New startups are commonly using one or more of these web services available from Amazon:

• EC2 hosts web applications. Our tutorial helps you Get Started With Amazon Cloud Computing.
• S3 is the “simple storage solution” used by even big name startups, like Twitter.
• EBS provides persistent storage to EC2.
• SimpleDB is in beta and provides access to structured data.

In early October Amazon will pick five finalists in the contest, which the public can vote on. A panel of judges will determine the eventual winner. The contest application form is straightforward, with seven long form questions to answer, including the problem being addressed and target customers. Anyone with a qualified entry (I’m assuming this means a site that uses AWS services) receives $25 in AWS credits.

Need some inspiration? Amazon has a list of AWS case studies that show how sites are using their services.

See also:

• S3 Outage Makes Developers Consider Redundancy
• Amazon Expands Elastic Computing With New Storage Service
• Amazon SimpleDB: Your Database in the Cloud