AWS continues to add yet more software and services to build out its revenues and touchpoints with businesses that already use its cloud infrastructure for storage and to host and administer services and apps. The latest product, launching today, is Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center solution. AWS said it is based on the same tech that Amazon itself has built and uses in-house… Read More

 A startup based in Petah Tikva, Israel, Airobotics, has scored the right to fly drones autonomously for business purposes in Israel. The Civil Aviation Authority of Israel (CAAI) was the first in the world to authorize commercial, fully unmanned drone flights in their nation’s airspace. Read More

 Hardware that responds to voice commands is already out there and probably in your hand or house right now. Whether it’s a smartphone, smart speaker or wearable, it has to connect to the cloud to deliver answers. Now, a startup called Mythic (formerly known as Isocline) is launching a chip and software that will change all that, putting voice control, computer vision and other kinds of… Read More

 Lystable, a startup that makes a workflow management platform aimed at businesses needing to manage lots of freelancers, has topped up its Series A again — this time with an additional $10 million, which founder and CEO Peter Johnston says will be used to fund a change of business model with a payments focus. Read More

 The way Ripcord CEO Alex Fielding discusses chief competitor Iron Mountain, the record keeping company sounds like it runs the warehouse from the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The startup comes out of stealth this week with the announcement of $9.5 million in funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for its goal of taking corporate records paperless through its industrial… Read More

 While CoreOS is probably still best known for its Linux distribution, that was only the company’s gateway drug to a wider range of services. Tectonic, the company’s service for running Kubernetes-based container deployments in the enterprise, now sits at the core of its business. Until now, Tectonic could only be used for installing and managing Kubernetes on bare-metal and… Read More

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth that times the frame rate. Matroid, a computer vision startup launching out of stealth today, enables anyone to take advantage of the information inherently embedded in video. You can build your own detector within the company’s intuitive, non-technical, web platform to detect people and most other objects. Reza Zadeh, founder… Read More

 Medical billing is a largely untapped and lucrative industry, potentially pulling in $55 billion globally by 2020. But it’s inner workings are still very murky — most of the time it’s not clear how much something will cost and sometimes you don’t even get the (possibly whopping) bill until months down the road. Founder Katelyn Gleason wants to make it easier to know… Read More

 As part of IBM’s annual InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, the company is announcing a new machine learning course in partnership with workspace and education provider Galvanize to familiarize students with IBM’s suite of Watson APIs. These APIs simplify the process of building tools that rely on language, speech and vision analysis. Going by the admittedly clunky name IBM… Read More

 IBM unveiled its “Blockchain as a Service” today, which is based on the open source Hyperledger Fabric, version 1.0 from The Linux Foundation. IBM Blockchain is a public cloud service that customers can use to build secure blockchain networks. The company introduced the idea last year, but this is the first ready-for-primetime implementation built using that technology.… Read More