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TECH ARTICLES
AWS
Pidentifier
It’s PI DAY!!! Can you stump our Pidentifier? To demonstrate rapid prototyping with AWS Rekognition, and also for fun, we built a serverless mobile-friendly app for Pi Day. It’s impressive how accurate the computer vision model is with a relatively small dataset. This just highlights the advancements in object classification and opens the doors to so many use cases.
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Video
Improving Traffic Congestion with ML
Amazon Web Services invited our CEO to speak at re:Invent 2021 about one of our projects. Traffic congestion is a complex real world problem, and it’s also not an easy problem to solve. In this session we cover how we broke down this complex problem and architected an end to end system on the AWS platform.
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Video
Beverage Inventory System
Computer vision can be used for a myriad of applications, and we built a system which can visually identify beverages and provide inventory counts and alerts for restocking. AWS DeepLens and Amazon Rekognition were utilized to quickly prototype this system, reducing development time from weeks to days.
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Video
What is Artificial Intelligence?
If your business has not yet implemented AI technology it’s time for you to consider incorporating it in the near future. Covid significantly increased the need for businesses to be more competitive, streamline operations, and increase efficiency and productivity.
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AWS
The Poopinator Video
When Amazon Web Services (AWS) found out about The Poopinator project, they said they wanted to do a video about it. Wait, what? Yep, that’s what we thought too. Due to Covid we even got to shoot some footage selfie-style, but they did such an excellent job you’d never know it. We’re honored to have
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AWS
DeepBlaster
Open Source Robotics When the AWS DeepRacer team approached us for ideas to promote their new Open Source Software initiative, we didn’t disappoint. DeepBlaster is a software and hardware package that extends the AWS DeepRacer platform. AWS DeepRacer is a 1/18 scale autonomous self driving car. Originally launched at AWS re:Invent 2018, the purpose of
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Machine Learning
Streamline Business Data and Forecasting
Cloud Brigade is setting out to answer the question: Can AI and Machine Learning help uncover actionable insights on the health and direction of your business using the data that you already own?
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Machine Learning
Sharpen Your Marketing Focus with ML Customer Segmentation Model
Challenge: Can Machine Learning help your Marketing Strategy by implementing better Segmentation Models? Are you using all of your data wisely? How deep is your data lake, and can you even handle all of it? What if there were a way to use all of your customer data to find the customer segments with the
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Machine Learning
AI In The Sky
Challenge: Farmers all over America are experiencing a worker shortage amidst the global pandemic, and as labor costs rise per worker, the need to have an automated solution to visual crop monitoring has never been greater. In a small family business, it can be very expensive and tedious to walk or drive every acre to
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Machine Learning
Creating Simplicity in the Workplace with NLP
Wouldn’t it be great if you had an automated assistant, capable of acting as your first point of contact with your clients, and intelligently escalate communication with the right person? That’s just one use of Natural Language Processing, or NLP.
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Machine Learning
AI Simplifying Health Tracking
Challenge: Have you ever started an exercise program or a diet only to be deterred by a couple of happy hours and a Taco Tuesday Too-Many? I have. Have you ever gotten a funny suggestion from your doctor after an annual physical about what you are eating or how often you stand up and sit
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Business
Thwarting Insider Attacks
Hire Cloud Brigade to apply a directory based, policy-driven approach to access management. Once only available within corporate IT environments, this approach greatly improves security response time for smaller organizations by relying on rights and roles rather than spreadsheets and access control lists.
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AWS
Automate your data project with AWS Glue
Cloud Brigade automates mundane daily data tasks with AWS Glue and AWS’ microservices. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create an automated data pull from GitHub using AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), store your data in a data lake using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), run ETL (extract, transform, and load) jobs on your data in AWS Glue, and visualize that data in Amazon QuickSight.
