Amazon Connect will be available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Region in the coming months, which lets businesses in Japan offer the best possible customer service experience to their customers.  The expansion into Tokyo provides  you more options to provision your Amazon Connect cloud contact center with the other AWS services you use.  

Amazon SageMaker now includes an improved Pipe Mode implementation that accelerates the speed at which data can be streamed from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) into SageMaker, while training machine learning (ML) models. The latest implementation of Pipe Mode provides up to 9 times better data streaming throughput compared to File Mode.

AWS Cost Explorer’s Reserved Instance (RI) Utilization and Coverage reports provide you with the ability to visualize your utilization and coverage trends both at a high level (e.g., utilization across all Amazon RDS reservations) or for highly-specific requests (e.g., utilization of all regional Amazon EC2 reservations owned by a particular linked account).

Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports global transaction identifiers (GTIDs), which uniquely identify each transaction on the server and within a replication setup.

Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports MySQL Community Edition minor versions 5.5.61, 5.6.41, and 5.7.23 in all AWS Regions. These new versions include functionality improvements and fixes for the MySQL database engine.

Courtesy of XinaBox, here is a chance to win one of three sets of the ingenious, modular xChips. Specifically, the IoT-friendly “XK12 IoT Starter Kit, powered by Zerynth”.

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Thanks to the Nikkei for this one – the top ten Japanese R&D spenders this year:

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Samtec has bought Precision Connector Inc (PCI) the specialist in the design and manufacture of precision RF and microwave coaxial connectors. The acquisition brings over 25 years of design experience in the RF/Microwave industry to the Samtec team. The additional engineering support and product offering of precision interconnects—such as 3.50 mm, 2.92 mm, SMP, 2.40 …

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SemiGen of Londonderry New Hampshire, which provides RF and microwave contract assembly, automated PCB assembly (PCBA), foundry services, semiconductor devices, and RF supplies, has bought Ion Beam Milling of Manchester, New Hampshire. Ion Beam Milling is a 35-year-old manufacturing company who pioneered several thin film circuit processing techniques using innovative ion beam milling approaches. They …

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Pickering Interfaces of Clacton-on-Sea have launched a 13-model family of 8GHz solid-state RF PXI switches, including SPDT, SP4T, SP6T, SP8T, SP16T and 4×4 Matrix devices. Pickering’s series 40-88xA high-performance switch family now covers 10MHz to 8GHz in the modular PXI format for easy system integration. Targeting the telecoms and semiconductor test industries and compatible with …

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