Author: AWS Editorial Team

Honesty is the name of game for Ruth Penford, the director of talent acquisition for Shazam. In fact, Penford believes honesty is so critical for recruiting, the first thing she did after joining the music sharing startup was to invite in a group of consultants to ask current employees about how they felt about the company.

Assigning credit risk to people who apply for business loans, credit cards, and home mortgages has mostly been done by weighing some 10 or 20 attributes. Take those attributes—and we’re all familiar with some of the things that make our credit scores rise and fall, including timeliness of payments, debt to income ratio, and defaults—and crank them through your favorite logistic regression model or scorecard. The result is your assigned credit risk, and depending on the number, you either get your loan or you don’t.

When Antoine Blondeau, the co-founder and chairman of Sentient Technologies, first began working with artificial intelligence, the concept was still known as “algorithmic science.” In the decades since, AI has evolved into a much sexier topic because, according to Blondeau, when operating on mission speed and plugged into the right workflow, AI will learn quicker and faster than humans—resulting in business models that can evolve at machine speed. “That is the revolution,” notes Blondeau.

In less than two weeks, 17,500 attendees from across the globe will descend on Helsinki for Slush 2017. A not-for-profit global event dedicated to the startup community and run entirely by an army of volunteers, it’s been described as “Burning Man meets TED.” With a mission to “help the next generation of great, world-conquering companies [come] forward,” the event, in just a few short years, has expanded beyond its flagship event in Helsinki to locations in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Singapore.

Forget talking microwaves or smart refrigerators. To kick off his recent keynote speech on voice at Lisbon’s Web Summit technology conference, Dr. Werner Vogels began with a story about rice farmers.

Listen on for global insights from Reshma Sohoni, the co-founder and managing partner of London-based investment fund Seedcamp

Medinas was started to make sure every unit of medical supplies in the U.S. gets a second chance at being used before it expires. Our solution involves allowing medical facilities to sell their unused surpluses to other medical practices who can then put them to use. By algorithmically matching surpluses to existing demand on a custom marketplace, we create cost savings for all parties and simultaneously reduce the volume of supplies going to waste. But starting off in a challenging space isn’t easy.

“It’s got to be a sickness or in my DNA.” That’s how Arth Labs Co-founder and CEO Gautam Ivatury describes his penchant for launching startups.

Regulators are people too. That’s what Monika Liikamaa, CEO of Enfuce Financial Services, wants to remind other founders who complain about meeting the strict standards of financial services regulators. “You have to be able to understand their concerns,” she says. “People are people, and they just want to feel secure that if they give a person a ‘go,’ the person they say okay to knows what they’re doing.” With Enfuce, the first infrastructure payments platform to run banks and financial institutions in a public cloud, Liikamaa’s solution to navigating the compliance process is doing her homework. For more from Liikamaa, including how she decides what features Enfuce should build and how she sees the banking industry evolving, listen here.

Tim Draper is perhaps one of the world’s foremost proponents of Bitcoin. “It’s an exciting time for us bitcoin-ers,” the Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Draper Associates founding partner recently told AWS Startups. “In five years, you’re going to try to pay in fiat currency at Starbucks and they’re going to laugh at you.” In addition […]