One of the challenges in creating smaller and smaller devices these days, such as wearables and phones, is that the batteries can take up a lot of room. Cases are often designed around standard battery sizes, and it often creates wasted space….
Source: Engadget | Researchers 3D print custom-sized lithium-ion batteries
- Reuters: “US Regains Crown as Most Competitive Economy for First Time Since 2008: WEF” Whitehouse.gov (press release)
- US Is World’s Most Competitive Economy for First Time in a Decade Wall Street Journal
- US regains title of world’s most competitive economy Fox Business
- USA’s infamous ‘Tornado Alley’ may be shifting east USA TODAY
- Tornado Alley May Be Shifting East and Scientists Don’t Know Why The Weather Channel
At the stroke of midnight on Wednesday, October 17, 2018, the great people of Canada turned over a new leaf, becoming just the second country to legalize marijuana (Uruguay being the first).
In legalizing weed, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made good on a campaign promise and the move is expected to result in the injection of billions of dollars into Canada’s economy, including from U.S. cannabis tourists.
Canadian job seeker interest in the cannabis industry continues to surge. After a temporary spike following the June 20th legalization announcement, searches containing cannabis-related terms have climbed even further through the end of last weekpic.twitter.com/GTL6sPwbMc
— Brendon Bernard (@BrendonBernard_) October 17, 2018 Read more…
More about Canada, Marijuana, Legalization, Culture, and Drugs
Source: Mashable | Pass the poutine: Weed is now legal in Canada and everyone's celebrating
Reuters: “US Regains Crown as Most Competitive Economy for First Time Since 2008: WEF”
October 17, 2018
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Source: Google News | Reuters: “US Regains Crown as Most Competitive Economy for First Time Since 2008: WEF”
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Source: Google News | USA's infamous 'Tornado Alley' may be shifting east
Rocket Lab selects NASA's Virginia facility as its US spaceport
October 17, 2018
Source: Engadget | Rocket Lab selects NASA's Virginia facility as its US spaceport
Twitter publishes over 10 million tweets linked to election meddling
October 17, 2018
Source: Engadget | Twitter publishes over 10 million tweets linked to election meddling
Epsagon, an Israeli startup, launched today with a new serverless tool that helps customers monitor infrastructure, even when they don’t know where or what that is.
That’s the nature of serverless of course. It involves ephemeral resources. Developers build a series of event triggers and the cloud vendor spins up the necessary resources as needed. The beauty of that approach is programmers just codes without worrying about infrastructure, but the downside is that operations doesn’t have any way of controlling or understanding that infrastructure.
Epsagon is trying to solve that problem by giving visibility into serverless architecture. “What the company does, essentially is distributed tracing, observability and cost monitoring for serverless. We’ve been laying low for awhile, and now is actually the official launch of the company,” CEO and co-founder Nitzan Shapira told TechCrunch.
With serverless you can’t use an agent because you don’t know where to put it. There is no fixed server to attach it to. This makes using traditional logging tools inappropriate. Epsagon gets around this problem with an agentless approach using libraries. Shapria says the company will be open sourcing these libraries to make them more attractive to developers.
For starters, the company is supporting AWS Lambda, but plans to expand to other cloud platforms next year. First you sign up for Epsagon, enter your AWS credentials and it immediately begins providing some information about performance in the Epsagon dashboard. But Shapira says the real value comes from the libraries. “We have this library that is essentially the instrumentation, which acts in the same way an agent does,” he explained.
The product does more than simply provide traditional monitoring data though. It also allows customers to understand what they are spending. With serverless, the cloud company provides you resources as required, which is convenient, but could also spiral out of control quickly from a cost perspective. Epsagon lets you see exactly what you’re paying.
The company is still playing with pricing, but they are using a self-service approach for starters. You go and sign up on their website and there are a variety of pricing options starting with a free tier. All of the tiers have a free two-week trial.
Epsagon, which is based in Tel Aviv, currently has 11 employees. They are in the process of opening a US office where they will establish sales, marketing and support operations. They raised $4 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in January.
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Epsagon emerges from stealth with serverless monitoring tool
Source: Engadget | Scribd's latest reading bundle includes The New York Times
Hot on the heels of raising $20 million in Series C funding led by Japan’s Rakuten Capital, London-based money transfer service Azimo is launching a new service aimed at small and medium-sized businesses.
Dubbed “Azimo Business,” it lets SMEs across the U.K. and Europe send payments to an impressive 189 countries — including many emerging markets, which is Azimo’s traditional focus — and at a price the company claims undercuts banks by 50 percent or more.
The idea isn’t just to beat the banks on fees (which is often not hard to do) but also through better technology, delivering faster transfers and a smoother UX via the Azimo mobile apps and web versions.
In a brief call, Azimo co-founder and CEO Michael Kent told me that a fully fledged business version of Azimo was something that many of the company’s existing customers had been asking for as they wanted to expand their use of the money transfer service to the small businesses they operate, not just for sending money to family and friends in their original home country.
He also (rightly) noted that immigrants are much more likely to start their own business compared to native nationals, and that these micro and small businesses are often international in nature, such as importing or exporting specialist goods. This requires a significant amount of money transfer and exchange for things like paying suppliers and paying local salaries.
To that end, even though Azimo Business runs on the same rails as Azimo’s existing consumer service, Kent explained that there are additional regulatory requirements around anti-money laundering. This sees business users having to pass KYC and KYB checks, with Azimo ultimately needing to satisfy the regulator that it knows the beneficial owner of a business sending money.
However, the Azimo founder says that required building technology and processes to scale those checks but in a way that doesn’t expose Azimo to regulatory risk or creates too many false positives that would decline customers unnecessarily.
Meanwhile (and proof that there was pent-up demand), while running in beta, Azimo Business customers on average sent six times more money than Azimo’s consumer customers. The most popular sending countries were the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and France. The most popular receiving countries were Poland, China, Singapore, Pakistan, Hong-Kong, and South Africa
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Azimo launches business money transfer service
Source: Engadget | Skydio's follow-me drone takes commands from your Apple Watch