More than 1,500 companies applied from 78 countries. But, at the end of day, England’s Fantasy Shopper took home the top prize in Amazon Web Services’ fifth annual Startup Challenge. As a result, the startup company won $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits.
Exeter, England-based Fantasy Shopper has developed a social game platform that allows users to make virtual purchases of their favorite outfits, sharing those virtual outfits with friends.
“Our goal for Fantasy Shopper is to become the world’s number one social shopping platform, which means we’ll be going global very quickly. Thankfully, AWS provides us the foundation to make this ambitious goal possible,” said Fantasy Shopper Co-Founder and CEO Chris Prescott.
The final entrants pitched their companies this week to a panel of judges in Silicon Valley. Here’s a look at each of the finalists, which traveled from all over the world to compete for the prize. Descriptions via Amazon.
Booshaka: Sunnyvale, California
Booshaka simplifies advocacy marketing for brands and businesses by making sense of large amounts of social data and providing an easy to use software-as-a-service solution. In an era where people are bombarded by media, advertisers face significant challenges in reaching and engaging their customers. Booshaka combines the social graph and big data technology to help advertisers turn customers into their best marketers.
Deputy.com: Australia
Deputy.com is an online business management solution specifically addressing the HR department. The powerful online and mobile platform engages all staff across an enterprise, builds positive culture and drives business growth.
Fantasy Shopper: UK
Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game. The shopping platform centralizes, socializes and “gamifies” online shopping to provide a real-world experience.
Flixlab: Palo Alto, California
With Flixlab, people can instantly and automatically transform raw videos and photos from their smartphone or their friends’ smartphones, into fun, compelling stories with just a few taps and immediately share them online. After creation, viewers can then interact with these movies by remixing them and creating personally relevant movies from the shared pictures and videos.
Getaround: San Francisco
Getaround is a peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace that enables car owners to rent their cars to qualified drivers by the hour, day, or week. Getaround facilitates payment, provide 24/7 roadside assistance, and provide complete insurance backed byBerkshire Hathaway with each rental.
Intervention Insights: Grand Rapids, Michigan
Intervention Insights provides a medical information service that combines cutting edge bioinformatics tools with disease information to deliver molecular insights to oncologists describing an individual’s unique tumor at a genomic level. The company then provides a report with an evidenced-based list of therapies that target the unique molecular basis of the cancer.
Localytics: (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
Localytics is a real-time mobile application analytics service that provides app developers with tools to measure usage, engagement and custom events in their applications. All data is stored at a per-event level instead of as aggregated counts. This allows app publishers, for example, to create more accurately targeted advertising and promotional campaigns from detailed segmentation of their dedicated customers
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