Frederic Lardinois
TechCrunch
Portland, OR, United States
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Recent articles by Frederic:
Why AWS is selling a MIDI keyboard to teach machine learning –
Earlier this week, AWS launched DeepComposer, a set of web-based tools for learning about AI to make music and a $99 MIDI keyboard for inputting melodies. That launch created a fair bit of confusion, though, so we sat down with Mike Miller, the director of AWS’s AI Devices group, to talk about where DeepComposer fits […] → Read More
Qualcomm launches the XR2 platform for 5G-connected AR and VR devices –
At its Snapdragon Boondoggle Summit in sunny Maui, Hawaii, Qualcomm today announced the launch of its XR2 platform, which it describes as the “world’s first 5G-supported extended reality (XR) platform.” The company’s older XR1 platform, which already powers a number of VR and AR devices, will remain in the market and is now branded as […] → Read More
AWS launches discounted spot capacity for its Fargate container platform –
AWS today quietly brought spot capacity to Fargate, its serverless compute engine for containers that supports both the company’s Elastic Container Service and, now, its Elastic Kubernetes service. Like spot instances for the EC2 compute platform, Fargate Spot pricing is significantly cheaper, both for storage and compute, than regular Fargate pricing. In return, though, you […] → Read More
AWS’ CodeGuru uses machine learning to automate code reviews –
AWS today announced CodeGuru, a new machine learning-based service that automates code reviews based on the data the company has gathered from doing code reviews internally. Developers write the code and simply add CodeGuru to the pull requests. It supports GitHub and CodeCommit, for the time being. The CodeGuru uses its knowledge of reviews from […] → Read More
AWS launches Sagemaker Studio, a web-based IDE for machine learning –
At its re:Invent conference, AWS CEO Andy Jassy today announced the launch of SageMaker Studio, a web-based IDO for building and training machine learning workflows. It includes everything a data scientist would need to get started with, including ways to organize notebooks, data sets, code and models, for example. It essentially wants to be a […] → Read More
AWS speeds up Redshift queries 10x with AQUA –
At its re:Invent conference, AWS CEO Andy Jassy today announced the launch of AQUA (the Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift, the company’s data warehousing service. As Jassy noted in his keynote, it’s hard to scale data warehouses when you want to do analytics over that data. At some point, as your data warehouse or […] → Read More
AWS launches its custom Inferentia inferencing chips –
At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced the launch of its Inferentia chips, which it initially announced last year. These new chips promise to make inferencing, that is, using the machine learning models you pre-trained earlier, significantly faster and cost effective. As AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted, a lot of companies are focussing on custom […] → Read More
Mozilla launches the next phase of its Firefox Private Network VPN beta –
Mozilla today announced that its Firefox Private Network (FPN), which lets you encrypt your Firefox connections, is now in an extended beta after a few months of relatively limited testing in the Firefox Test Pilot program. This beta, however, is only available to users in the U.S. and the free service is restricted to 12 […] → Read More
CircleCI launches improved AWS support –
For about a year now, continuous integration and delivery service CircleCI, has offered Orbs, a way to easily reuse commands and integrations with third-party services. Unsurprisingly, some of the most popular Orbs focus on AWS, since that’s where most of the company’s developers are either testing their code or deploying it to. Today, right in […] → Read More
AWS launches Braket, its quantum computing service –
While Google, Microsoft, IBM and others have made a lot of noise around their quantum computing efforts in recent months, AWS remained quiet. The company, after all, never had its own quantum research division. Today, though, AWS announced the preview launch of Braket (named after the common notation for quantum states), its own quantum computing […] → Read More
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is coming to Disrupt Berlin –
Back in 2010, the web performance and security company Cloudflare launched in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield competition. The company came in second. Earlier this year, Cloudflare IPOed. To talk about this journey, Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince will join us on the main stage at Disrupt Berlin on December 12. He’ll also participate in a […] → Read More
Android’s Ambient Mode will soon come to ‘select devices’ –
You’ve probably heard murmurs about Google’s forthcoming Ambient Mode for Android . The company first announced this feature, which essentially turns an Android device into a smart display while it’s charging, in September. Now, in a Twitter post, Google confirmed that it will launch soon, starting with a number of select devices that run Android […] → Read More
AWS Translate comes to 22 new languages and 6 new regions –
AWS seems to be using this week to get some news out ahead of its annual re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas next week. In addition to new IoT services and updates to its Rekognition AI service, the company also today announced that it is bringing 22 new languages to its AWS Translate service and […] → Read More
AWS expands its IoT services, brings Alexa to devices with only 1MB of RAM –
AWS today announced a number of IoT-related updates that, for the most part, aim to make getting started with its IoT services easier, especially for companies that are trying to deploy a large fleet of devices. The marquee announcement, however, is about the Alexa Voice Service, which makes Amazon’s Alex voice assistant available to hardware […] → Read More
Cloud Foundry’s Kubernetes bet with Project Eirini hits 1.0 –
Cloud Foundry, the open-source platform-as-a-service that, with the help of lots of commercial backers, is currently in use by the majority of Fortune 500 companies, launched well before containers, and especially the Kubernetes orchestrator, were a thing. Instead, the project built its own container service, but the rise of Kubernetes obviously created a lot of […] → Read More
MontyCloud raises $2.85 million for its cloud management platform –
For enterprises that want to move to the cloud, that actual move is often hard enough, but in the long run, being able to manage the lifecycle of their cloud deployments is just as important. MontyCloud, which focuses on these kinds of Day-2 operations, today announced that it has raised a $2.85 million seed round […] → Read More
G Suite users get more AI writing help, Google Assistant calendar integration and more –
Google is launching a number of updates to its G Suite tools today that, among other things, brings to Google Docs an AI grammar checker, smarter spellchecking and, soon, spelling autocorrect. The company is also launching the ability for G Suite users to use the Google Assistant to read out a calendar schedule and, maybe […] → Read More
Google Cloud launches Bare Metal Solution –
Google Cloud today announced the launch of a new bare metal service, dubbed the Bare Metal Solution. We aren’t talking about bare metal servers offered directly by Google Cloud here, though. Instead, we’re talking about a solution that enterprises can use to run their specialized workloads on certified hardware that’s co-located in the Google Cloud […] → Read More
Smart Compose is coming to Google Docs –
At its Cloud Next event in London, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian today announced that Smart Compose, the AI-powered feature that currently tries to complete phrases and sentences for you in Gmail, is also coming to G Suite’s Google Docs soon. For now, though, your G Suite admin has to sign up for the beta […] → Read More
Starburst raises $22M to modernize data analytics with Presto –
Starburst, the company that’s looking to monetize the open-source Presto distributed query engine, today announced that it has raised a $22 million funding round led by Index Ventures, with the firm’s partner Mike Volpi joining the board. The general idea behind Presto is to allow anybody to use the standard SQL query language to run […] → Read More