Author: Michelle Kung

Every day here at GIPHY, we have GIFs on GIFs on GIFs uploaded to our platform. In fact, we serve over three billion GIFs a day (that’s a lot of dancing cats!) to over 300 million daily active users. Every upload, however, brings new information and an increasingly large amount of data—this can become a lot to manage. Using database services like MySQL and DynamoDB, we’re able to organize this heavy amount of data in a high-performing way.

After selling his first startup to Salesforce when he was 21, Howie Liu could have focused his efforts on any number of subjects. Instead, he decided start Airtable, a collaboration platform that essentially modernizes one of the least sexy products around: spreadsheets.

What’s more fun than an all-night hackathon in Vegas? Why, a Vegas hackathon involving self-driving cars, of course. During AWS’s 2017 re:Invent conference, 25 teams were given kits to build an autonomous car that could learn how to drive around a track on its own. In this video, we explain what deep learning has to do with autonomous driving and how even a light-hearted Robocar Rally can have deeper implications for learning and the cloud.

When fans pick and buy a ticket on the SeatGeek app, the company is tracking their actions to improve the user experience. SeatGeek data scientists Andy Enkeboll and Tiffany Hu explain how they used AWS to help make their data more easily accessible for both themselves and the larger SeatGeek team.

Halloween and New Year’s Eve are among Uber’s busiest nights of the year. According to Matt Schallert, a site reliability engineer at Uber NYC, those days can see 50-100% extra trip volume over the rest of the year. See how Matt and his team rely on AWS to make sure they are fully prepared to handle the volume of requests that come through on such ride-share heavy holidays.

This holiday season, spare a thought for the beleaguered store clerks throughout the shopping malls and big-box stores of America. And send good vibes to any engineers and developers who work for e-commerce sites, such as Spring, because they too are working overtime to help us survive the madness.

2017 has been a great year for Kathryn Petralia. In the past twelve months, Kabbage, the financial services and small loan company she co-founded with Rob Frohwein nine years ago, raised $250 million from Softbank, bringing the company’s total equity to $500 million, and also secured $200 million in a revolving credit facility with Credit Suisse.

As the CEO and co-founder of Peanut, a social networking app for new mothers, Michelle Kennedy knows a thing or two about growing a company from scratch. Not only has the app—which only launched in February 2017—already struck a chord with countless mom groups online and with the media, but it’s also facilitated over 10 million […]

Lisbon is stepping up its game when it comes to attracting startups. Following the country’s $83 billion bailout by the European Union in 2011, the city—now in its second year of hosting the popular European tech conference Web Summit—is welcoming back the youth that fled the city during the downturn and encouraging new entrepreneurship with […]

Even though Brussels is the de facto capital of the European Union, the city of waffles, beer, and Papa Smurf hasn’t traditionally been known for its startup scene. However, with the growth of companies like data management startup Collibra, which raised $50 million in 2017, Brussels—along with Ghent and Antwerp—is definitely putting Belgium on the map […]