Tampa’s WeoGeo, a local company poised to reinvent the global mapping industry, has been selected as a finalist in the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. The national competition was created to recognize burgeoning businesses making the best use of cutting-edge Amazon Web Services. WeoGeo is one of seven finalists who will present their ideas to Amazon leadership in Seattle, Washington on December 6^th.WeoGeo has used Amazon Web Services to start more than a business; their entry has the makings of a revolution. WeoGeo creates a mapping marketplace as never before conceived, creating a one-stop community for geospatial professionals to create, share, and store their extremely detailed and data-heavy maps (ranging up to Terabytes in size).

Amazon Web Services allows companies of all sizes to use the same infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its own technology infrastructure. By offering these services on a pay-as-you-go basis, Amazon Web Services is an ideal solution for small companies with big needs like WeoGeo. Amazon Web Services make it possible for an online start-up to get up and running without the massive investment of building their own data center.

“Amazon Web Services brought the WeoGeo vision to fruition faster and more efficiently than we could ever have imagined without them,” said Paul Bissett, Ph.D., CEO of WeoGeo. “The scale of what WeoGeo does is way beyond the typical e-commerce business. To accommodate our business without Amazon Web Services, we’d need to physically build several thousand square feet of data serving space… and we still wouldn’t be as well equipped as we are with Amazon Web Services.”

“We’re excited by the type of innovation we see from companies like WeoGeo,” said Steve Rabuchin, Director of Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services. “WeoGeo’s potential and their use of Amazon Web Services to scale the business were impressive even amongst the many entries we received.”

Top executives from WeoGeo will fly to Amazon headquarters in Seattle to present their business model to a panel of judges on December 6. That evening, the winner will be announced at the AWS Start-Up Challenge Awards dinner, and will receive $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits and an investment offer from Amazon.

WeoGeo creates a one-stop marketplace for the mapping industry. It supplies surveyors, engineers, cartographers, architects, and scientists with the ability to conveniently host, discover, and acquire high resolution mapping products. Geo-content providers can easily list their data for sale, and users can quickly find the data they need. For more information, visit www.weogeo.com.

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WeoGeo is one of 7 finalists for the Amazon Web Services Start-Up challenge. WeoGeo’s mapping marketplace was the sole geospatial entry selected for this prestigious award.

About the AWS Start-Up Challenge

Contestants were judged on the originality and creativity of the idea, likelihood of long-term success, how well it addresses a need in the marketplace, and implementation of pay-as-you-use Amazon Web Services. Amazon is currently producing a video and promotional materials for the finalists. Online voting and interviews with the judges’ panel will be used to determine the grand prize winner, which will be announced at an Awards Dinner on December 6, 2007. The grand prize includes $100,000 in cash and AWS credits and an investment offer from Amazon.

About WeoGeo

WeoGeo Inc., incorporated August 2006 in Tampa, Florida, is focused on discovery, customization, and delivery of geospatial content. The company hosts its WeoGeo Market (www.weogeo.com) entirely on Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and utilizes the Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage. Co-founder and CEO of WeoGeo, Dr. W. Paul Bissett, has frequently blogged on the business strategy of using AWS and said of the services, “Providing a superior user experience is one of our key features. Scaling the marketplace with our growth, while maintaining that quality experience is vital to our success. AWS gives us the required scalability along with a pay-as-you go pricing model that has allowed us to develop our business while minimizing capital expenditure.”

In addition to WeoGeo Market, the company sells a load-balancing and scaling solution for EC2 (www.weoceo.com) and stand-alone network attached appliances (server.weogeo.com) with functionality similar to the WeoGeo Market minus financial transactions.

For more information, and to vote online, see:
http://aws.amazon.com/startupchallenge
http://aws.typepad.com/
http://server.weogeo.com
http://www.weogeo.com
http://blogs.weogeo.com/pbissett/