Applications are open now for Amazon Web Service’s Startup Challenge. This is the fourth year that AWS has run the competition, designed to help recognize startups that are using (or planning to use) any of the paid Amazon Web Services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, or Amazon Mechanical Turk. Prizes include up to $100,000 in cash and credits.

Startups that have yet to generate more than $10 million USD in gross annual revenue or outside funding are eligible to enter. Startups must be located in one of the 22 eligble countries across America, Asia, and Europe. And AWS will recognize 5 regional semi-finalists from each of the 3 regions, 6 finalists, and then select one global grand prize winner.

The global winner receives $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits. The 6 global finalists will receive $10,000 in AWS credits. 15 regional semi-finalists – 5 in each of the 3 regions: Americas, Asia and Europe – will receive $2,500 in AWS credits. In addition, all eligible entrants that complete the application form will receive $25 in AWS credits.

Applicants will be judged on the following criteria:

• implementation and integration of Amazon Web Services
• originality and creativity of the business
• likelihood of long-term success and scalability
• effectiveness in addressing a need in the marketplace

Past grand prize winners include GoodData (2009), Yieldex (2008), and Ooyala (2007).

Deadline for entry is October 31.

Google TV is about to launch. It’s playing a part in the way people think about how the Internet and traditional media meet to form an entertainment experience that is new but not relegated to a traditional television set or a personal computer.

Right now, television shows or movies can be converted to be seen online but it requires a digital device to view the programming. The television set can support digital media but it often lacks a browser. That’s what Google is banking on will make the difference. A browser, search and content that can be seen on a television set as easily as on a digital device.

This will have the purpose of providing television with its own Web oriented architecture. It therefore follows logic that APis could connect the Web and television media into one experience. How apps will correlate to this environment will be in part what defines entertainment in a distributed world.

In anticipation of the coming bridge between television and the Internet, independent filmmaker Zak Forsman began digging into what it would cost in time and money to launch an online video on demand (VOD) portal for Sabi Pictures. He has also curated a number of films from the CINEFIST Screening Series that he wanted to show on demand. The result: Cinefist TV.

Forsman first looked into Youreeka and Maxcast, video on demand services. He saw that using these services would mean he’d receive little of the purchase price from the films he offered from Sabi. So instead, he started looking into what it would require to build an on-demand service. He wanted it to be much like Netflix Watch where films are instantly available for streaming. It has to be cheap to create, use a simple interface and have ways to charge or provide the films for free.

Forsman used WordPress to create a site where the videos could be viewed. He opted for the premium video-base themes developed by Press75.com.

He then needed a streaming server. Most services cost about 99 cents per gigabyte. He opted for CloudFront the streaming media service from Amazon Web Services that costs 15 cents per gigabyte. Forsman writes that a feature-length stream is in the neighborhood of 1 to 2 gigabytes. The decision to go with CloudFront was in his words, “a no brainer.”

Setting up the Video Streaming Service

Forsman initially set up Amazon AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) account where the media would live.

Forsman downloaded S3Fox Organizer to manage the account’s files, folders and settings. With the the organizer he could upload all his media files including trailers, previews, shorts and features. He made them public and read-only.

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Forsman then describes the basics of setting up files and then explains how to use CloudFront:

Next you’ll have to set-up a “Distribution” in Cloudfront. Go to the AWS Management Console and add the EC2 and Cloudfront services to your account, if you haven’t already. Then go back to the main console and click the tab for Cloudfront. Click the button for “Create Distribution” and select the “bucket” you made earlier. Then set the delivery method to “Streaming”.

Now you’re looking at a list of your Cloudfront Distributions. Make note of the assigned domain name that looks something like a1b2c3d4e5f6g7.cloudfront.net. You will take that domain name and build the url to your streaming media as follows:

rtmp://cloudfront_domain_name/cfx/st/your_video_file.mp4

The /cfx/st/ path is required. While “your_video_file.mp4″ is the video you uploaded (or will upload) to your bucket.

Dynamic Streaming

Forsman decided to offer the video streaming service at different bandwidths. He downloaded JW Player, an open-source, flash-based video player. He stored the video player in his WP-admin folder and set up the video files with an XML extension to correspond with CloudFront.

