Amazon Web Services announced today that the winner of its third annual AWS Start-up Challenge is GoodData, a business intelligence and analytics firm based in San Francisco. The company was awarded $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in AWS credits, and an investment offer from Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN). The runner-up was Bizo, a San Francisco-based online audience targeting platform, which received $25,000 in AWS credits. Lastly, FlightCaster, a flight-delay predictor also based in San Francisco, won $10,000 in cash and credits for “most creative monetization model.” No Seattle-area startups were among the seven finalists.

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It was a pretty quiet week for deals in the Northwest, what with the Thanksgiving holiday. But there was some activity in the software, Internet, and medical device sectors.

—Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital participated in a $6 million equity funding round for San Francisco-based Bizo, an online ad network and audience targeting platform. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, and Venrock and Ascent also participated. Bizo spun out of ZoomInfo last year, and is one of seven finalists in the 2009 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge; the winner will be announced on December 9.

—Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners participated in a $1.1 million equity financing for French photo encyclopedia startup Fotonauts, as Ryan reported. Banexi Ventures Partners and Fotonauts co-founder and former Apple executive Jean-Marie Hullot also invested in the round.

—Seattle-based EVO Media, the creator of DevHub, a Web publishing platform, raised $1.5 million in equity financing from angel investors including Jeff Schrock, Geoff Entress, John Cunningham, Alex Algard, and Richard Wolpert, as well as an undisclosed private equity group. EVO Media, which has been profitable since last summer, will use the money to work with larger publishers, support new partnerships, and do more marketing.

—Datacastle, the Seattle-based data backup and recovery software company, raised a $3 million funding round led by Australian venture firm CM Capital Investments, an existing investor. Datacastle was founded in 2005 and raised a $5.3 million Series A round, also led by CM Capital, last year.

—EndoGastric Solutions, a Redwood City, CA-based medical device company with operations in Redmond, WA, said it closed on a $21.5 million Series E round of financing. The company makes minimally-invasive surgical devices for chronic heartburn and other gastrointestinal diseases. EndoGastric previously raised around $82 million, from firms like Advanced Technology Ventures, Chicago Growth Partners, DeNovo Ventures, Foundation Medical Partners, MPM Capital, and Oakwood Medical Investors, according to PE Hub.

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Seattle-based Vulcan Capital has participated in a $6 million equity funding round for Bizo, an online advertising network and audience targeting platform based in San Francisco. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors Venrock, Vulcan, and Ascent. Bizo, which spun out of ZoomInfo in May 2008, has also been named one of seven finalists in the 2009 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start-Up Challenge; the grand prize winner will be announced on December 9.

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Smaller deals were the rule last week, but this first one marked an exception.

—Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR) of Marlboro, MA, inked about $1 billion worth of new long-term sales deals. The company, which was formed in 1994 to commercialize “string ribbon” solar-cell manufacturing technology invented at MIT, now has long-term agreements with eight customers worth a combined value of nearly $2 billion.

—Burlington, MA-based medical imaging firm HyperMed closed a $4 million round of funding from Greenwich, CT-based GBP Capital.

—Dialysis products maker NxStage Medical (NASDAQ: NXTM) of Lawrence, MA, announced it plans to raise $43 million in a private placement of its common stock and warrants. The deal will be closed in two tranches—a $25 million first tranche to be completed on or before May 28, and an $18 million tranche expected to close during the third quarter, pending stockholder approval.

—Boston’s Spark Capital made a cool $9.7 million—a 48 percent return on its four-month investment—when CBS bought CNET Networks for $1.8 billion.

—Woburn, MA’s Wilson TurboPower got $500,000 from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative to fund the development of its industrial heat exchanger, which is expected to lower the cost of electricity generation from biomass and fuel cells.

—Business database firm ZoomInfo of Waltham, MA, spun off its ad-service unit, which targets ads to Web users based on sophisticated guesses about their job titles and roles. The new business demographics or “bizographics” firm, called Bizo, will be based in San Francisco.

—Waltham, MA-based Atlas Venture co-led an $8 million Series A investment in Boulder, CO-based Miragen Therapeutics. Colorado-based Boulder Ventures was the other founding investor in the firm, which was launched to use the hot new science of microRNA to develop treatments for heart failure and muscle disease.

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A few months ago, when we zoomed in on ZoomInfo, the Waltham, MA-based business database company was beta testing an ad-targeting service designed to quickly identify website visitors and serve up ads customized for people in their specific job categories.

It’s all about business demographics, or “bizographics.” As Wade wrote, “In a way, ZoomInfo’s service is similar to the consumer-oriented ‘behavorial targeting’ services offered by Tacoda and Revenue Science. But there are two big differences. ZoomInfo’s service is aimed at people in business roles. And thanks to its profile database, ZoomInfo can target Web surfers based on a highly informed guess about their job title and responsibilities—not just based on which websites they’ve visited recently or what subjects they search for…”

Yesterday, ZoomInfo officially spun off its ad service business unit as its own bizographics company, dubbed (perhaps you guessed it) Bizo. Former ZoomInfo GM and SVP of advertising Russell Glass is Bizo’s CEO. Unfortunately, for those wanting to see more New England startups, Bizo is based in San Francisco.

“In a nutshell, we knew there was a big advertising opportunity in the B2B space, and we thought ZoomInfo was in a great position to take advantage of that given our knowledge of business people and companies,” ZoomInfo president Bryan Burdick told me yesterday. Burdick says the response to the beta test was extremely promising—and informative. One of the things the company learned, Burdick says, was that bizographics was a “different kind of opportunity than [our] core business. So at the end of the day we felt that it was really better suited as a separate company that could grow along its own trajectory.” He says Bizo was spun off to shareholders and funded with a debt financing from ZoomInfo.

Why California? “The primary reason is that from a technology perspective there’s a lot of talent out there, particularly in the engineering side, for individuals that have great experience in building highly scalable ad networks of this type,” Burdick says. The San Francisco area is also home to several potential publishing and advertising partners, he says.

ZoomInfo will continue with its core business of scouring the Web for information about people and companies, which it organizes into free and premium databases used by sales, marketing, and recruiting professionals to identify business opportunities and talent.

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