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Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat : Amazon announces AWS IoT TwinMaker to help developers create digital twins of real-time systems like buildings, factories, equipment, and product lines   —  Amazon today announced Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT TwinMaker, a new service designed to make it easier for developers to create digital twins … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3o6LY1H via IFTTT

Adam Selipsky gave his first AWS re:Invent keynote this morning since taking over as CEO from Andy Jassy earlier this year. He had big shoes to fill, but it’s not as though Selipsky was a complete stranger to the AWS team. In fact, he had been at the division since its earliest days, helping Jassy to build it into a substantial business, before leaving in 2016 to become CEO at Tableau. He began the day with a history lesson, and he didn’t need to count on others to feed the background to him, given he had been there when they opened their doors in Seattle all those years ago, a pig-in-a-poke of an idea to sell web services. As Selipsky told it when he presented the cloud infrastructure concept to early potential customers, they didn’t quite get it. “What does this have to do with selling books,” he was continually asked. While he didn’t share the answer he gave, I would speculate that it had nothing to with it, and it had everything to with it. Years ago, at a presentation with A

On-demand shuttle and software company Via has raised another $130 million, capital that has pushed its valuation to about $3.3 billion as demand from cities to update its legacy transit systems rises. The round was led by Janus Henderson with participation from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, ION Crossover Partners, Koch Disruptive Technologies and existing investor Exor. To date, the company has raised $800 million. Via, which today employs about 950 people, has two sides to its business. The company operates consumer-facing shuttles in Washington, D.C. and New York. Its underlying software platform, which it sells to cities, transportation authorities, school districts and universities to deploy their own shuttles, is not only the core of its business; it has become the primary driver of growth. Co-founder and CEO Daniel Ramot previously told TechCrunch that there was was little interest from cities in the software-as-a-service platform when the company first launched i

Credit: Oliver Cragg / Android Authority Some of the Samsung Galaxy S22 wallpapers have allegedly just leaked. You can download four of the wallpapers here. The source of these walls is vague at the moment, so we’re not sure how credible they are. In early 2022, we expect Samsung to launch the next iterations of its flagship Galaxy S smartphones. Now, well over a month before that anticipated launch, we have an interesting leak related to the phones. Below, you’ll find what are allegedly Samsung Galaxy S22 wallpapers. The four wallpapers certainly look legit since they feature the usual abstract and colorful designs we see from Samsung. However, the source of the leak,  Android Police , makes no mention of how they obtained them. As such, we’re going to be a little more skeptical of them than usual. We’ve reached out to  Android Police  to get clarity on this. from Android Authority https://ift.tt/3rni5MF via IFTTT

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica : Microsoft's inclusion of buy-now-pay-later app Zip in Edge is seen by some as heavy-handed, adding bloatware that may lessen the browser's privacy and security   —  “This all feels extremely unnecessary for a browsing experience,” one user says.  —  Microsoft is taking a lot of flak … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3d3GpL8 via IFTTT

Ben Thompson / Stratechery : Twitter should consider changing its business model as its ad revenue remains weak, despite its locked-in userbase, indispensability, and impenetrable moat   —  From CNBC: … On one hand, congratulations to Twitter for its first non-messy CEO transition in its history; on the other hand … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3d4RYSp via IFTTT

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch : Amazon unveils SageMaker Canvas, which lets business users build ML prediction models with a point-and-click UI, following similar offerings by Azure and others   —  AWS today announced a new machine learning service, Amazon SageMaker Canvas.  Unlike its existing machine learning services … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3ljOPms via IFTTT

Todd Bishop / GeekWire : SEC filing: Satya Nadella last week sold half his Microsoft stock, worth over $285M, before Washington state implements its new capital gains tax on January 1   —  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sold half of his stake in the company in a series of transactions last week, divesting about 840,000 shares … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3d3vVvg via IFTTT

At AWS’s re:Invent conference this morning, the company announced AWS IoT TwinMaker , a new service that makes it easy to create and use digital twins of real-world systems . For context, digital twins are virtual representations of things like buildings, factories, production lines, and equipment that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the behavior of the systems they represent. The company outlines that with this new service, users can create digital twins by connecting data from sources like video feeds and applications without having to move the data into a single repository. “You can use built-in data connectors for the following AWS services: AWS IoT SiteWise for equipment and time-series sensor data; Amazon Kinesis Video Streams for video data; and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage of visual resources (for example, CAD files) and data from business applications. AWS IoT TwinMaker also provides a framework for you to create your own data connecto