Forsman’s post details the process for setting up Amazon CloudFront and connecting it WordPress. He provides ways to set up posts that can be locked down for premium content using S2 Member, a WordPress plug-in. He could not find a player that offered the capability to set up a payment system from within the player.

Further, the Flash-player has inherent weaknesses as it can not play on Apple devices. He is experimenting with HTML 5 players but they can’t be scaled to full screen on television, which defeats the purpose of making it a living room experience.

Amazon CloudFront and WordPress are the anchors for creating a VOD service. It shows how DIY culture could emerge as a platform develops for media from television, film and the Internet.

The Xbox 360‘s new motion gaming peripheral will be called “Microsoft Kinect,” replacing “Project Natal,” the old development name, USA Today reports. There are also some new details about the games that will be available for the device.

As we reported earlier today, one of the games will be a white water rafting simulation. It turns out that game (River Rush) will actually be part of a suite of games called Kinect Adventures. Another suite titled Kinect Sports will take on — yep, you guessed it — Nintendo’s Wii Sports. That package will include bowling, boxing, track and field, volleyball, table tennis and soccer/football.

A separate game called Joyride will be a bit like Nintendo’s Mario Kart or Sony’s ModNation Racers, but you’ll control your car by holding an imaginary steering wheel that you’ll push forward or pull away to control the throttle. No casual gaming lineup would be complete without pets, so Microsoft will also launch a game called Kinectimals, in which you’ll be able to play with or train 20 kinds of cats using motion controls.

Finally, MTV Games is working on a dance competition title called Dance Central, and franchise games featuring characters and settings from Disney and Star Wars movies are set for launch as well.

Stay tuned for pricing and exact release date — both will probably be revealed this week at the E3 games conference in Los Angeles.

As a side note, we’ll mention that an Italian video ad featuring the Kinect brand also mentions a new, slimmer version of the Xbox 360 console itself. That hasn’t been announced officially, but it seems likely since the leaked ad called the Kinect name too.

[via Kotaku]

A week ago I had a chance to sit down for a hour-long one on one interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. There were no rules, and the whole interview was on the record. Part of the interview was on video as well.

There’s so much material that we’ve broken the interview notes up into a few different subject areas. We’ll post separately with his thoughts on the future of search, books, news, mobile and more. Schmidt also spoke candidly about the Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance, Twitter (he mentioned them before I did!) and Facebook.

What Is Google?

I started the interview with a simple question: What is Google?

Most people think of Google as a search engine, a place to start and end the day. People also think of it as an advertising company. But Google is obviously more than that.

Google says its mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But that’s too much of a 50,000 foot view of the company – and it’s so vague it’s not very useful.

Schmidt describes Google:

I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It’s a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search…I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know. And the first and the second are inter-related. The third is I think of us as a network of partners and infrastructure. I don’t know how many billions of dollars we hand to everybody. But by the time you look at the publishers, the use of AdSense and so forth, it’s literally billions of dollars going through Google and to other people which we hope fund additional software, additional web applications, additional content and so forth and we care a lot about that.

He also says Google has a certain way of doing things internally, a theme comes up repeatedly later in the interview. It involves the small cultural things, like free soft drinks, snacks and lava lamps. But he also says Google has always focused on solving big problems:

And then I also think of Google as a cultural phenomenon in and of itself, you know, the lava lamps and the way in which Google is run and so forth. That’s how I like to think about it. With respect to product buckets, we’ve always taken the position of we want to do things that matter to a large number of people at scale. So, we don’t define ourselves as search only or ads only or what have you. We sort of wait until something comes along which could actually affect, in a positive way, a lot of people. We don’t want to work on problems that only affect a small number of people.

Five years ago (about the time Google went public), Schmidt says, he sat down with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to talk about Google’s strategy:

And so, we had a – Larry and Sergey and I had a strategy meeting five years ago…I said, OK, well, let’s write down our strategy. We never really had a strategy. And so Sergey basically got up and said, our job is to do things that matter to the world at scale and it should just boom, boom, boom like that. And that became our strategy. And then Larry and I wrote down in detail some of the ideas that happened from that. But it’s not just a search company or not just an advertising company. It doesn’t even have to be just an Internet company, although obviously, the Internet is key.

More interesting conversation from the interview coming up in additional posts today and tomorrow. We’ll also update this post with links to those, too.