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AWS announced some big updates to its Lambda serverless function service today. For starters, starting today it will be able to deliver functions with up to 10MB of memory and 6 vCPUs (virtual CPUs). This will allow developers building more compute-intensive functions to get the resources they need.

“Starting today, you can allocate up to 10 GB of memory to a Lambda function. This is more than a 3x increase compared to previous limits. Lambda allocates CPU and other resources linearly in proportion to the amount of memory configured. That means you can now have access to up to 6 vCPUs in each execution environment,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new capabilities.

Serverless computing doesn’t mean there are no servers. It means that developers no longer have to worry about the compute, storage and memory requirements because the cloud provider — in this case, AWS — takes care of it for them, freeing them up to just code the application instead of deploying resources.

Today’s announcement combined with support for support for the AVX2 instruction set, means that developers can use this approach with more sophisticated technologies like machine learning, gaming and even high performance computing.

One of the beauties of this approach is that in theory you can save money because you aren’t paying for resources you aren’t using. You are only paying each time the application requires a set of resources and no more. To make this an even bigger advantage, the company also announced, “Starting today, we are rounding up duration to the nearest millisecond with no minimum execution time,” the company announced in a blog post on the new pricing approach.

Finally the company also announced container image support for Lambda functions. “To help you with that, you can now package and deploy Lambda functions as container images of up to 10 GB in size. In this way, you can also easily build and deploy larger workloads that rely on sizable dependencies, such as machine learning or data intensive workloads,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new capability.

All of these announcements in combination mean that you can now use Lambda functions for more intensive operations than you could previously, and the new billing approach should lower your overall spending as you make that transition to the new capabilities.

AWS has launched a new tool to let developers move data from one store to another called Glue Elastic Views.

At the AWS:Invent keynote CEO Andy Jassy announced Glue Elastic Views, a service that lets programmers move data across multiple data stores more seamlessly.

The new service can take data from disparate silos and move them together. That AWS ETL service allows programmers to write a little bit of SQL code to have a materialized view tht can move from one source data store to another.

For instance, Jassy said, a programmer can move data from DynamoDB to Elastic Search allowing a developer to set up a materialized view to copy that data — all the while managing dependencies. That means if data changes in the source data lake, then it will automatically be updated in the other data stores where the data has been relocated, Jassy said.

“When you have the ability to move data… and move that data easily from data store to data store… that’s incredibly powerful,” said Jassy.

AWS today announced a new database product that is clearly meant to go after Microsoft’s SQL Server and make it easier — and cheaper — for SQL Server users to migrate to the AWS cloud. The new service is Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL. The tagline AWS CEO Andy Jassy used for this service in his re:Invent keynote today is probably telling: “Stop paying for SQL Server licenses you don’t need.” And to show how serious it is about this, the company is even open-sourcing the tool.

What Babelfish does is provide a translation layer for SQL Server’s proprietary SQL dialect (T-SQL) and communications protocol so that businesses can switch to AWS’ Aurora relational database at will (though they’ll still have to migrate their existing data). It provides translations for the dialect, but also SQL commands,  cursors, catalog views, data types, triggers, stored procedures and functions.

The promise here is that companies won’t have to replace their database drivers or rewrite and verify their database requests to make this transition.

“We believe Babelfish stands out because it’s not another migration service, as useful as those can be. Babelfish enables PostgreSQL to understand database requests—both the command and the protocol—from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server without changing libraries, database schema, or SQL statements,” AWS’s Matt Asay writes in today’s announcement. “This means much faster ‘migrations’ with minimal developer effort. It’s also centered on ‘correctness,’ meaning applications designed to use SQL Server functionality will behave the same on PostgreSQL as they would on SQL Server.”

PostgreSQL, AWS rightly points out, is one of the most popular open-source databases in the market today. A lot of companies want to migrate their relational databases to it — or at least use it in conjunction with their existing databases. This new service is going to make that significantly easier.

The open-source Babelfish project will launch in 2021 and will be available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.

