to build and monetize direct relationships with their customers.

Motally
Motally is a mobile analytics tracking and reporting service. Motally technology successfully handles the nuances of mobile tracking - including accurately tracking users and visits and identifying the underlying operator and country when a user accesses a site through operator gateways.

ReTel Technologies
ReTel Technologies empowers retailers and restaurants with data that enables them to improve sales and cut costs. ReTel's system accomplishes this by integrating with existing security cameras and constantly monitoring customer and operational factors, such as speed of service, store appearance, and retail sales conversion funnels.

Participating venture capitalists included CMEA Capital, Emergence Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Hummer Winblad Partners, Matrix Partners and Madrona Venture Group.