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.

###