“It’s still true that the overwhelming majority of relational databases are on-premise,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said. “Customers are fed up with and sick of incumbents.” As is tradition at re:Invent, Jassy also got a few swipes at Oracle into his keynote, but the real target of the products the company is launching in the database area today is clearly Microsoft.

Floww – a data-driven marketplace designed to allow founders to pitch investors, with the whole investment relationship managed online – says it has raised $6.7M / £5M to date in Seed funding from angels and family offices. Investors include Ramon Mendes De Leon, Duncan Simpson Craib, Angus Davidson, Stephane Delacote and Pip Baker (Google’s Head of Fintech UK) and multiple Family Offices. The cash will be used to build out the platform designed to give startups access to over 500+ VCs, accelerators and angel networks.

The team consists of Martijn De Wever, founder and CEO of London based VC Force Over Mass; Lee Fasciani, cofounder of Territory Projects (the firm behind film graphics and design including Guardians of the Galaxy and BladeRunner 2049); and CTO Alex Pilsworth, of various Fintech startups.

Having made over 160 investments himself, De Wever says he recognized the need for a platform connecting investors and startups based on merit, clean data, and transparency, rather than a system built on “warm introductions” which can have inherent cultural and even racial biases.

Floww’s idea is that it showcases startups based on merit only, allowing founders to raise capital by providing investors with data and transparency. Startups are given a suite of tools and materials to get started, from cap table templates to ‘How To’ guides. Founders can then ‘drag and drop’ their investor documents in any format. Floww’s team of accountants then cross-checks the data for errors and process key performance metrics. A startup’s digital profile includes dynamic charts and tables, allowing prospective investors to see the company’s business potential.

Floww charges a monthly fee to VCs, accelerators, family offices and PE firms. Startups have free access to the platform, and a premium model to contact and send their deal to multiple VCs.

Floww’s pitch is that VCs can, in turn, manage deal-sourcing, CRM, as well as reporting to their investors and LPs. Quite a claim, given all VCs to-date handle this kind of thing in-house. However, Floww claims to have processed 3,000 startups and says it is rolling out to over 500 VC’s.

In a statement, De Wever said: “In an age of virtual meetings and connections, the need for coffee meetings on Sand Hill Road or Mayfair is gone. What we need now are global connections, allowing VCs to engage in merit-based investing using data and metrics.” He says the era of the Coronavirus pandemic means many deals will have to be sourced remotely now, so “the time for a platform like this is now.”

AngelList is perhaps its closest competitor from the startup perspective. And the VC application incorporates the kind of functionality seen in Affinity, Airtable, Efront and Docsend. But AngeList doesn’t provide data or metrics.

Today at AWS re:Invent, Andy Jassy talked a lot about how companies are making a big push to the cloud, but today’s container-focussed announcements gave a big nod to the data center as the company announced ECS Anywhere and EKS Anywhere, both designed to let you run these services on-premises, as well as in the cloud.

These two services, ECS for generalized container orchestration and EKS for that’s focused on Kubernetes will let customers use these popular AWS services on premises. Jassy said that some customers still want the same tools they use in the cloud on prem and this is designed to give it to them.

Speaking of ECS he said,  “I still have a lot of my containers that I need to run on premises as I’m making this transition to the cloud, and [these] people really want it to have the same management and deployment mechanisms that they have in AWS also on premises and customers have asked us to work on this. And so I’m excited to announce two new things to you. The first is the launch, or the announcement of Amazon ECS anywhere, which lets you run ECS and your own data center,” he told the re:Invent audience.

Image Credits: AWS

He said it gives you the same AWS API’s and cluster configuration management pieces. This will work the same for EKS, allowing this single management methodology regardless of where you are using the service.

While it was at it, the company also announced it was open sourcing EKS, its own managed Kubernetes service. The idea behind these moves is to give customers as much flexibility as possible, and recognizing what Microsoft, IBM and Google have been saying, that we live in a multi-cloud and hybrid world and people aren’t moving everything to the cloud right away.

