There’s something strangely comforting in watching Boston Dynamics’ 330-pound bipedal humanoid robot cautiously attempt to navigate a field of uneven surfaces. Something…humanizing, if that’s the right world, as the faceless ‘bot gingerly tests its footholds, slowly and with an abundance of caution, before shifting its full weight to the next block. The IHMC… Read More
With its EC2 Container Service (ECS), Amazon has long offered support for software containers on its AWS cloud computing platform. Today, at its re:Invent developer conference, the company announced a number of updates to how it supports containers, which are quickly becoming the go-to way to operate distributed applications. Soon, for example, the EC2 container service will become far… Read More
If you’ve ever had to have a logo designed, you probably know that a lot of love, care, taste, years of training, tons of experience and buckets of knowledge goes into the process. Logojoy pulls the plug on all of that and goes barreling down a different alleyway, unlocking the power of AI and machine learning to help you throw together logo concepts. The result is astonishingly good. Read More
Amazon announced Amazon Glue today at the re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. The tool has been designed to help developers process data, whether the source is in the cloud or on prem. This is sometimes known as extract, transform, load (ETL) of data, and it’s generally considered one of the toughest parts of analytics. As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explained today on stage at the… Read More
Today, Amazon said it was rolling out a tool called Lambda@Edge, that allows developers to execute Lambda functions at edge locations on a content delivery network, cutting down the time needed to make a process. With Lambda@Edge, developers can do processing at the edge locations without having to go back to the original source. These functions are able to inspect HTTP requests and take… Read More
Lyden Foust was an ethnographer traveling the world on behalf of corporations, living in a city for months at a time to learn what he could, and reporting back to the people who hired him. “I realized people were telling their social media more than they would ever tell me as a researcher,” Foust said. And so he partnered with his friend Will Kiessling, a jet engine software… Read More
Amazon’s new AWS Batch allows engineers to execute a series of jobs automatically, in the cloud. The tool lets you run apps and container images on whatever EC2 instances are required to accomplish a given task.
Amazon recognized that many of its customers were bootstrapping their own batch computing systems. Users were stringing together EC2 instances, containers, notifications, and… Read More
YayPay is focusing on an interesting yet underserved niche — collecting payments from your customers. The startup is launching the second version of its platform today and now focuses on big companies with accounts receivable teams.
The company first launched on stage at Disrupt London exactly one year ago. At the time, the company wanted to help small and medium companies get paid on time. Read More
Washington State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler has ordered insurance startup Zenefits to stop providing free use of its software in the state. The Commissioner issued a release detailing the order on Thursday, and explaining that the block on a completely free product is a result of Zenefits violating the state’s inducement laws, which prevent any one provider from acts that… Read More
As developers build apps, the hard part becomes not only attracting sufficient audience to justify the exercise, but also finding ways to keep that audience engaged and coming back to your app. Today, Amazon announced a new tool called Amazon Pinpoint designed to let developers send highly targeted push notifications, that can help them stay connected to the audience. Amazon CTO Werner… Read More
Hit songs of the season ask: why can’t we make everyday a holiday?
The answer is that we can. By giving loved ones a subscription-based gift that has new parcels, experiences or digital content arriving every season, we can spread the cheer across the year. Read More
A Redwood City, Calif. startup called Neurotrack Technologies Inc. has created a brain health app that is helping scientists unravel the mysteries of memory, and work to find a cure for Alzheimer’s. Its simple browser-based app screens users for signs of cognitive decline based on their eye movement as they watch a few images presented on their screens. These tests used to take about… Read More
Just a reminder that after Disrupt in London I’ll be heading over to Wroclaw, Poland for a double dose of meet-up fun. The meetups coincided with a few events in Wroclaw and you’re welcome to come to one or both. The first meetup is part of ImpactCEE and will be held on Wednesday, December 7. You can RSVP here. It’s primarily Fintech-related but, again, you’re… Read More
DevOps teams will be happy to hear that Amazon is launching its own dashboard for Amazon Web Services. Personal Health Dashboard, as the company calls it, is its latest release from the stage of re:Invent 2016 to support more advanced cloud apps monitoring. The tool puts critical infrastructure data in one place. The dashboard will automatically notify teams of failures and allow them… Read More
At its re:Invent developer conference, Amazon today announced AWS Shield, a DDoS protection service for web apps that run on Amazon’s cloud computing service. AWS Shield is generally available today and is already turned on (for free) for all web applications that currently run on AWS — no action by the developer required. The service is based on the work Amazon has done with… Read More
Amazon today is rolling out a tool to help developers dive deep into their existing applications to diagnose each element of the application’s processes in order to get a full snapshot of how an application is performing. Called X-Ray, developers can use the tool to dive into individual processes in order to identify bottlenecks or see individual performance of functions within an app.… Read More
SpaceX hasn’t had a launch since one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on a launch pad during pre-flight checks in September, but it’s hoping to resume activities with a December 16 mission for client Iridium Communications. The proposed launch was announced by Iridium on Thursday, and still requires Federal Aviation Administration clearance before it gets a full green light.… Read More
Amazon is hosting the second of two major keynotes at its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas today. TechCrunch has received detailed notes on the contents of today’s keynote, which will be delivered by Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels. We already knew he was going to talk about DevOps and containers today, but here are a few more details of what to expect. The keynote is scheduled to… Read More
Math. Math. Oh and perhaps some more math. That’s the gist of the advice to students interested in AI from Facebook’s Yann LeCun and Joaquin Quiñonero Candela who run the company’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and Applied Machine Learning group respectively. Tech companies often advocate STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), but today’s tips… Read More
Annapurna Pictures, the production company behind films including Zero Dark Thirty and Her, is launching a new division focused on video game development and publishing. Annapurna was founded by Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and has developed a reputation for writing relatively large checks for arty, director-driven films — though it’s also faced… Read More
