AWS Mobile Hub now includes an integration with Amazon Lex, so you can build mobile apps that use speech and text, in addition to touch to your mobile app. This lets you use the technology that powers Amazon Alexa to create engaging speech- and text-based conversational bots in your own app. Each bot you create with Mobile Hub uses Amazon Lex to recognize the intent of natural language input and triggers appropriate business functions. You can create engaging conversational experiences for common app scenarios such as booking tickets, ordering products, logging tickets with customer support, querying an internal IT helpdesk system, and more.

Amazon Rekognition is a service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications. With Rekognition, you can detect objects, scenes, and faces in images. You can also search and compare faces. Rekognition’s API lets you easily build powerful visual search and discovery into your applications. With Amazon Rekognition, you only pay for the images you analyze and the face metadata you store. There are no minimum fees and there are no upfront commitments.

One of the attractive ways in which the world is trending is that many people can work from anywhere. A number of organisations have sprung up to provide working sites in exotic locations. Hubud provides an environment in Bali with desks and fast Internet and help with accommodation and transport and local requirements. Or there’s …

Read full article: Working In Shangri-La

Touch control moves into mid-air gesture control with tactile feedback. Bastien Beauvois describes some of the techniques for designing haptic touch interfaces.

Read full article: In the air gesture control gets haptic feedback

Thanks to the IMF for this one – the ten biggest economies: $trn USA 18.5 China 11.4 Japan 4.4 Germany 3.5 UK 2.8 France 2.5 India 2.3 Italy 1.9 Brazil 1.5 Canada 1.5

Read full article: Top Ten Economies

X-FAB and efabless corporation have launched an open mixed-signal design challenge. The objective of this challenge is to give designers the opportunity to deliver a completed design IP for an ultra-low power voltage reference. The IP will be developed in X-FAB’s 350nm mixed-signal process with designers being granted access to the required models, design files …

Read full article: X-Fab launches mixed-signal design contest

Intel has set up a new group called the Automated Driving Group (ADG) led by Doug Davis and Kathy Winter. Today’s announcement comes after CEO Brian Krzanich announced a $250 million investment for autonomous driving. Intel is teaming with Delphi and Mobileye for Self-Driving Cars and cars based on the Intel solution are expected to …

Read full article: Intel sets up autonomous car group

Molex can print silver flexible circuits on polyester (PET) substrates with tacks as narrow as 0.13mm (0.005in) spaced by as little as 0.13mm. And it has a way to attach fine-pitch ICs. “The process creates a viable, cost-effective alternative to traditional flexible circuits: etched copper traces on polyimide,” said the firm. “Polyimide is more expensive than …

Read full article: Printing makes tracks down to 0.13mm on flexi PET

National Instruments outlines plans for supporting time sensitive networking for the deterministic handling of data over Ethernet for industrial IoT applications.

Read full article: NIDays 2016: Industrial IoT routes itself into Time Sensitive Networking

AWS Competency Program & Financial Services Partners
The AWS Partner Network (APN) is thrilled to announce the launch of the new AWS Financial Services Competency. The AWS Competency Program is designed to highlight APN Partners who have demonstrated industry expertise, readily implemented solutions that align with AWS architectural best practices, and have staff with AWS-certifications.