Amazon’s Civic Apps Contest Disappears

This post was updated at 2 pm PST with Amazon response, cached contest documentation and prize amounts.

Amazon has apparently “unlaunched” and postponed its $100,000+ Civic Apps Contest for AWS. Amazon AWS PR spokesperson Kerri Catallozzi wrote, “We accidentally pushed this out early, but please stay tuned for more information on this program later this year.” All entrants were to receive $50 AWS credits.

You can view pdfs of the contest’s Official Rules (pdf) and FAQ (pdf) which I obtained from Google Cache.

Amazon’s own contest rules state that the company “reserve[s] the right to terminate the Contest in the event it does not receive a minimum of 50 qualified Entries from separate eligible entrants,” but apparently it decided it could terminate the contest before its own October 15th deadline.

Links to Amazon’s fall Civic Apps Contest have all been redirected to its government pages and virtually disappeared. The contest’s prizes totaled more than $50,000 $113,000 in AWS usage and travel credits. I had begun entering Geogram, my AWS-hosted application for place-based email groups such as neighborhoods and community businesses.

The Entry Form which Amazon partnered with YouNoodle to host reads, “The entry period for the AWS Civic Apps Challenge begins at 12:00:00 A.M. Pacific Time (“PT”) on 09/02/2013, and ends at 11:59:59 P.M. (PT) on 10/15/2013. See the contest Official Rules for details” However, the links to
http://aws.amazon.com/civic-apps-challenge & http://aws.amazon.com/civic-apps-challenge/rules redirect to the company’s government page with no information about the contest.

Amazon’s PR team is traditionally impossible to reach – so I’m not really sure how to get a definitive response. I’ve sent an email to their Web Services PR  team and YouNoodle and will update this post when I receive a response. (Response now posted above)

One downside to the contest is that entrants need to “use” their AWS prize credits by the end of 2014. Anyone need some extra S3 storage space?

My AWS Civic App Entry Form at YouNoodle