Amazon Start-Up Tour

I took a break this aftrenoon from the Web 2.0 Expo for the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Tour. It was a cool event highlighting startups which are building their businesses on top of AWS, as well as some good talks by VCs about what they’re looking for in today’s startup space. Highlights included Adaptive Blue founder Alex Iskold describing some unique ways his company is using the services and a talk by Nick Beim of Matrix Partners about doing deep analyses of your customer microeconomics.

Amazon’s Web Services are a hugely important addition to the web 2.0 space, and one who’s possibilities are only starting to be fully capitalized upon. AWS Evangelist Mike Culver described how using Amazon Web Services can eliminate the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” that stands between idea and execution for a startup. I’ve made use of S3, SimpleDB, and SQS for my recent web projects, and am working on incorporating the Flexible Payment Service (FPS) into another prototype now. Taking advantage of these tools helps startups focus on the areas where they really add value, while leveraging Amazon’s infrastructure for the rest.