We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon EC2 P3 instances, the next-generation of EC2 compute-optimized GPU instances. P3 instances are powered by up to 8 of the latest-generation NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and are ideal for computationally advanced workloads such as machine learning (ML), high performance computing (HPC), data compression, and cryptography. They are also ideal for specific industry applications for scientific computing and simulations, financial analytics, and image and video processing.

Flying drones and robots now patrol distribution warehouses - they've become workhorses of the e-commerce era online that retailers can't do without. It is driving down costs but it is also putting people out of work: what price progress? It could be a scene from Blade Runner 2049; the flying drone hovers in the warehouse aisle, its spinning rotors filling the cavernous space with a buzzing whine. It edges close to the packages stacked on the shelf and scans them using onboard optical sensors, before whizzing off to its next assignment. But this is no sci-fi film, it's a warehouse in the US - one of around 250,000 throughout the country, many gargantuan in size: retail giant Walmart's smallest warehouse, for example, is larger than 17 football fields put together.

Amazon announced its earnings for the third quarter of 2017 on Thursday and to nobody's surprise, the internet shopping titan revealed that it has sold a whole bunch of products for unfathomable amounts of money. The company reports that it sold $43.7 billion worth of merchandise in Q3, that's a 34 percent increase over the same period last year. However, if you don't count the $1.3 billion in sales that Whole Foods earned during that time, the company's net sales only increased by a measly 29 percent year-over-year. So where did all this cash come from? Well the Whole Foods acquisition in late August definitely helped, but Amazon also introduced three new Echos (the second-gen Echo, the Echo Plus home hub, and the lightweight Echo Spot) as well as new Fire TV, which supports 4K and integrates with an Echo for voice control.

You may have seen stores deploy shelf-scanning robots before, but they're about to get one of their largest real-world tests to date. Walmart is expanding a shelf-scanning robot trial run to 50 additional stores, including some in its home state of Arkansas. Machines from Bossa Nova Robotics will roam the aisles to check for stock levels, pricing and misplaced items, saving human staffers the hassle of checking everything themselves. There will be technicians on-site just in case, but the bots are fully autonomous. Thanks in part to 3D imaging, they can dodge around obstacles and make notes to return later if their path is completely blocked.

Wal-Mart is rolling out shelf-scanning robots in more than 50 U.S. stores to replenish inventory faster and save employees time when products run out. The approximately 2-foot (0.61-meter) robots come with a tower that is fitted with cameras that scan aisles to check stock and identify missing and misplaced items, incorrect prices and mislabeling. The robots pass that data to store employees, who then stock the shelves and fix errors. The approximately 2-foot (0.61-meter) robots come with a tower that is fitted with cameras that scan aisles to check stock and identify missing and misplaced items, incorrect prices and mislabeling Out-of-stock items are a big problem for retailers since they miss out on sales every time a shopper cannot find a product on store shelves. Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer has been testing shelf-scanning robots in a handful of stores in Arkansas, Pennsylvania and California.

According to a survey from SLI Systems, 54 percent of mid-size retailers are using or plan to use artificial intelligence (AI) as an online tool in the next 12 months. The most popular applications are expected to be personalized product recommendations, customer service requests and chatbots. The online survey of 234 e-commerce professionals primarily in the U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand showed that 56 percent are either using or planning to use AI for personalized product recommendations. That was followed by customer service requests, 41 percent; chatbots, 35 percent; and visual search, 32 percent. VR/AR, voice-activated apps and virtual buying assistants scored lower.In a note from late September, according to Barron's, R.W. Baird's Colin Sebastian indicated that the "overriding theme" at the Shop.org Noting that AI chatter had risen significantly at e-commerce conferences over the last two or three years, Mr. Sebastion said the message being relayed was that "machines will learn about and communicate with individual customers."

If you aren't ponying up for Prime, but are smitten with the game, those half-dozen hints will run you $1.99 a month, and you can subscribe to them directly within the skill itself. Developers beyond Sony Pictures Television won't have access to the skill-subscription tools just yet, but Amazon says it'll let you know when that's ready. Like TechCrunch notes, this is interesting for a few reasons; app subscriptions themselves, and how they'll potentially shape the future of the Alexa business model chief among them. Tying the subscription to a Prime membership is a bit odd too when you consider that an Echo device is kind of pointless without a Prime subscription as it is. Amazon is still working on a revenue split for developers, too, and told Engadget that it hasn't finalized its revenue sharing model for that.

Often when we think of a data science assignment, the main thing that comes to mind is the algorithm technique that needs to be applied. While, that is crucially important, there are many other steps in a typical data science assignment that requires equal attention. There is an online retailer, who is running a shopping festival in the month of November, just before the holiday season. It has a catalogue of a million products and a database of 100 million customers, who had bought from them in the past. The retailer wants to do promotional email campaigns to its customer base.

Amazon's gone to a lot of effort to make its services as convenient as possible -- free delivery, lightning fast delivery, delivery from the sky (well, soon, probably) -- now it's eliminating the need for you to even be at home to receive your packages (or to have a designated safe place), because its couriers can now simply let themselves into your property. It's not as sinister as it sounds, of course. The Prime members-only service, called Amazon Key, uses a smart lock and connected camera. When a delivery is made the courier scans the package's barcode which sends an access request to Amazon's cloud. When it grants permission, the camera starts recording, the courier swipes a prompt on their app and then your door unlocks.

This is a guest post by Roland Schemers, CTO of Astro Technology, Inc. Astro, in their own words, "creates modern email apps for Mac, iOS and Android, powered by artificial intelligence, built for people and teams. With Astrobot Voice, an in-app email voice assistant, you can now read, manage, and reply to emails without leaving Astro's apps." Recently, Astro launched Astrobot Voice, the first in-app email voice assistant. This means you can now read, manage, and reply to emails without leaving Astro's iOS or Android apps. After Astro launched an Amazon Alexa skill in June, we were eager to enable more people to manage email with voice.