AWS News Blog
AWS Hot Startups – June 2017
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Thanks for stopping by for another round of AWS Hot Startups! This month we are featuring:
- CloudRanger – helping companies understand the cloud with visual representation.
- quintly – providing social media analytics for brands on a single dashboard.
- Tango Card – reinventing rewards programs for businesses and their customers worldwide.
Don’t forget to check out May’s Hot Startups in case you missed them.
CloudRanger (Letterkenny, Ireland) 
The idea for CloudRanger started where most great ideas do – at a bar in Las Vegas. During a late-night conversation with his friends at re:Invent 2014, Dave Gildea (Founder and CEO) used cocktail napkins and drink coasters to visually illustrate servers and backups, and the light on his phone to represent scheduling. By the end of the night, the idea for automated visual server management was born. With CloudRanger, companies can easily create backup and retention policies, visual scheduling, and simple restoration of snapshots and AMIs. The team behind CloudRanger believes that when servers and cloud resources are represented visually, they are easier to manage and understand. Users are able to see their servers, which turns them into a tangible and important piece of business inventory.
CloudRanger is an excellent platform for MSPs who manage many different AWS accounts, and need a quick method to display many servers and audit certain attributes. The company’s goal is to give anyone the ability to create backup policies in multiple regions, apply them using a tag-based methodology, and manage backups. Servers can be scheduled from one simple dashboard, and restoration is easy and step-by-step. With CloudRanger’s visual representation of resources, customers are encouraged to fully understand their backup policies, schedules, and servers.
As an AWS Partner, CloudRanger has built a globally redundant system after going all-in with AWS. They are using over 25 AWS services for everything including enterprise-level security, automation and 24/7 runtimes, and an emphasis on Machine Learning for efficiency in the sales process. CloudRanger continues to rely more on AWS as new services and features are released, and are replacing current services with AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild. CloudRanger was also named Startup Company of the Year at a recent Irish tech event!
To learn more about CloudRanger, visit their website.
quintly (Cologne, Germany)
In 2010, brothers Alexander Peiniger and Frederik Peiniger started a journey to help companies track their social media profiles and improve their strategies against competitors. The startup began under the name “Social.Media.Tracking” and then “AllFacebook Stats” before officially becoming quintly in 2013. With quintly, brands and agencies can analyze, benchmark, and optimize their social media activities on a global scale. The innovative dashboarding system gives clients an overview across all social media profiles on the most important networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.) and then derives an optimal social media strategy from those profiles. Today, quintly has users in over 180 countries and paying clients in over 65 countries including major agency networks and Fortune 500 companies.
Getting an overview of a brand’s social media activities can be time-consuming, and turning insights into actions is a challenge that not all brands master. Quintly offers a variety of features designed to help clients improve their social media reach. With their web-based SaaS product, brands and agencies can compare their social media performance against competitors and their best practices. Not only can clients learn from their own historic performance, but they can leverage data from any other brand around the world.
Since the company’s founding, quintly built and operates its SaaS offering on top of AWS services, leveraging Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route53 to host their Docker-based environment. Large amounts of data are stored in Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon RDS, and they use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor and seamlessly scale to the current needs. In addition, quintly is using Amazon Machine Learning to add additional attributes to the data and to drive better decisions for their clients. With the help of AWS, quintly has been able to focus on their core business while having a scalable and well-performing solution to solve their technical needs.
For more on quintly, check out their Social Media Analytics blog.
Tango Card (Seattle, Washington)
Based in the heart of West Seattle, Tango Card is revolutionizing rewards programs for companies around the world. Too often customers redeem points in a loyalty or rebate program only to wait weeks for their prize to arrive. Companies generously give their employees appreciation gifts, but the gifts can be generic and impersonal. With Tango Card, companies can choose from a variety of rewards that fit the needs of their specific program, event, or business incentive. The extensive Rewards Catalog includes options for e-gift cards that are sure to excite any recipient. There are plenty of options for everyone from traditional e-gift cards to nonprofit donations to cash equivalent rewards.
Tango Card uses a combination of desired rewards, modern technology, and expert service to change the rewards and incentive experience. The Reward Delivery Platform offers solutions including Blast Rewards, Reward Link, and Rewards as a Service API (RaaS). Blast Rewards enables companies to purchase and send e-gift cards in bulk in just one business day. Reward Link lets recipients choose from an assortment of e-gift cards, prepaid cards, digital checks, and donations and is delivered instantly. Finally, Rewards as a Service is a robust digital gift card API that is built to support apps and platforms. With RaaS, Tango Card can send out e-gift cards on company-branded email templates or deliver them directly within a user interface.
The entire Tango Card Reward Delivery Platform leverages many AWS services. They use Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) for rapid deployment of containerized micro services, and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for low overhead managed databases. Tango Card is also leveraging Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and AWS Identity and Access Management (IMS).
To learn more about Tango Card, check out their blog!
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I would also like to thank Alexander Moss-Bolanos for helping with the Hot Startups posts this year.
Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next month!
-Tina Barr