In fact, in his opening Jassy stated that right now in 2020, just 4% of worldwide IT spend is on the cloud. That means there’s money to be made selling services on premises, and that’s what these services will do.

The idea of people going to live and work in space, outside of the extremely unique case of the International Space Station, has long been the strict domain of science fiction. That’s changing fast, however, with public space agencies, private companies and the scientific community all looking at ways of making it safe for people to live and work in space for longer periods – and broadening accessibility of space to people who don’t necessarily have the training and discipline of dedicated astronauts.

At TC Sessions: Space on December 16 & 17, we’ll be talking to some of the people who want to make living and working in space a reality, and who are paving the way for the future of both commercial and scientific human space activity. Those efforts range from designing the systems people will need for staying safe and comfortable on long spaceflights, to ideating and developing the technologies needed for long-term stays on the surface of worlds that are far less hospitable to life than Earth, like the Moon and Mars.

We’re thrilled to have Janet Kavandi from Sierra Nevada Corporation, Melodie Yashar from SEArch+, Nujoud Mercy from NASA and Axiom’s Amir Blachman joining us at TC Sessions: Space on December 16 &17 to chat about the future of human space exploration and commercial activity.

Janet Kavandi is Executive Vice President of Space Systems at the Sierra Nevada Corporation. She was selected as a NASA astronaut in 1994 as a member of the fifteenth class of U.S. astronauts. She completed three space flights in which she supported space station payload integration, capsule communications and robotics. She went on to serve as director of flight crew operations at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and then as director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center, where she directed cutting-edge research on aerospace and aeronautical propulsion, power and communication technologies. She retired from NASA in 2019 after 25 years of service.

Melodie Yashar is a design architect, technologist, and researcher. She is co-founder of Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch+), a group developing human-supporting concepts for space exploration. SEArch+ won top prize in both of NASA’s design solicitations for a Mars habitat within the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge. The success of the team’s work in NASA’s Centennial Challenge led to consultancy roles and collaborations with UTAS/Collins Aerospace, NASA Langley, ICON, NASA Marshall, and others.

Nujoud Merancy is a systems engineer with extensive background in human spaceflight and spacecraft at NASA Johnson Space Center. She is currently the Chief of the Exploration Mission Planning Office responsible for the team of engineers and analysts designing, developing, and integrating NASA’s human spaceflight portfolio beyond low earth orbit. These missions include planning for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, Space Launch System, Exploration Ground Systems, Gateway, and Human Landing System.

Amir Blachman is Chief Business Officer at Axiom, a pioneering company in the realm of commercializing space and building the first generation of private commercial space stations. He spent most of his career investing in and leading early stage companies. Before joining Axiom as the company’s first employee, he managed a syndicate of 120 space investors in 11 countries. Through this syndicate, he funded lunar landers, communication networks, Earth imaging satellites, antennae and exploration technologies.

In order to hear from these experts, you’ll need to pick up your ticket to TC Sessions: Space, which will also include video on demand for all sessions, which means you won’t have to miss a minute of expert insight, tips and trend spotting from the top founders, investors, technologists, government officials and military minds across public, private and defense sectors. There are even discounts for groups, students and military/government officials.

You’ll find panel discussions, interviews, fireside chats and interactive Q&As on a range of topics: mineral exploration, global mapping of the Earth from space, deep tech software, defense capabilities, 3D-printed rockets and the future of agriculture and food technology. Don’t miss the breakout sessions dedicated to accessing grant money. Explore the event agenda now and get a jump on organizing your schedule.

Everyday thousands of trucks carry freight along U.S. highways, propelling the economy forward as consumer goods, electronics, cars and agriculture make their way to distribution centers, stores and eventually households. It’s inside these trucks — many of which sit half empty — where Flock Freight, a five-year-old startup out of San Diego believes it can transform the industry.

Now, it has the funds to try and do it.

