[January 24, 2013]

Grand Cru, LogMyCalls, MortarData and TraceLink Named Winners of the Sixth Amazon Web Services Global Start-Up Challenge, Receive $100,000 in Cash and AWS Service Credits

Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the winners of the sixth AWS Global Start-Up Challenge. Grand Cru, LogMyCalls, MortarData and TraceLink were each awarded $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits, AWS Support services at the Business-level tier for one year and technical mentorship from AWS. The four winners were selected based on their originality and creativity, likelihood of long-term success and scalability, how well the business addresses a need in the marketplace, and implementation of AWS solutions.

This year, AWS selected four grand prize winners - one from each of the following categories:

Grand Cru - Gaming

LogMyCalls - Consumer Applications

MortarData - Big Data & High Performance Computing

TraceLink - Business Applications

"We are very happy, proud and honored to have been named the best Gaming start-up in the 2012 Amazon Web Services Global Startup Challenge," said Markus Pasula, CEO and Co-Founder of Grand Cru. "Being a mobile free-to-play gaming company, having a great cloud based server and storage solution is critical for our success and a key component of everything we do. Only AWS fulfills our demands and provides the scalability and flexibility we require."

"We are elated to be a Grand Prize Winner. The market values what LogMyCalls delivers--cloud-based analytics of phone conversations so businesses can optimize their marketing, automate marketing, and make more money from phone calls," said Jason Wells, CEO of ContactPoint, maker of LogMyCalls. "Our platform and our capabilities are built on AWS and they are central to our expansion strategy as we grow and require seamless scalability. It's an honor to be selected out of 2500 companies from 85 countries and we're excited to work with AWS for the long-term."

"We are humbled that AWS has selected us from such a large pool of impressive startups," said K Young, CEO of MortarData. "Our mission is to make big data accessible to companies of all sizes - allowing them to analyze data and build complex big data apps with ease. We've combined the Mortar open source frameworks' focus on collaboration and simplicity with our Hadoop platform-as-a-service built on AWS's Elastic MapReduce service. Using Mortar, our customers take on machine learning, natural language processing, regression analysis, and much more using their existing skills-and because we build on AWS, our customers never have to worry about scaling or operations."

The TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud protects life and enables health by creating complete global connectivity, traceability and visibility of pharmaceuticals from raw materials through production, distribution and delivery to the patient. "Counterfeit drugs threaten the safety of millions of people each year. Eighty percent of medicines are consumed by only 15 percent of the global population. Over 2 billion patients lack access to essential medicines," said Shabbir Dahod, President and CEO, TraceLink. "The AWS platform is fundamental in giving us the scale and reach we need to help the global Life Sciences supply network address these critical issues and securely track and trace the billions of pharmaceutical products produced each year. With a single point and click connection, we enable shared visibility and complete collaboration across all supply, production and distribution processes that a company executes with each and every partner in their network."

New to the Global Start-up Challenge this year was an Audience (News - Alert) Favorite award. Finalists made short presentations at the finale event and the audience voted for their favorite finalist. This year's Audience Favorite went to Poikos, who earned $5,000 in AWS credits.

Amazon Web Services recognized twenty-four semi-finalists from around the world. From these, twelve finalists were selected to move into the final round and were flown to San Francisco, California to attend the AWS Start-Up Challenge finale event. At the event, each finalist presented their ideas to a panel of judges with representatives from AWS. The finalists also had the opportunity to present their business to venture capitalists during "lightning round" sessions. At the end of the day, the judges selected the winners and announced the results at the evening awards ceremony. After accepting their award, the four winners were presented with the coveted "Golden Hammer," and then partook in the annual AWS Start-Up Challenge ritual of using the hammer to demolish a real server, symbolizing how companies no longer need to own servers when they operate in the cloud.

AWS congratulates the winners and all of the 2012 AWS Global Start-Up Challenge finalists:

Big Data & High Performance Computing

• Demyst Data (Hong Kong) - Real-time analysis of consumer and small business profiles to improve decision making.
• MortarData (USA) - Open source framework and runtime environment for building big data pipelines on Elastic MapReduce.
• QMedic (USA) - A wearable sensing platform that monitors physical activity, sleep, and falls for older adults.

• PlanGrid (USA) - A mobile replacement for construction blueprints.
• Poikos (Netherlands) - Imaging and measurement of the human body in 3D using consumer-grade hardware.
• TraceLink (USA) - Connect people, processes, and information across a global supply network.

Consumer Applications

• LogMyCalls (USA) - A marketing and analytics platform for the phone.
• Hive (Australia) - A battery-powered security camera combined with a social network to protect people, places, and things.
• Wikidot (Poland) - A web-based Wiki platform for community sites, personal blogs, gaming, and more.

Gaming

• Bossa Studios (UK) - Real-time multiplayer cross-platform games.
• Grand Cru (Finland) - The Supernauts game, a casual take on the Minecraft style of sandboxed building.
• Playblazer (India) - A configurable API for instant access to a comprehensive set of pre-built data models, components, and workflows.

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.

About Amazon.com (News - Alert)

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle Paperwhite is the most-advanced e-reader ever constructed with 62% more pixels and 25% increased contrast, a patented built-in front light for reading in all lighting conditions, extra-long battery life, and a thin and light design. The new latest generation Kindle, the lightest and smallest Kindle, now features new, improved fonts and faster page turns. Kindle Fire HD features a stunning custom high-definition display, exclusive Dolby audio with dual stereo speakers, high-end, laptop-grade Wi-Fi with dual-band support, dual-antennas and MIMO for faster streaming and downloads, enough storage for HD content, and the latest generation processor and graphics engine-and it is available in two display sizes-7" and 8.9". The large-screen Kindle Fire HD is also available with 4G wireless, and comes with a groundbreaking $49.99 introductory 4G LTE (News - Alert) data package. The all-new Kindle Fire features a 20% faster processor, 40% faster performance, twice the memory, and longer battery life.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, www.amazon.cn, www.amazon.it, www.amazon.es and www.amazon.com.br. As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

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