Kigen Motors” is the name of a fictional company that WonderAffect created as part of a demonstration for Amazon Web Services; the definitive cloud computing solution on the market today.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) seems too good to be true.

With AWS, you get unlimited computing power, unlimited storage, unlimited messaging and an Internet-sized database at your beck and call. And the best part is the price. You only pay for what you use. The cost can be as cheap as a thousandth of a penny for sending a message, or 10 cents for an hour of CPU time.

But, those in the technology industry this can be a very difficult concept to understand and appreciate. What exactly does one do with unlimited computing power? And how does that help my business?

That was the challenge that brought Amazon Web Services and WonderAffect together.

There are numerous abstruse academic problems that lend themselves very well to Amazon Web Services, but WonderAffect wanted to tell a very simple, clear story with AWS that everyone in the technology industry could immediately appreciate.

The story goes like this…

A fictional company called ‘Kigen Motors’ wants to start a grassroots advertising campaign called ‘This is how I drive’. The idea behind this campaign is to have Kigen Motors customers submit videos of themselves driving Kigen Motors cars. These videos would be part of a mosaic on the Kigen Motors site.

This scenario presents a few very interesting problems that are deftly solved by Amazon Web Services.

1. First, the web site itself needs to be hosted somewhere. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is ideal for this purpose. When combined with Amazon’s Elastic IP, you can literally have a scalable web server solution with a permanent IP façade in less than 10 minutes.
2. Any kind of video taken by a digital camera or camcorder has to be first optimized for the web. This process is computationally very expensive and can take upwards of a minute for even a short video. With Amazon EC2, you can scale the amount of computing power with amount of incoming demand. As the demand increases, you simply add more computing power. As it subsides, you dial down the amount of computing power. All the while, you only pay for the computing power that you actually use.
3. Any kind of media requires a lot of storage. With Amazon S3 and SimpleDB, you can have as much storage as you need – S3 provides the unstructured storage while SimpleDB provides structured, easily query-able data storage.

The “Kigen Motors” demonstration is a great example of the type of work we really enjoy and excel at doing – helping companies connect their innovations with customers.