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Attention all US, UK, German, Israeli startups out there: in their latest AWS newsletter Amazon announced the opening of their third annual start-up challenge.  The grand prize winner will walk away with $50k in cash and $50k in AWS credits to help get their project on the way.  Amazon also adds verbiage on the contest site that the grand prize winner "may also receive an investment from Amazon".

Amazon has added a new bonus prize of $5k in cash and $5k in credits this year for the most creative use of their flexible payments service (FPS).  This should help steal some developer attention away from PayPal and their upcoming release of their new payment API.

Past participants in the challenge are Yieldex, Zephyr, Ooyala and Justin.tv.  If you have any shred of interest in launching something on AWS you should apply here and you will receive $25 in AWS credits to get started on the development work.

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