Facebook parent company Meta is losing its top crypto executive later this year. David Marcus who leads crypto unit Novi and previously helmed the company’s Messenger unit, announced Tuesday that he will be leaving the company later this year. Marcus joined Facebook in 2014. His departure marks another major exit from a long-time Facebook executive — in September, Facebook CTO Mike Scroepfer announced he was stepping down from his role after 13 years at the company. Former Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel who previously worked as the Head of Product for Novi will be taking over Marcus’s role at the top of the org. Marcus has long been an important figure in the crypto community since his days as President of PayPal where he was among the first crop of tech leaders to embrace bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Marcus has previously served on the board of Coinbase. His tenure leading crypto at Facebook has mostly been marred by setbacks as the company’s Diem cryptocurrency project has e

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch : AWS says four of its cloud-based analytics services, Redshift, EMR, MSK, and Kinesis, are now available as serverless and on-demand services as public previews   —  At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced that four of its cloud-based analytics services, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3d7tW9v via IFTTT

Kurt Wagner / Bloomberg : David Marcus, the co-creator of Diem who spent the last few years building the Novi wallet, is leaving Meta at the end of 2021 to pursue other projects   —  Marcus, who joined the tech giant in 2014, has struggled to get the Diem currency off the ground  —  David Marcus, one of the top executives … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/318MZhp via IFTTT

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch : Amazon unveils AWS Private 5G, a service providing hardware, software, and SIMs to help deploy private mobile networks quickly without per-device charges   —  At Amazon's AWS re:Invent conference this morning, the company announced the preview of “AWS Private 5G,” which is a new service … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3rp5N6M via IFTTT

Credit: Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority Email read receipts are a bit of an old and rather outdated feature. This is perhaps why Google doesn’t include it in all of their email accounts by default. Instead, they only offer it in paid Google Workspace accounts , probably reasoning that only work professionals will ever need to use it. If you fall into this camp, read on to find out how to enable read receipts in Gmail. Read more: How to set up email forwarding in Gmail from Android Authority https://ift.tt/2ZF5vx5 via IFTTT

Credit: Oliver Cragg / Android Authority Smartwatches have cemented themselves as staples of any tech collection, but they’re not all created equal. Some, like Fitbit , excel at health tracking while others, like Fossil watches, are focused more on fashion. But one thing we love about any smartwatch is saving money with a great deal. Related: The best smartwatches you can buy from Android Authority https://ift.tt/34Vwt1A via IFTTT

Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2021 are officially over, but the deals never really stop once Tuesday rolls around. You can still save some cash on some of the best earbuds , fitness trackers , Chromebooks , and more. We’ve rounded up the 10 best Cyber Monday deals still worth buying. from Android Authority https://ift.tt/3o6YwGo via IFTTT

AWS today announced a new machine learning service, Amazon SageMaker Canvas. Unlike its existing machine learning services, the target audience here isn’t highly technical data scientists and engineers but any engineer or business user inside a company. The promise of SageMaker Canvas is that it will allow anybody to build machine learning prediction models, using a point-and-click interface. If that sounds familiar, it may be because Azure and others offer similar tools, though AWS may have the advantage that a lot of companies already store all of their data in AWS anyway. Image Credits: Amazon “SageMaker Canvas leverages the same technology as Amazon SageMaker to automatically clean and combine your data, create hundreds of models under the hood, select the best performing one, and generate new individual or batch predictions,” writes AWS’s Alex Casalboni in today’s announcement. “It supports multiple problem types such as binary classification, multi-class classification,

At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced that four of its cloud-based analytics services, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, Amazon MSK and Amazon Kinesis, are now available as serverless and on-demand services. That’s something AWS’s customers have been asking for, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in today’s keynote. These new services are now available as public previews. As Selipsky argued, some AWS competitors may argue that one database can just do it all, but he argues that different workloads need the right databases to back them — and he argued that the same is true for analytics services. But customers also don’t want to have to worry about the infrastructure that comes with running these services — and in addition to doing away with having to manage clusters, users will also only have to pay for the resources they use. For Redshift , for example, that means uses will only pay when the data warehouse is in use, not when it sits idle. “Amazon Redshift Serverless automatically pro

As more companies move to custom silicon for their customer’s workloads, Amazon has been busy on this front. They introduced the Inferentia chip in 2019 to help speed up inference learning. Then last year the company launched a second Trainium chip , designed specifically for machine learning models. Today, AWS continued to build on this previous work, introducing its latest machine learning chip, the Trn1. Adam Selipsky, delivering his first AWS re:Invent keynote, dispatched the news about the latest chip on stage in Las Vegas this morning. “So today, I’m excited to announce the new Trn1 instance powered by Trainium, which we expect to deliver the best price-performance for training deep learning models in the cloud and the fastest on EC2,” Selipsky told the re:Invent audience. “Trn1 is the first EC2 instance with up to 800 gigabytes per second bandwidth. So it’s absolutely great for large scale, multi node distributed training use cases.” He said that this should work well for u

At Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference this morning, the company announced the preview of “ AWS Private 5G ,” which is a new service that aims to make it easy to deploy and manage your own private global network. The launch is meant to address the challenges companies are facing with leveraging 5G. AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said that with AWS Private 5G, you can set up and scale a private mobile network in days instead of months. “You get all the goodness of mobile technology without the pain of long planning cycles, complex integrations and the high upfront costs,” Selipsky stated during the company’s keynote. “You tell us where you want to build your network and specify the network capacity. We ship you all the required hardware, the software and the SIM cards.” Image Credits: AWS Selipsky outlined that AWS Private 5G automates the setup and deployment of the network and scales capacity on-demand to support additional devices and increased network traffic. There are no upfront fees

Startups are often questions: What if we did things in a new way, instead of the way we have been? Massive is a good example of the genre: What if users could pay for apps or services not with money or attention, but with their spare compute power? The general concept of distributed compute power sourced from individuals is not new. Anyone familiar with the SETI screensaver has seen similar work before. But what Massive is building could take a somewhat known idea and bring it into the modern world as an alternative to charging users or pounding them with advertisements to generate revenue. Massive announced an $11 million round this morning, led by Point72 Ventures with participation from crypto-themed entities, including CoinShares Ventures and Coinbase Ventures. Several angels also participated in the funding event. The model is interesting, and Massive’s funding round is an indication that it has found some market traction. So, we get the company on the horn to learn more.

Amazon CloudWatch was introduced way back in 2009 to help AWS customers view data about their cloud usage and spending. Today at the dawn of AWS re:Invent , the company’s cloud customer conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, the cloud division announced a couple of enhancements to the product. Amazon has been building on the types of data provided by CloudWatch, and today it added user monitoring . With Real User Monitoring, AWS customers can understand when there is a problem with a deployment and take corrective action before customers really begin to feel it. “Amazon CloudWatch RUM will help you to collect the metrics that give you the insights that will help you to identify, understand, and improve this experience. You simply register your application, add a snippet of JavaScript to the header of each page and deploy,” Amazon’s Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post announcing the feature. This doesn’t exactly fall under the category of stunning innovation. It’s something co

The director of the National Labor Relation Board’s 10th region has authorized a new union election for workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center. An NLRB representative has confirmed the decision with TechCrunch, which would see the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union getting a second chance to unionize workers at the site, following its defeat back in April . The victory was a lopsided one for the mega-retailer, though the RWDSU immediately called shenanigans in what was expected to be a major test for unionizing efforts for blue collar tech workers. At the time, the union accused Amazon of “gaslighting” employees through “egregious and blatantly illegal action.” Amazon naturally denied the accusations, stating, “It’s easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that’s not true. Our employees heard far more anti-Amazon messages from the union, policymakers, and media outlets than they heard from us.”

Annie Palmer / CNBC : The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union says the NLRB has authorized a new election for Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama   —  - The National Labor Relations Board has authorized a new union election at one of Amazon's Alabama warehouses, the labor union behind the effort said Monday. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3ljkK6s via IFTTT

Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch : Yassir, an Algerian startup with 3M+ users that provides on-demand services such as ride-hailing and last-mile delivery, raises a $30M Series A   —  Yassir, an Algerian startup that provides on-demand services such as ride-hailing and last-mile delivery, has raised a $30 million Series A round. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3D4L5ek via IFTTT

Kyle Wiggers / VentureBeat : Amazon launches AWS IoT RoboRunner to simplify building management apps for robot fleets and AWS Robotics Startup Accelerator for AWS credits and expert advice   —  At a keynote during its Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2021 conference today, Amazon launched AWS IoT RoboRunner … from Techmeme https://ift.tt/31fzSuB via IFTTT

Credit: Hadlee Simons / Android Authority Today is Cyber Monday , and everyone is getting in on the crazy deals action. Not to be left out, Samsung is also getting in on the fun with plenty of Samsung Cyber Monday deals out there for you to grab. See also:  Everything you need to know about Samsung phones from Android Authority https://ift.tt/3o6sv16 via IFTTT

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen will go before Congress again this week, this time offering her unique perspective on the company’s moderation and policy failures as they relate to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the key legal shield that protects online platforms from liability for the user-created content they host. The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold the hearing, titled “ Holding Big Tech Accountable: Targeted Reforms to Tech’s Legal Immunity ,” this Wednesday, December 1 at 10:30 AM ET. Color of Change President Rashad Robinson and Common Sense Media CEO James Steyer will also testify on Wednesday. The hearing is the latest Section 230-focused discussion from the House committee. In March, the chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter went before lawmakers to defend the measures they’ve taken to fight misinformation and disinformation — two major areas of concern that have inspired Democratic lawmakers

