Eight Companies Unleash New Internet Businesses to the World at AWS re: Invent
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) recently announced the eight companies who participated in the inaugural “LAUNCHED!” Live Stage at re: Invent, the first AWS global user conference. “LAUNCHED!” is a live stage environment where these selected start-up companies launched their businesses or applications publicly for the first time. Alegion, Animoto, Averail, BitYota, CloudMunch, Mortar, PunchTab, and ThisLife launched unique solutions in the areas of media, big data, developer platforms, media sharing and crowdsourcing, demonstrating the innovation that start-ups of all kinds are finding possible with AWS.
“AWS helps companies get started by offering a technology infrastructure with no capital expense and low pay as you go pricing, and providing a technology platform with broad functionality and global scale. This year, at the first AWS re: Invent conference, we have created a dynamic, live stage environment for start-up companies to launch publicly for the first time,” said Ariel Kelman, Head of Worldwide Marketing, AWS. “It was a great experience for us to watch these eight exciting companies show off their new apps on AWS in front of 6,000 members of the AWS community.”
The new businesses and applications announced today include:
Animoto
The online video creation service that empowers anyone to create and share extraordinary videos, launched a new service called “Best of 2012 Facebook Videos.” With this new service, Animoto, an AWS customer since 2008, is enabling all Facebook users to tell the story of their year in an engaging video. With a click of a button and in a matter of seconds, Animoto automatically curates the best photos and comments from a Facebook user and sets them to music. The resulting Best of 2012 video is a rich orchestration that highlights Facebook users’ top moments from 2012, as documented on Facebook. Once the video is created, users can share via a multitude of ways or first edit further by adding or removing photos and comments and changing the music. Animoto’s Best of 2012 Facebook Videos look to amaze the Facebook community by harnessing Facebook Timeline and showcasing the video creation power of Animoto, all with a simple click of a button.
Alegion
Publicly launched today, Alegion brings the power of crowd-sourced labor to the Enterprise. Leveraging Amazon Mechanical Turk as a key architectural component, Alegion’s self-service workflow designer allows large businesses to integrate crowd labor tasks into their complex business processes. Businesses can achieve exceptional data accuracy, speed, and worker management using Alegion’s ground-breaking platform. Alegion uses Amazon Mechanical Turk to provide access to "workers" for tasks, and Amazon Simple Workflow Service to automate the jobs.
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CloudMunch
GitHub, Jira, Google Docs, Asana, NewRelic, AWS Elastic Beanstalk — these are just a few of the dozens of innovative tools today’s software development teams rely on to build, deploy, run & manage their cloud applications. However, getting all of these point tools to work seamlessly together is causing developers to devote more of their precious time to operational tasks rather than focusing on creating innovative software. Publicly launched as a company today, CloudMunch is built entirely on AWS and launched the industry’s first orchestration engine to manage the entire cloud application lifecycle, allowing developers to plug and play with the tools they already know and love, giving them the ability to continuously deliver higher quality software, faster.
Averail
Mobile employees need more than basic email to be productive. They need secure and easy access to critical business content stored across the organization. Publicly launched today, Averail offers Averail Access to give busy executives, sales teams and marketing professionals the power to safely access, manage and share business documents on mobile devices without sacrificing enterprise security and control. Averail provides native access to Microsoft SharePoint and other storage sites without requiring any additional storage capacity. This simplifies compliance, reduces cost, and improves collaboration. With this service, mobile employees can now safely and easily reach the information they need to stay productive and deliver business results. Averail uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with AutoScaling and Elastic Load Balancing with multi-AZ deployments and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. This gives Averail server virtualization, availability and elastic scale-out in a secure environment.
BitYota
Publicly launched as a company today, BitYota offers an alternative for solving big data analytics challenges with its new Warehouse-as-a-Service offering on AWS. This SaaS offering takes away both Big Cost and Big Headache making analytics accessible to everyone at scale, with no compromise on functionality or service levels. BitYota’s one-click data integration allows customers to load data from a variety of sources and its massively parallel analytics engine is designed for the cloud, and driven through native SQL and industry standard BI tools. Customers don’t need to learn new languages or tools and BitYota is built entirely on Amazon Web Services. BitYota relies on Amazon EC2 and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes to deliver a Data Warehouse-as-a-Service on AWS with the requisite efficiency, performance and scale to handle Big Data.
Mortar Data
Publicly launched today, Mortar Data is a development framework for Hadoop—it is open source so there is no lock-in. It is Rails-inspired and built for collaboration, allowing teams of engineers and data scientists to easily share, repeat, and maintain code. Mortar is built on Hadoop, Pig (which is similar to SQL), and supports real Python, including NumPy, SciPy, NLTK, or any other lib. Mortar hosts and executes Mortar project as a service, and provides full history of execution including code snapshots, automated testing, and one-button deploy. Mortar uses Elastic MapReduce to power Hadoop execution at scale. They also use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to reliably coordinate their many distributed, multi-step, long-running, concurrent jobs.
ThisLife
ThisLife is a new application launched today for photos and videos living in the cloud. ThisLife gathers all the photos & videos people have scattered on their phone, hard drive, SD cards and social services. Then, ThisLife intelligently removes duplicates while retaining the highest quality version of each image. ThisLife automatically enhances photos and still preserves the true originals. The technology identifies faces and dramatically facilitates tagging so customers can search their personal photos based on people, places and tags. ThisLife keeps everything private so customers can share what they and with whom they want. And, because ThisLife lives in the cloud, customers can access their entire collection any time from any device. ThisLife uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as a reliable data store for all the photos, and with Amazon Glacier they keep a long term low cost archive of all of the memories.
PunchTab
PunchTab announced today its Agency Campaign Manager. This new application enables marketing and advertising agencies and brands to easily create incentive-based programs for seasonal campaigns, new launches, brand activation programs, sweepstakes and events. In addition to powering over 1,000 giveaways every month, PunchTab powers over 12,000 loyalty programs reaching over 22 million consumers every month. PunchTab uses the flexibility of Amazon EC2 to scale campaigns on-demand based on the needs of its customers, while using Amazon CloudFront helps PunchTab to improve their user experience by speeding up delivery of the content.
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About Amazon Web Services
Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began exposing key infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services — now widely known as cloud computing. The ultimate benefit of cloud computing, and AWS, is the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. Businesses no longer need to plan and procure servers and other IT resources weeks or months in advance. Using AWS, businesses can take advantage of Amazon’s expertise and economies of scale to access resources when their business needs them, delivering results faster and at a lower cost. Today, Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government and startup customers businesses in 190 countries around the world. AWS offers over 30 different services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). AWS services are available to customers from data center locations in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia.
