In case it wasn’t already apparent, Amazon Web Services Inc. is serious about mounting a full-blown public music festival in Las Vegas in early December. Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing operation this morning announced a fleshed-out roster of artists set to perform at its Intersect Music Festival, which will be held Dec. 6 and 7 at ...

Updated: Amazon Web Services Inc.’s growth has fallen to its lowest point since it began reporting separate results, up 37% from a year ago, but Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing unit still drove most of the second-quarter profits reported today by the retail and tech giant. Meantime, Google LLC owner Alphabet Inc. today reported better-than-expected earnings ...

Updated: Beating back weeks of negative publicity all the way into today, Facebook Inc. reported better-than-expected second quarter results on strong sales of mobile ads on its core app and Instagram.  The social networking giant has been buffeted by a seemingly endless series of bad news, challenges and gaffes — most recently the imposition early today ...

In a twist on the annual South by Southwest event that added a large tech component to its music festival, Amazon Web Services Inc. plans to hold a full-blown music festival at its annual cloud conference in December. Tweeted quietly late last week from a new Twitter account, the Intersect festival is billed as “a new festival ...

Machine learning and deep learning have produced plenty of breakthroughs in recent years, from more capable speech and image recognition to self-driving cars. But one big problem with these artificial-intelligence techniques that attempt to mimic how the brain works is that the neural networks they employ don’t have the common-sense knowledge and context that people ...

In a continuing bid to help data centers become more cloudlike, VMware Inc. today said it plans to acquire Avi Networks Inc. for an undisclosed price. Avi provides application delivery services to large enterprises such as Deutsche Bank, Cisco Systems Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc. with what it calls a multicloud fabric, in particular helping balance application loads ...

In a rather rare public appearance, Amazon.com Inc. founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos provided no news but offered up a few of his well-honed tips for creating and building successful businesses at a “fireside chat” today. The only exciting moment at the retail and tech giant’s re:MARS conference in Las Vegas was when a ...

Alexa, Amazon.com Inc.’s increasingly ubiquitous digital voice assistant, is about to get a lot chattier. Today at the company’s re:MARS conference in Las Vegas, Amazon said it has developed a new approach using deep learning, which has already produced new capabilities in voice and image recognition in recent years, that will help developers create more ...

Actor and producer Robert Downey Jr. launched a group Tuesday night at Amazon.com Inc.’s re:MARS conference in Las Vegas that plans to use advanced technologies to clean up the environment “significantly if not totally” in about 10 years. Somewhat more specifically, Downey Jr. said, robotics and nanotechnology, as well as artificial intelligence, could help clean ...

For all the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, there’s one big obstacle to its seemingly relentless march: The algorithms for running AI applications have been so big and complex that they’ve required processing on powerful machines in the cloud and data centers, making a wide swath of applications less useful on smartphones and other ...