Tag: Startup Spotlight

There is something of value for everyone at the AWS Summits, a free event series that brings the cloud computing community together. These events are intended to provide educational value to attendees of all skill levels and industry backgrounds and demonstrate how they can utilize AWS for designing, deploying, and eventually operating infrastructures and applications. The next AWS Summit is being held in San Francisco on April 4th, where CTO Werner Vogels and Dr. Matt Wood, GM of Artificial Intelligence, will be delivering the keynote.

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.

Readaar co-founder Matthijs van Til explains how his startup, which buys imagery and sells data, learned how to sell their product to local governments.

You’ve certainly heard about the volatile ride cryptocurrency investors have been on of late. But all of the focus on the wealth being created and/or lost tends to drown out the underlying technology that is enabling these forays into not just new kinds of digital currencies, but also new ways of thinking about transferring wealth, ownership, access, all kinds of data, and more. AWS Solutions Architects Santanu Dutt and Anand Iyer explain the potential for Blockchain technology to up-end industries.

Initially released on February 19, 1990, Adobe’s Photoshop has long been the doyen of design. However, after nearly 30 years, Photoshop’s licensing model is being challenged by several startups looking to democratize the design industry and make it easier for all people, and not just professionals, to create. One such startup is San Francisco-based Figma. Founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, the open design platform—which just raised a $25 million Series B—features a cloud-based screen design tool, which helps teams achieve a shared understanding around design without worrying about syncing, exporting or installing software. We recently caught up with Field to talk about how the cloud has made life easier for designers.

It’s been another exciting year for startups! Since the start of 2017, we’ve featured 33 startups headquartered all over the world. The startups we highlighted are developing innovative products and solutions across a range of industries, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, fintech, healthcare, education, and more.

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.

Panos Panay wants to change the mindset of music students—and as the Vice President of Innovation and Strategy at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he’s in a great position to do so. At Berklee, Panay says, students are not only learning about music theory and composition, but they are also developing entrepreneurial skills he believes will help them become better musicians. “For musicians, it’s important to have the mindset of a startup,” says Panay, who is also the founder of Sonicbids, a startup that connects bands, music promoters, and brands on one online platform. “Most music colleges are focused on skill development, and not necessarily the mindset that you will need to embark and develop a successful career, however you define it.”

Amazon supports startups through a number of programs like AWS Activate, Amazon Launchpad, and Handmade, designed to boost the go-to-market efforts of entrepreneurs. Today, we’ve added the AWS Marketplace for Startups program to these, helping launch an ancillary channel for EMEA-based startups interested in building sustainable revenue streams.

As part of the Diversity Series organized by the Amazon Web Services We Power Tech program, AWS Technical Evangelist Tara Walker led a panel at re:Invent 2017 to discuss how best to champion diversity and inclusion in tech.