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News Feed Item Alexa Skills Kit Turns One, Adds New Features for Skill Discovery |
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(NASDAQ:AMZN)—One year ago, Amazon opened Alexa to developers, making it simple and free for them to build Alexa skills and integrate Alexa into their own products. Today, tens of thousands of developers are building skills for Alexa, and there are over 1,400 new skills for Alexa—including Lyft and Honeywell, which were added today. As the selection of skills continues to grow, Amazon is introducing new, simple ways to discover and enable Alexa skills. The skills section of the Alexa app is now completely redesigned. Starting today, customers can browse Alexa skills by categories such as “Smart Home” and “Lifestyle” in the Alexa app, apply additional search filters, and access their previously enabled skills via the “Your Skills” section. Also available today, Alexa customers can use their voice to enable skills: simply say “Alexa, enable NBC News” or “Alexa, enable 7 minute workout” and access them instantly. “We are thrilled that tens of thousands of developers are already building skills for Alexa, helping to grow our Alexa skill selection by 50% in just over a month. And today, we’re excited to introduce new features that make it even easier for customers to discover those skills,” said Steve Rabuchin, Vice President, Amazon Alexa. “This is a win for developers and for customers, and we can’t wait to hear what they think.” Some fun facts about the Alexa Skills Kit, Alexa Voice Service, and Alexa Fund include:
About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160628005476/en/ Latest Stories
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“We’re bringing out a new application monitoring system to the DevOps space. It manages large enterprise applications that are distributed throughout a node in many enterprises and we manage them as one collective,” explained Kevin Barnes, President of eCube Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Much of the value of DevOps comes from a (renewed) focus on measurement, sharing, and continuous feedback loops. In increasingly complex DevOps workflows and environments, and especially in larger, regulated, or more crystallized organizations, these core concepts become even more critical. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk, showed how, by focusing on ‘metrics that matter,’ you can provide objective, transparent, and meaningful f…
DBmaestro has announced the release of TeamWork Version 5.1, which improves its database release automation interoperability to support seamless integration with all sources of database changes, while predicting the success of database deployments and alerting for configuration drift. Additionally, Version 5.1 includes dozens of security upgrades and improvements to integrations with solutions such as Jira, Jenkins and CA Release Automation.
Predictive analytics tools monitor, report, and troubleshoot in order to make proactive decisions about the health, performance, and utilization of storage. Most enterprises combine cloud and on-premise storage, resulting in blended environments of physical, virtual, cloud, and other platforms, which justifies more sophisticated storage analytics. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Peter McCallum, Vice President of Datacenter Solutions at FalconStor, discussed using predictive analytics to mon…
Basho Technologies has announced the latest release of Basho Riak TS, version 1.3. Riak TS is an enterprise-grade NoSQL database optimized for Internet of Things (IoT). The open source version enables developers to download the software for free and use it in production as well as make contributions to the code and develop applications around Riak TS. Enhancements to Riak TS make it quick, easy and cost-effective to spin up an instance to test new ideas and build IoT applications. In addition to…
When people aren’t talking about VMs and containers, they’re talking about serverless architecture. Serverless is about no maintenance. It means you are not worried about low-level infrastructural and operational details. An event-driven serverless platform is a great use case for IoT. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Animesh Singh, an STSM and Lead for IBM Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, will detail how to build a distributed serverless, polyglot, microservices framework using open source tec…
What does it look like when you have access to cloud infrastructure and platform under the same roof? Let’s talk about the different layers of Technology as a Service: who cares, what runs where, and how does it all fit together. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Lead Technology Evangelist at SoftLayer, an IBM company, spoke about the picture being painted by IBM Cloud and how the tools being crafted can help fill the gaps in your IT infrastructure.
