AWS Startups Blog

Michelle Kung

Author: Michelle Kung

Michelle Kung currently works in startup content at AWS and was previously the head of content at Index Ventures. Prior to joining the corporate world, Michelle was a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, the founding Business Editor at the Huffington Post, a correspondent for The Boston Globe, a columnist for Publisher’s Weekly and a writer at Entertainment Weekly.

DIY Robocars

3DR’s Chris Anderson Says the Future of Driverless Cars is DIY

Chris Anderson has always loved using the latest technology on the relative cheap. Applying technology from what he calls the “peace dividend from the smartphone wars,” Anderson started building his own drones and in 2007, launched DIY Drones, a central resource for makers and amateur enthusiasts. He’s since gone on to launch DIY Robocars, a similar resource for robocar builders and racers.

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Aaron Ames on Walking Robots

Tell a Robot to Take a Hike, and It Might Listen: “Cassie” Takes on the Pacific Crest Trail

For most adventurers, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail would be a crowning achievement in its own right. But one Caltech professor is upping the ante: he wants to design a robot that can complete the famous trek, all with outside assistance. That’s why Dr. Aaron Ames and his team have created Cassie, the world’s first fully autonomous robot designed to navigate the harshest and most complex environments in the world.

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The Smallpdf team at their offices in Zurich, Switzerland.

How to Run a World-class Website with a DevOps team of Two

At last count, Smallpdf, the PDF conversion startup I work for, had roughly 13 million monthly users. As for the number of employees currently running our website? That would be 10—with only two employees focused on the backend and infrastructure. You might be curious to learn how we run such a processing intensive website with such a small DevOps team. Our little secret stands in automation and delegation.

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