Today we had a wonderful day with the finalists of the 900 contestants in the AWS Startup Challenge, all seven proved themselves worthy of winning the ultimate price. The finalists were:

• Brainscape
• Commerce360
• Justin.tv
• Milemeter
• Ooyala
• WeoGeo

Go to the startup challenge vote page to see videos of each of these companies and to see the voting results. The judges of the contest followed the voters preference and awarded the $50K cash, $50K AWS credits, an investment offer from Amazon and 6 months of RightScale to Ooyala.

As part of the award ceremony the winners were given a server to demolish with the golden AWS hammer under the motto “we don’t need no stickin’ servers”.

After that of course every one wants to talk to the winners. VCs (Lucinda Stewart, managing director at OVP, at the front), the press (Brier Dudley, Seattle Times, in the middle top) and sponsors (Thorsten von Eicken, CTO/founder RightScale, at the left) all came out in force tonight and are all hovering around the new glamour boys (Belsasar, Bismarck and Sean).

Congrats to all the participants. We are bound the hear more from each of you as you are likely to build sucessful companies.