A number of startups are experimenting with what a better social app could look like. For a startup called Alms , the answer is a social network that focuses on users’ well-being through participation in creator-led challenges in areas like personal growth, sustainability, and others with positive impacts. Instead of driving the collection “likes,” as on other social apps, Alms aims to encourage real-world engagement through its challenges and the specific steps and actions that must be taken. The idea, explains Alms founder Alexander Nevedovsky, is to design an app that guides users to a happier and more meaningful life when they use it. That’s something modern social platforms can’t really promise to do. Work on the project began during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, Nevedovsky says. “A lot of us were feeling depressed and sad, at home without much access to friends and family,” he explains. “I felt like the world really needed something that’s a bit more than just medit

Yassir, an Algerian startup that provides on-demand services such as ride-hailing and last-mile delivery, has raised a $30 million Series A round. The investment came from a long list of VCs and angel investors. VCs include WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike Ventures, Quiet Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, VentureSouq, Nellore Capital and Moving Capital. The angel investors include Cleo Sham of Uber; Thomas Layton of Upwork, Opentable and Metaweb; Rohan Monga of Gojek; and Hannes Graah of Spotify and Revolut . The company said in a statement that most of the investors from its $13.25 million seed round, which was previously undisclosed, participated as well.   After earning a Ph.D. at Stanford and spending most of his professional life in Silicon Valley working at various companies, CEO Noureddine Tayebi returned to Algeria to get involved in the country’s nascent tech scene to start a company and build technical talent in the Maghreb region (Algeria, Morocco and

Carolyn Mooney wants you to make your decision-making process code. She is the co-founder and CEO of Nextmv which helps companies make efficient decisions on a mass scale—think Amazon delivering packages or Uber plotting a route for an uber pool. In this week’s episode, she talks with Darrell and Jordan about Nextmv’s software that doesn’t just optimize decision making and route planning but also enables engineers to work on many different types of teams. Plus she talks about how coaching high school volleyball has made her a better leader and forced her to prioritize a work-life balance. Take our listener survey and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of FOUND. Connect with us: On Twitter On Instagram Via email: found@techcrunch.com Call us and leave a voicemail at (510) 936-1618 from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3FYDY9f via IFTTT

Well, so much for a relaxed post-holiday week on Monday. News broke this morning that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down from the company entirely . The company’s CTO, Parag Agrawal , will be taking over at the helm. Saleforce exec Bret Taylor will take over as board chairman. So, Amanda and Natasha and Alex jumped into onto the mics — and, ironically, a Twitter space — to riff on all things Jack and future of Twitter. From the show: Crypto and the CTO, what can we read from the tea leaves? Jack’s dual role, and its detractors. The fact that Twitter’s product work has been  great lately, which we don’t want to stop. When is a good time to leave a company, is it on the up and up or when things are quiet? And, finally, Jack’s somewhat biting words regarding founder-led companies, which are, frankly, a bit at odds with his own behavior until now. The show is back on Wednesday, unless some other major CEO resigns. Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m.

Credit: Amazon Today is Cyber Monday 2021 and you know what that means: deals, deals, and more deals. If you are looking for some Cyber Monday monitor deals specifically, we’ve got you covered right here! See also:  The best monitors for work and play you can get from Android Authority https://ift.tt/3ocghV7 via IFTTT

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch : Citing “alleged serious breaches” of data protection laws, UK's ICO notifies Clearview AI of its provisional intention to fine the company over £17M   —  Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is facing a potential fine in the UK. from Techmeme https://ift.tt/3o6aMY0 via IFTTT

In 2019, AWS launched Braket , its quantum computing service that makes hardware and software tools from its partners Rigetti, IonQ and D-Wave available in its cloud. Given how quickly quantum computing is moving ahead, it’s maybe no surprise that a lot has changed since then. Among other things, hybrid algorithms that use classical computers to optimize quantum algorithms — a process similar to training machine learning models — have become a standard tool for developers. Today, AWS announced improved support for running these hybrid algorithms on Braket. Previously, to run these algorithms, developers would have to set up and manage the infrastructure to run the optimization algorithms on classical machines and then manage the integration with the quantum computing hardware, in addition to the monitoring and visualization tools for analyzing the results. Image Credits: AWS But that’s not all. “Another big challenge is that [Quantum Processing Units] are shared, inelastic res