Four years after pioneering indoor positioning, and with the technology now installed across many of its 1845 stores, the retailer acknowledges its supplier. Is asset tracking next?

Today, Amazon Pinpoint is launching a new dashboard for transactional SMS messages. This dashboard includes information about the number of SMS messages that you sent, the number of messages that were received, and your average delivery rate. It also includes a section that breaks out your message deliveries by country. This data makes it easy to see how many messages you sent to each country or region, as well as the average price that you paid for sending those messages. This information enables you to optimize both your costs and delivery performance for transactional SMS messages.

For more information about the new transactional SMS message dashboards, see the Amazon Pinpoint User Guide .

Starting today, Amazon CloudFront has made the process of adding an alternate domain name to a distribution even more secure than before. Now, when you add an alternate domain name, like www.example.com, to a distribution, you must also attach a SSL/TLS certificate to that distribution that covers the alternate domain name. With today’s release, only those with authorized access to your domain’s certificate can add your domain to a CloudFront distribution as an alternate domain name.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now provides built-in event monitoring and alerting, enabling you to monitor the data stored in your domain and automatically send notifications based on pre-configured thresholds. For example, if you are storing HTTP server logs in your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain, you can now monitor the response codes and alert your team if there are too many errors, right from your domain. 

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capability to your applications. Amazon Transcribe now supports real-time transcription of audio in the following new languages: British English, French, and Canadian French. These languages expand upon the existing two languages already available in Amazon Transcribe’s streaming service: US English and Mexican Spanish.

The new set of languages expands the markets served by Amazon Transcribe to enable use cases in contact centers, media and entertainment, education, among others, to reach a broader global audience.

British English, French, and Canadian French support for streaming transcription are available in all AWS Regions that Amazon Transcribe is available at no additional cost. Learn more about streaming transcription using this documentation page . For more information on language support, visit this documentation page .

Amazon Web Services today announced the availability of a replatforming assistant for Microsoft SQL Server, a new scripting tool that makes it easier to modernize existing SQL Server workloads from Windows to Linux and save on Windows licensing costs.

You can now use Apache HBase 1.4.9, Apache Flink 1.7.1, and Apache Oozie 5.1.0 on Amazon EMR release 5.22.0. These releases include various bug fixes and stability improvements.

Also, with this release, we have increased the default EBS storage size of EC2 instances that have EBS-only storage. The size increase is proportional to the size of the EC2 instance and we have spread the increase over multiple EBS volumes. This change allows applications such as Spark to take better advantage of the IOPS performance of the EBS volumes when writing intermediate data to disk which in turn results in better job performance.

Additionally, with this release, you can use the upgraded version of Apache Phoenix 4.14.1 and Apache Zeppelin 0.8.1.

You can create an Amazon EMR cluster with the release 5.22.0 by choosing the release label “emr-5.22.0” from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDK. You can choose HBase, Oozie, Flink, Phoenix, and Zeppelin to install these applications when you launch your EMR cluster. Please visit the Amazon EMR documentation for more information about EMR release 5.22.0, HBase 1.4.9 , Oozie 5.1.0 , Flink 1.7.1 , Phoenix 4.14.1 , and Zeppelin 0.8.1 .

Amazon EMR release 5.22.0 is now available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR .

You can stay up to date on EMR releases by subscribing to the RSS feed for EMR release notes. Use the RSS icon at the top of the EMR Release Guide to link the feed URL directly to your favorite feed reader.

 

AWS Elemental MediaStore now supports chunked object transfer , a standard that lets you build ultra-low latency end-to-end workflows for over-the-top (OTT) video. When using chunked object transfer to deliver segmented objects, your video segments are split into smaller chunks that can be played before the complete segment is delivered. Video players can begin playback by requesting video from CDNs such as Amazon CloudFront , which in turn can start downloading the beginning of a video segment from MediaStore while the encoder is still in the process of writing the end of that same segment.

The Amplify Console is now available in five new AWS regions: Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and EU (Frankfurt). This expands the number of AWS regions where Amplify Console is available to 11.

The Amplify Console is a fully managed hosting service for fullstack serverless web applications. Learn more about hosting your web app on our Product and Getting Started pages.

Devon-based LED chip-maker Plessey is to focus entirely on micro-LED-based micro-displays, and has ceased launching new lighting LEDs. “The business strategy is 100% micro-LED applications: augmented reality, virtual reality, smart watches and large panel outdoor displays,” Plessey president of business development Mike Lee told Electronics Weekly. “Right now, we are in the middle of raising …

This story continues at Plessey’s pins future on micro-LED displays, and gears up for production

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