Flock Freight said Tuesday it has raised $113.5 million in a Series C round led by Softbank Vision Fund 2. Existing investors SignalFire, GLP Capital Partners and Google Ventures also participated in the round, in addition to a new minority investment by strategic partner Volvo Group Venture Capital. Ervin Tu, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, will join Flock Freight’s board. The company, which has raised $184 million to date, has post-funding valuation of $500 million, according to a source familiar with the deal who confirmed an earlier report by Bloomberg.

A slew of startups have popped up in the past several years all aiming to use technology to transform trucking — the backbone of the U.S. economy that moves more than 70% of all U.S. freight — into a more efficient machine. Most have focused on building digital freight networks that connect truckers with shippers.

Flock Freight has focused instead on the shipments themselves. The company created a software platform that helps pool shipments into a single shared truckload to make carrying freight more efficient. Flock Freight says its software avoids the traditional hub-and-spoke system, which is dominated by trucks with less than a full load, known in the industry as LTL. Flock Freight says that by pooling shipments that are going the same direction onto one truck, freight-related carbon emissions can be reduced by 40%.

The funds will be used to hire more employees; it has 129 employees to date.

“Unlike the digital freight-matching category that uses technology to simply improve efficiency as workflow automation, Flock Freight uses technology to power a new shipping mode (shared truckload) that makes freight transportation more efficient. The impact of Flock Freight’s algorithms is that shippers no longer need to adhere to LTL constraints for freight that measures up to 44 linear feet; instead, they can classify it as ‘shared truckload,'” Oren Zaslansky, founder and CEO of Flock Freight said in a statement. “Shippers can use Flock Freight’s efficient shared truckload solution to accommodate high demand and increased urgency.”

Their pitch has been compelling enough to attract a diverse mix of venture firms and corporate investors such as Volvo and Softbank.

“Flock Freight is improving supply chain efficiency for hundreds of thousands of shippers. Our investment is intended to accelerate the company’s ability to scale its business and capture a greater share of the market,” said Tu, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.

At its annual re:Invent developer conference, AWS today announced the launch of AWS Trainium, the company’s next-gen custom chip dedicated to training machine learning models. The company promises that it can offer higher performance than any of its competitors in the cloud, with support for TensorFlow, PyTorch and MXNet.

It will be available as EC2 instances and inside Amazon SageMaker, the company’s machine learning platform.

New instances based on these custom chips will launch next year.

The main arguments for these custom chips are speed and cost. AWS promises 30% higher throughput and 45% lower cost-per-inference compared to the standard AWS GPU instances.

In addition, AWS is also partnering with Intel to launch Habana Gaudi-based EC2 instances for machine learning training as well. Coming next year, these instances promise to offer up to 40% better price/performance compared to the current set of GPU-based EC2 instances for machine learning. These chips will support TensorFlow and PyTorch.

These new chips will make their debut in the AWS cloud in the first half of 2021.

Both of these new offerings complement AWS Inferentia, which the company launched at last year’s re:Invent. Inferentia is the inferencing counterpart to these machine learning pieces, which also uses a custom chip.

Trainium, it’s worth noting, will use the same SDK as Inferentia.

“While Inferentia addressed the cost of inference, which constitutes up to 90% of ML infrastructure costs, many development teams are also limited by fixed ML training budgets,” the AWS team writes. “This puts a cap on the scope and frequency of training needed to improve their models and applications. AWS Trainium addresses this challenge by providing the highest performance and lowest cost for ML training in the cloud. With both Trainium and Inferentia, customers will have an end-to-end flow of ML compute from scaling training workloads to deploying accelerated inference.”

Electric automaker Lucid Motors has completed the initial phase of its $700 million factory, a milestone required to begin production of its first luxury all-electric Air sedan this spring.

The factory, which is located about halfway between Tucson and Phoenix off Interstate 10, has the capacity to produce 30,000 vehicles a year. If Lucid, led by CEO Peter Rawlinson, is successful in its bid to attract buyers, that factory will expand from its current 999,000 square feet to more than 5 million square feet. Once fully built out, the factory will have the capacity to build 400,000 vehicles a year.

