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Mobile coupon firm wins cloud contest with US$86 start-up fund

By Asia Cloud Forum staff 09-Dec-2010

Man picking lettuce at a supermarket
Man picking lettuce at a supermarket
M-Dot Network, a US-based mobile coupon platform provider, has become the winner of the fourth annual Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. M-Dot Network was awarded US$50,000 in cash and US$50,000 in AWS service credits. 

M-Dot Network is a platform that let consumers receive digital coupons from a retailer's website via short text messages, the Internet or on-site. Consumers can find and select coupons online or on their mobile phone. Promotional offers are aggregated and presented directly to consumers from multiple third-party digital coupon issuers and from the retailer. 

Using a high speed transaction network, M-Dot Network provides real-time connectivity between Internet and mobile based technologies to in-store retail point-of-sale systems for immediate redemption of digital coupons and incentives.

Processing 1 million transactions in 0.1 second

Mike Kavis, CTO of M-Dot Network, said, "Two years ago, we set out on a bootstrap budget to enable consumers to store digital coupons and incentives online and then conveniently redeem them at physical retail locations through seamless connection with point-of-sale systems.

"We always like to tell the story about how we created a full service demo on AWS for only US$86. By building our business on AWS, we can process one million concurrent transactions in a tenth of a second without ever having to buy or lease a physical data center, purchase hardware or hire dedicated data center staff." 

The final round was judged by AWS representatives and leading venture capital firms. M-Dot Network was selected based on its implementation of AWS solutions, originality and creativity, likelihood of long-term success, and how well the business addresses a need in the marketplace.

Innovative business projects

The other six finalists in the 2010 AWS Start-Up Challenge were:

Compass Labs (US): The team at Compass Labs offers their strong expertise in Web and social media technologies, natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, and complex algorithms to help merchants reach specific users who want to buy a particular product at the moment they are contemplating a purchase. 

Loggly (US): Loggly is a cloud-based server logging service. Loggly provides a way to collect logs from servers in one centralized location and then quickly search them with an intuitive user interface.

Mediology (India): Mediology DigitalEdition is a Software-as-a-Service platform that enables print publishers to digitize their content, add interactivity to it and then distribute the content via web, mobile and e-reading platforms. The system achieves its massive scale for content digitization and delivery using event centric cloud computing services. (Click here to read about Mediology's story on cloud adoption.)

TellApart (US): TellApart helps ecommerce companies drive incremental sales and revenue through applications built on its customer data platform. Predictive modeling enables the ability to "tell apart" the highest value customers and prospects, and TellApart Transactional Retargeting serves personalized display ads to these best users, thereby lifting conversion rates. TellApart's customers include some of the world's largest online retailers, including: Diapers.com, CafePress, eBags and Hayneedle.

Yottaa (US): Based on its cloud service platform, Yottaa enables website owners to assess, monitor and optimize web performance to speed up their websites.
 
Zoombu (England): Zoombu is a travel search engine that helps find the best door-to-door route from home to destination by searching thousands of routes across multiple modes of transport (flights, trains, ferries, coaches, car hire, private taxis and more). 




Tags:
Amazon Web Services, awards, M-Dot Network, Mediology, mobility, start-up




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