There's still a month in which to enter Amazon's 6th AWS Global Start-Up Challenge. This year there are four Grand Prizes to be won plus AWS credits for all entrants who submit a qualified entry.

OK so $25 in AWS Credits for those who don't make it beyond the first round isn't much of an incentive, but the top prizes are well worth aiming for, together with the opportunity to pitch to venture capitalists who might be persuaded to invest in your innovative idea.

In this worldwide contest for start-ups who built on AWS, one Grand Prize winner will be selected in each of the four categories:

1. Big Data & High Performance Computing
2. Gaming
3. Consumer Applications
4. Business Applications

They will be awarded $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, as well as AWS Business-level support for one year and technical mentorship from Amazon Web Services. Moreover, the contest is is good way to get your product, Web sites, software application/tool or service, noticed.

To qualify it needs to make use of one or more AWS service - i.e. Amazon Glacier, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Dynamo DB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Flexible Payments Service (FPS), Amazon Mechanical Turk, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and at the first round all you have to do is to provide information and supply a written description of your business proposition.

Entry is open to individuals or sole proprietors who are at least 18 and have reached the age of majority in the country of residence and to privately held business that haven't generated more than $10 million or raised $10 million in outside funding. Credits.The deadline for entry is December 5, 2012. See the Officiall Rules for the fine details.

At the first round all qualified entries will be considered by a panel of qualified judges in terms of the following criteria:

(a) implementation and integration of the Paid Services;

(b) originality and creativity;

(c) likelihood of long-term success and scalability;

and

(d) effectiveness in addressing a need in the marketplace. 

Up to six semi-finalists in each category will be chosen. They will be expected to submit a short video for the second round of judging to be held in late December.

From this pool a minimum of two Finalists in each category (12 in total) will be chosen and the ones not selected to go further will  each receive $2,000 in AWS Credits.

Finalists will be expected to prepare 30-minute presentation to be delivered in person to the Amazon Judging Panel. They will be flown to San Francisco where they will also get the opportunity to present a short pitch to venture capitalists who will make recommendations to the judges to select the Grand Prize winners. The remaining finalists will receive $10,000 in AWS.