AWS Startups Blog

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.

We’re in it together. That community-driven sentiment was in full-effect as more than 200 entrepreneurs gathered at the AWS Loft in SoHo for New York’s first AWS Startup Day. Machine Learning? Check. How to tell your story? Covered. Cronuts? Inhaled. “Everyone wants to help everyone else to succeed,” said Future Lab’s Craig Wilson, one of the day’s speakers. “We’re here to be a part of that.”

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.

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.

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.

In Season 4 of the hit HBO show, “Silicon Valley,” the character Jian Yang attempts to build an app that uses image recognition artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and label the foods in captured pictures. But there is a fairly major glitch: his app can only differentiate between hot dogs and… not hot dogs. Once I stopped laughing, the episode prompted a question that centers on my role as a Solutions Architect at AWS: How easily could I build my own hotdog identifying app? Turns out, pretty easily.

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