Cyber Monday: talking tech at the Amazon Web Services conference

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LAS VEGAS (NEWS 1130) – Cyber Monday wouldn’t exist without the internet, and it’s just one of the areas of life that are increasingly dominated by the Cloud.

Tens of thousands of people are attending the Amazon Web Services conference this week in Las Vegas, where they’re using the company division that’s on track to produce more than $20 billion USD in revenue this year. The same goes for Microsoft’s cloud division, followed by IBC, Google, and many others.

AWS’ vast array of products are never seen by most people, and for good reason.

This conference is for the people who make the thing that goes into the thing that you see as a customer service centre, a chat bot for shopping, or hear as a natural-language inquiry system or voice-activated speaker among many other aspects of daily life.

More than 40,000 showed up for what’s called re:Invent last year and more are expected this year.

Technology’s biggest names are competing for tens of billions of dollars as the Cloud expands, and they’re also interested in small customers.

Gigabytes of free storage are there for the taking, and more space is offered, at a price, for businesses.
AWS baits the hook with storage and analytics products most of us will never hear of.

“For instance flight sale, one of our services that enables an individual or a small business to go ahead and host a website or about a cup of coffee per month or so,”Jeffrey Kratz with AWS’ Canadian public sector unit explains.

The big fish, of course, are large businesses and government. Earlier this year, Amazon and six partners landed federal contracts for Cloud computing in a project running through 2024.

Sports and high-speed data

It’s not just people who use mountains of data — a global sport does so as well, at high speed.

Formula 1 auto racing is a $2 billion-a-year business that lives on data. At the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Sunday each car generated 1,500 data points per second, all collected and plugged into machine learning systems in real time.

It brings insight to fans but also helps F1 shape its design rules.

Similar deals with the NFL and major league baseball give predictions about catching a pass or stealing a base, and business executives who make big decision about the cloud and analytics might be watching.

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