Apixio Inc. has raised $19.3 million in Series D venture capital funding led by SSM Partners with participation from First Analysis, Bain Capital Ventures and Apixio’s largest angel investor. Apixio will dedicate the proceeds toward advancing and scaling products powered by its cognitive computing platform, further enabling insights for optimal patient care. The Series D funding comes as Apixio experiences strong momentum and increasing demand for its HCC Profiler solution, which mines unstruc…
Digital Initiatives create new ways of conducting business, which drive the need for increasingly advanced security and regulatory compliance challenges with exponentially more damaging consequences. In the BMC and Forbes Insights Survey in 2016, 97% of executives said they expect a rise in data breach attempts in the next 12 months. Sixty percent said operations and security teams have only a general understanding of each other’s requirements, resulting in a “SecOps gap” leaving organizations u…
IoT offers a value of almost $4 trillion to the manufacturing industry through platforms that can improve margins, optimize operations & drive high performance work teams. By using IoT technologies as a foundation, manufacturing customers are integrating worker safety with manufacturing systems, driving deep collaboration and utilizing analytics to exponentially increased per-unit margins. However, as Benoit Lheureux, the VP for Research at Gartner points out, “IoT project implementers often …
Edge Hosting has announced a partnership with and the availability of CloudFlare, a web application firewall, CDN and DDoS mitigation service. “This partnership enhances Edge Hosting’s world class, perimeter layer, application (layer 7) defensive mechanism,” said Mark Houpt, Edge Hosting CISO. “The goal was to enable a new layer of customer controlled defense and compliance through the application of DDoS filters and mitigations, the web application firewall (WAF) feature and the added benefit …
It is one thing to build single industrial IoT applications, but what will it take to build the Smart Cities and truly society changing applications of the future? The technology won’t be the problem, it will be the number of parties that need to work together and be aligned in their motivation to succeed. In his Day 2 Keynote at @ThingsExpo, Henrik Kenani Dahlgren, Portfolio Marketing Manager at Ericsson, discussed how to plan to cooperate, partner, and form lasting all-star teams to change t…
Keeping pace with advancements in software delivery processes and tooling is taxing even for the most proficient organizations. Point tools, platforms, open source and the increasing adoption of private and public cloud services requires strong engineering rigor – all in the face of developer demands to use the tools of choice. As Agile has settled in as a mainstream practice, now DevOps has emerged as the next wave to improve software delivery speed and output. To make DevOps work, organization…
“Avere Systems is a hybrid cloud solution provider. We have customers that want to use cloud storage and we have customers that want to take advantage of cloud compute,” explained Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing at Avere Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
“A lot of times people will come to us and have a very diverse set of requirements or very customized need and we’ll help them to implement it in a fashion that you can’t just buy off of the shelf,” explained Nick Rose, CTO of Enzu, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 18th Cloud Expo, held June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.More Stories
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By Xenia von Wedel  xMatters for the Enterprise DevOps toolchain stitches together the disparate operational tools to help orchestrate hand-offs between the tools and team members. Customers like us because we understand the need for DevOps or NoOps automation at enterprise scale and recognize that humans are still involved when something goes wrong.Jun. 28, 2016 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 865 |
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By Scott Allen  Time and again, those keeping a pulse on the Internet of Things (IoT) space frequently hear about the “rise of the machines.” Humanity is not only discovering fascinating ways to integrate machines into our daily lives, but also finding new uses for machines as well. How? Machines are now “internet-connected” just like the smartphones we carry around in our pockets. And this isn’t just on the comm…Jun. 28, 2016 08:30 AM EDT Reads: 790 |
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By Kevin Jackson  Karen Field, Penton Communications’ IoT Institute director, in her article “Start Small to Gain Big,” postulated an oil drilling platform with 30,000 sensors would generate about 1 Terabyte of data per day. She also stressed that only 1% of that data would likely be used. From a systems engineering point of view this data flow is multiplied by the trillions of other IoT sensors in the cloud, intro…Jun. 28, 2016 08:30 AM EDT Reads: 1,003 |
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By Scott Allen  Fog Computing is being touted as the data communication solution our Internet of Things (IoT) devices are asking for by bringing the power of cloud computing closer to the end user. The fact is, the number of connected devices is going to continue to grow exponentionally. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020 IoT will include 26 billion connected things. Consider the impact that amount of data co…Jun. 27, 2016 01:15 PM EDT Reads: 1,113 |
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