Take the prize in Amazon's (AMZN) new Web services contest

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has started a business to offer "online-software services such as storage or access to computing power" and, according to The Wall Street Journal, it has come up with a way to lure more customers. The big e-commerce company is starting a contest that will award the entrepreneur with the best original and most promising business venture with a first prize of $50,000 cash. That should get the attention of potential enterprise storage customers.

The contest may appear wacky, but Amazon is dead serious. The company received significant criticism for over-building its technology platform, squeezing the company's margins and helping to drive down its stock price. Now that Amazon shares are doing extremely well, it wants to show Wall Street that it can make money from the excess storage and e-commerce software that the company has already paid for.

In theory, the profits on the business should be a very large percentage of revenue. Most of the costs to build out the technology have already been spent.

The enterprise e-commerce licensing push is another one of the pieces that the company is trying to put in place to show that Amazon is more than an online seller of books and CDs, contest or no contest.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.