Would be great if Amazon considered more 3rd world countries as those countries don't have or barely have any kind of startup support/ecosystem. It gives the few individuals doing the startup thing at least some chance at scoring some "funding."
They're moving in the right direction. Until now they didn't accept any countries outside of the US. Going from "none" to "some" is a big step towards "all".
Lots of countries have regulations about competitions -- they generally come down to "unregulated lotteries are bad" but exactly what paperwork you need to prove that what you're doing is a legitimate competition and not just a lottery varies.
"Eligible countries"? Please. This coming from a cloud computing global economy no-borders company?
What kind of a challenge is that? We are a startup based in Poland — neighboring EU countries can participate, and we can't, even though it is the same European Union.
I find it sad that companies so often arbitrarily exclude the majority of the world and everyone just accepts it, rationalizing all the time. I believe that every time such exclusions are made we should stand up for whomever is excluded and shout. We are past the days of national borders as far as Internet goes.
That seems like a good reason to enter (we'll have to see what the criteria are for entering once the contest actually goes live).