21st Century Innovative Technologies and Developments as also discoveries, curiosity ( insolite)...

Amazon announced Thursday it’s launching its own generative AI service through its cloud computing platform, targeting corporate customers who want to incorporate AI into their businesses, a split-off from other tech giants’ consumer-focused approaches to AI.

The AI service Amazon Bedrock offers companies tools to build and grow their own artificial intelligence applications designed for their business needs, according to an announcement from Amazon Web Services.

Amazon kauft Roomba-Hersteller für 1,7 Milliarden Dollar
Amazon steigt in den Markt der Saugroboter ein und konnte sich dafür einen der größten Player der Szene sichern. Der Deal könnte den Markt für Haushaltsrobotik auf den Kopf stellen.

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Those weird “loved ones come back from the dead to visit you” stunts pulled by celebrities like Kanye West may soon become a reality through your digital assistant.

At Amazon’s re:MARS conference, the company announced it’s working on a feature that can synthesize short audio clips of a person’s voice and then reprogram it as longer speech. Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, showed off a demonstration where, as TechCrunch described, “the voice of a deceased loved one (a grandmother, in this case), is used to read a grandson a bedtime story.”

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Amazon: Übernahme von MGM abgeschlossen
Die EU-Kommission gab grünes Licht, die FTC beschwerte sich nicht: Amazon hat den Kauf des US-Medienkonzerns MGM für 8,45 Milliarden US-Dollar abgeschlossen.

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Amazon's cloud subsidiary AWS has released its first research paper detailing a new architecture for a future quantum computer, which, if realized, could set a new standard for error correction.

The cloud company published a new blueprint for a fault-tolerant quantum computer that, although still purely theoretical, describes a new way of controlling quantum bits (or qubits) to ensure that they carry out calculations as accurately as possible.  

The paper is likely to grab the attention of many experts who are working to improve quantum error correction (QEC), a field that's growing in parallel with quantum computing that seeks to resolve one of the key barriers standing in the way of realising useful, large-scale quantum computers.

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Für 1,2 Milliarden US-Dollar übernimmt Amazon Medienberichten zufolge Zoox. Das Start-up entwickelt selbstfahrende Autos.

Amazon springt einmal mehr auf den Zug der selbstfahrenden Autos auf. Der Onlinehandelsgigant übernimmt das Start-up Zoox, Medienberichten zufolge für stolze 1,2 Milliarden US-Dollar (etwa 900 Millionen Euro).

Bereits vor einem Monat gab es entsprechende Hinweise, damals erklärte Zoox, es gebe Angebote und Verhandlungen zur Übernahme – jedoch wurde deren Herkunft nicht verraten. Nun ist es offiziell, Amazon hat das Ergebnis inzwischen mitgeteilt. Zum Kaufpreis schreibt der US-Konzern nichts, mehrere US-Medien hatten vorab jedoch nicht nur die Übernahme vermeldet, sondern auch den Preis in Milliardenhöhe.

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Amazon has announced that it's buying mesh networking fim Eero. The company was founded in 2015 and is based in San Francisco. According to Crunchbase it employs between 51 and 100 people.

In January 2018, the company laid off 30 employees, around 20% of the company. It has raised around $90 million in four funding rounds so far.

The company's product is selling simple, powerful networking hardware that's easy to use. Eero says that you can take its product out of the box and have it up and running in 10 minutes.


It has two main products, a smaller repeater that plugs into a power outlet and a larger device that can cover 1,500 sq feet with Wi-Fi. The hardware scales so that larger houses can add more devices to provide comprehensive wireless coverage.

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On Wednesday, the world learned of a new industry association called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, and it includes some of the biggest tech companies in the world. IBM, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have all signed on as marquis members, though the group hopes to expand even further over time. The goal is to create a body that can provide a platform for discussions among stakeholders and work out best practices for the artificial intelligence industry. Not directly mentioned, but easily seen on the horizon, is its place as the primary force lobbying for smarter legislation on AI and related future-tech issues.

Best practices can be boring or important, depending on the context, and in this case they are very, very important. Best practices could provide a framework for accurate safety testing, which will be important as researchers ask people to put more and more of their lives in the hands of AI and AI-driven robots. This sort of effort might also someday work toward a list of inherently dangerous and illegitimate actions or AI “thought” processes. One of its core goals is to produce thought leadership on the ethics of AI development.

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Amazon hat Cloostermans übernommen, ein belgisches Unternehmen, das Lagermaschinen und Robotik herstellt. Die Beschäftigten von Cloostermans werden zu Amazon Robotics wechseln, erklärte Amazon am 9. September 2022. Die Bedingungen des Kaufs wurden nicht bekannt gegeben.

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Amazon is buying robot vacuum cleaner company iRobot in a deal valued at approximately $1.7 billion.  

iRobot is best known for the Roomba, the autonomous vacuum cleaner that finds its way around household obstacles to vacuum floors completely on its own. It also makes robot mop devices, too.

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Amazon bietet mithilfe von Augmented Reality (AR) virtuelle Sneaker  an: Die neue Funktion "Virtual Try-On for Shoes" ermöglicht es Kunden, Schuhe virtuell anzuprobieren und aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln zu betrachten.

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Der Online-Riese Amazon kauft das für die James-Bond-Filme bekannte Hollywood-Studio Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM). Der Kaufpreis wird 8,45 Milliarden Dollar (rund 6,9 Milliarden Euro) betragen.

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Amazon.com Inc.’s Dec. 30 announcement that it was acquiring 4-year-old podcast network Wondery has industry insiders again saying the medium could turn a corner in the new year. The investment follows Sirius XM Holdings Inc., Spotify Technology SA, and a string of others spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy podcasting companies.

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After nearly a year of testing, Amazon on Tuesday announced the general availability its Amazon Managed Blockchain, a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks.

Amazon originally announced the blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) at its AWS re:Invent conference last June, inviting companies to sign up for a pilot of it.

Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at Amazon Web Services, said the offering is now available for production use in the U.S. East (North Virginia) Region.


[ Further reading: Blockchain jobs remain unfilled, while skilled workers are being poached ]
"You can use it to create scalable blockchain networks that use the Hyperledger Fabric open source framework, with Ethereum in the works," Barr said in a blog post today. "You can create your network in minutes. Once created, you can easily manage and maintain your blockchain network. You can manage certificates, invite new members, and scale out peer node capacity in order to process transactions more quickly."

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has joined a list of BaaS providers that already includes IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

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TechCrunch has learned that Amazon has acquired Body Labs, a company with a stated aim of creating true-to-life 3D body models to support various b2b software applications — such as virtually trying on clothes or photorealistic avatars for gaming.

One source suggested the price-tag Amazon paid for Body Labs could be $100M+. However a second well-placed source suggested it’s closer to $70M than $100M — so we’re pegging it at between $50M and $70M.

An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment on the acquisition.

New York based Body Labs was founded in March 2013, according to CrunchBase, and had raised more than $10M across two investment rounds — closing an $8M Series A in November 2015.

The company says its AI, computer vision, and body modeling expertise stems from research started at Brown University and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.

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