GCT Semiconductor announces an LTE device which will also support the Sigfox wireless IoT interface.

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Take these vendor reports and surveys with a grain of salt. But there are plenty of kernels of truth, too.

Amazon EC2 recently transitioned from hourly to per-second billing. Previously, as your jobs completed, AWS Batch would retain idle compute resources for the majority of the billing hour in order to avoid the cost associated with additional instance launches within the hour. With per-second billing, AWS customers are able to focus on their applications instead of maximizing usage to the hour. As a result, AWS Batch will now evaluate compute resources more frequently and immediately scale down any idle instances when there are no more runnable jobs in your job queues.

You can now configure your Amazon Kinesis Analytics applications to transform data before it is processed by your SQL code. This new feature allows you to use AWS Lambda to convert formats, enrich data, filter data, and more. Once the data is transformed by your function, Kinesis Analytics sends the data to your application’s SQL code for real-time analytics.

Amazon EMR is now billed in one-second increments in all AWS Regions. There is a 1 minute minimum charge per instance in your Amazon EMR cluster, and per-second billing is applicable to clusters that are newly launched or already running. The Amazon EC2 instances in your cluster, including On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved instances, and Amazon EBS volumes attached to these instances are billed in per-second increments effective October 2 . Pricing is still listed on a per-hour basis, but bills are now calculated down to the second and show times in decimal form. Please visit the Amazon EMR pricing page for more information on per-second billing.

AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) has added Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Azure SQL Database as migration sources. Amazon S3 is object storage with a simple web interface to store and retrieve any amount of data. Now that S3 is supported as both a source and a target, you can easily move your data between S3 buckets and any database supported by DMS.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), today announced the release of the following:

• SDK for Node.js.
• General availability in two new regions, Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and South America (São Paulo). DAX is already available in US East (N. Virginia), EU (Ireland), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and US West (N. California.
• Support for new R4 instances in US East (N. Virginia), EU (Ireland), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and South America (São Paulo). R4 is the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory Optimized instances, with 2X the cache sizes of current R3 instances, well-suited for memory-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads such as DAX.

You can now use Apache Livy (0.4) and new versions of Hue (4.0.1), Presto (0.184), Flink (1.3.2) and Apache Pig (0.17) on Amazon EMR release 5.9.0. Apache Livy is an application that enables you to submit, interact with, and manage Apache Spark applications over a REST interface. Hue 4.0.1 includes a redesigned interface and new SQL editor, interactive Spark notebook, and an improved job browser UI. Also, Apache Spark on release 5.9.0 now uses SSL instead of 3DES for in-transit encryption for the block transfer service, giving performance enhancements when using Amazon EC2 instance types with AES-NI. Additionally, we have added several enhancements to Spark to improve resilience and performance during Auto Scaling.

Adafruit has created an ARM Cortex-M0 version of its Gemma wearable development board and single-board computer – the original has an 8bit ATtiny85. Called Gemma M0 it is 28mm in diameter and 7mm high, with crocodile clip sewing pads for solderless wearable applications and a Microchip (Atmel) ATSAMD21E18 on-board. This vastly more powerful chip offers …

This story continues at 32bit ARM power in a tiny wearable, sewable, package

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Having uncovered the industry’s brightest young talent last year, the search is on for the BrightSparks of 2018.

This story continues at BrightSparks 2018: Be one to watch

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