AWS Startups Blog

I recently embarked on a journey to bring AWS Startup Days to Johannesburg, Lagos, Accra and Nairobi. Here’s what I learn about startups, founders, and investors as I engaged with some of the hottest startup ecosystems in Africa.

Pillar Project changed the base of their architecture entirely to facilitate a vision: an ability to ingest ever increasing amounts of data from various blockchain networks with high durability, low latency, fault-tolerance, transferability and ultimately store this data in a useful, unrestricted way. Here’s how they did it.

In 2006, Mike Ford and Mike Rogers were working together at a health tech startup digitizing paper-based claims sent from hospitals to medical funds. At the time, Ford had an investment in a local hostel through which he gained unique insight into how the Internet was disrupting hospitality management. He experienced the struggles of hoteliers who couldn’t connect their systems with online booking sites to centrally manage their rates and availability, and drew a striking resemblance to the conversion problems that he and Rogers were solving between hospitals and medical funds. Ford quickly worked with Rogers to build what would become their flagship product. From that, SiteMinder was born.

AWS is back in Helsinki, Finland for its third year at the Slush Conference. Check out the agenda here!

Ambyint, a Calgary- and Houston-based startup focused on oil & gas well optimization and automation, provides an artificial lift automation and optimization solution to engineering and operations teams that scales production workflows using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and physics-based mathematics. AWS recently caught up with Ambyint CEO Alex Robart to learn more about what trends he sees in the oil & gas industry, how Ambyint differentiates itself, and where the company goes next.

Prior to co-founding Glia in 2012, Justin DiPietro and Dan Michaeli were working with Accenture. Though their original project was to figure out how this retailer could compete against rising e-commerce rivals, they quickly realized that the company’s greatest strength was not its prices, but rather its employees. Realizing they needed to compete with the convenience of online rivals, DiPietro explains, the business needed to find a way to “bring the in-person customer experience online.”

When thinking of two types of businesses that are at odds, startups versus enterprises would be a pair that quickly comes to mind. But what if you’re a B2B entrepreneur that serves these enterprises as customers? This question and more was what a handful of early-stage entrepreneurs were looking to learn the answers to at a recent event hosted at the AWS San Francisco Loft.

Wellstreet, the tech innovation ecosystem, and investment group announced it was launching the Wellstreet Fintech Loft in collaboration with AWS.

The reality is that every new application deployed in the cloud expands the potential attack surface and the number of possible entry points into the network. Frederick Harris, Director of Product Marketing & Cloud Security at Fortinet sat down to tell us more.

Suppose you are building location-aware applications to make the mobile workforce more productive and logistics networks more efficient. To do this, you would start by getting the live location and then show it to the customer on a map in real-time. To do that successfully, you also need to operate complex infrastructure to ingest, process, store, provision, and manage this data. Enter HyperTrack.