Image Credits: Lucid Motors

It’s an ambitious plan for a company that has yet to deliver a single vehicle. Yet, Rawlinson has remained bullish of EVs and Lucid’s future. Lucid is already getting ready to resume construction on the next phase of the factory early next year that will be used to produce its next vehicle, an all-electric SUV in 2023.

The company plans to build out the factory, which sits on 590 acres, over four phases through 2028.

Image Credits: Lucid Motors

The completion of the first phase comes about four years since Lucid Motors first announced its intentions to produce electric vehicles. It’s a milestone that almost didn’t happen. As the company burned through capital, it struggled to find new investors. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund finally stepped up in September 2018 and committed to invest $1 billion into the company.

The all-electric luxury Air sedan, which was revealed in September, has a range of up to 517 miles, depending on the variant, and a design that puts technology and understated luxury front and center.

Two of the four variants — the $169,000 flagship Dream edition and a $139,000 Grand Touring model — will go into production first at its new factory this year. Deliveries of these variants are slated to begin in spring 2021. Two other variants, a Touring model priced at $95,000 and a base model that’s a smidge below $80,000, are expected at the end of 2021 and into 2022, respectively. (All prices are before the $7,500 federal tax credit is accounted for.)

The Air is meant to be the electric alternative to the Mercedes Benz S Class. That means performance matters as much the design. and it does come with some eye popping performance specs. For instance, the Dream edition boasts 1,080 horsepower and can travel from zero to 60 mph acceleration in 2.5 seconds. As a result of the power, the Dream edition has 465 miles of range. Meanwhile, the Grand Touring has 800 horsepower and can hit that same acceleration in 3 seconds, but has the highest range of 517 miles.

The Air will also be loaded with 32 sensors, a driver-monitoring system and an Ethernet-based architecture all for its advanced driver assistance system, which is designed to support hands-free driving on highways. Inside, a 34-inch curved glass 5K display sits in front of the driver, and appears to float above the dashboard. Another center touchscreen is retractable, revealing more storage. Meanwhile, a few physical controls remain on the steering wheel and just above the center screen to control volume and activate the ADAS and Amazon Alexa, which is integrated into the vehicle. Below that center touchscreen and moving to the console is a spot for inductive charging, cup holders and USB-C ports, along with additional storage.

To accomplish all of this, Lucid as touted its approach to design as well as its advanced manufacturing process. Lucid says is uses riveted and bonded monocoque body structure instead of spot welds. Most modern vehicles today have a unibody design, which means the frame, floor and chassis are made of a single structure. A monocoque design is typically seen in motorsports with the frame acting as a skin that gets its strength by distributing tension and compression.

Chinese state news agencies are reporting a successful landing of the Chang’e-5 lunar robotic lander, which will seek to return lunar rock samples back to Earth. The launch took off on November 23, and attained lunar orbit on November 28. It launched the lander vehicle on November 30, and the reports today from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) says that at shortly after 10 AM EST it achieved its goal of touching down on the Moon’s surface intact.

China’s Chang’e-5 mission will be the third ever to bring back soil or rock samples from the Moon – only the U.S. and the former Soviet Union have accomplished that so far. The mission landed on the side of the Moon closest to the Earth (which is always the same side, since the Moon is locked in its orientation during its orbit around our planet).

This landing starts a clock that has a pretty fixed duration in terms of the next steps for the mission – the lander doesn’t actually have a heater unit on board, so it can’t withstand the lunar night. That means it will have to collect the samples it hopes to return within a period spanning the next 14 Earth days, with a potential landing planned for around December 16 or 17 (which means, coincidentally, that if everything goes to plan, China will have its Moon rocks back to study just in time for our debut TC Sessions: Space event).

This isn’t the only extraterrestrial sample return mission going on right now – a Lockheed Martin-designed probe successfully retrieved samples from near-Earth asteroid Bennu just last month, and will seek to return those with a trip beginning next March. NASA has also launched its Mars sample-return mission, using the Perseverance rover it launched in July.