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Automate data workflows with AWS Glue
Ever wanted to automate a mundane daily data task that collates regularly updated data and puts it onto a dashboard? Who hasn’t, right? Since late 2020, I have been building a COVID-19 daily case and death forecast and until recently, I was spending hours each day to build and tweak the model. Now that the
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Business
The Cost of Bad Customer Service
Customer Service is perhaps one of my biggest pet peeves, and one of the few things in life which can make my blood boil. Most companies view the cost of customer service strictly on their bottom line, but the true cost is the burden on your customers. As Warren Buffet is known for saying about
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AWS
AWS DeepComposer – 1st Impressions from a Music Producer
Background Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have been in music creation for quite a while, (doing various things like correcting a singer’s pitch) but over the past few years I have seen apps, plugins and features that use machine learning to actually compose music. I tried quite a few of them when they first started
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AWS
Machine Learning Gives Santa Cruz Traffic the Green Light
Ever wonder why it takes so long to travel short distances on city streets? The traffic lights only seem to laugh as you watch them cycle through from green to red without putting your car into gear.
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Business
Importance of Deep Marketing Analytics
Intro Few businesses operate without a website these days, a necessary tool that allows your organization to connect with the world. The impact a website can have is often underestimated as many business leaders may have no idea what is really happening on their website. Vanity metrics like the number of visitors per month, bounce
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Machine Learning
What COVID-19 Reveals About Tech Monopolies
by David Apgar, Santa Cruz County Bank Underlying the recent congressional interest in tech monopolies is a wrong assumption about data. Lucrative monopolies are supposedly inevitable in lines of business that depend on data because companies become more effective as they accumulate more of the stuff. Whoever has the most data wins. And it’s not
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Machine Learning
Exploring COVID-19 Data
The Problem COVID-19 is spreading and killing people unevenly through our national population, and public policy makers need a better way to narrow their focus to best handle this pandemic. The Data Science Problem Can we create and use a set of Machine Learning models and Data Science tools to identify the leading indicators of
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AWS
What’s in my Fridge?
Let me tell you a real story, that definitely happened. With the announcement of Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels, we were trying to find a nice use-case to evaluate the performance of this new functionality. While we were thinking we got thirsty, so we ran to the fridge but instead of beverages, we found a surprise, the fridge was empty!
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Machine Learning
Correcting Bad Behavior with AI
What do strange dogs pooping in your yard and the way some people are responding to Covid-19 have in common?
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Development
We Built a Fake News App… Horrible Idea
Fake News was discussed daily, and I had been thinking about this problem for a few months. On a whim I thought, what if we created a website that allowed the public to rate our president’s tweets as true or false?
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Business
Managing Office Capacity with Data
It’s an increasingly common modern workplace problem. With hybrid work arrangements (those which allow workers to telecommute part time), many companies are grappling with how to manage their office space and capacity.
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Tech Articles
Having fun with Serverless
The idea is that you can leave a digital object at a specific location, and share the object with someone, requiring that they show up to that location to find the object. That could be a 3D handwritten note, picture, or perhaps a 3D object.
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Business
MAPS Customer Case Study
Cloud Brigade is the trusted caretaker of the Cloud Environment for Non-Profit, MAPS. MAPS needed to keep its website content searchable and available during a complicated migration as well as maintain a secure cloud environment at a reasonable cost, and Cloud Brigade came through.
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Business
Outstanding In The Field Customer Case Study
Outstanding in the Field Relies on Cloud Brigade to Run Ticket Sales Smoothly. Learn more about how they improved customer service and ensure smooth collection of revenues by sizing web resources for extremely high traffic volumes.
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Business
Nordic Naturals Customer Story
Nordic Naturals wanted to expand consumer product sales into mainland China, but wasn’t set up with a full Chinese-compliant e-commerce website. Cloud Brigade’s technical team developed custom integrations of their e-commerce platform and ERP system, as well as overcame Chinese restrictions resulting in the expansion of business globally.
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Business
Cloud Brigade Helps Keep Visit Santa Cruz County in the Spotlight
www.santacruz.org Summary Customer Since 2018 HQ in Santa Cruz, CA, USALeisure, Travel & Tourism, Small BusinessMaggie Ivy, CEOFounded in 1988, Non-Profit Marketing Org. Challenge Visit Santa Cruz County needed to migrate its website and content management system to a more modern platform. Benefits The new web platform allows for easy update of partner information, blog
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Business
The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History Serves its community with Help from Cloud Brigade
www.santacruzmah.org Summary Customer Since 2018 Located in Santa Cruz, CAIndustry: Museums, Historical Sites Small BusinessRobb Woulfe, Executive DirectorFounded in 1996, Non-profit Challenge Gaps in IT maintenance and support left the MAH in dire straits with a hacked website and locked-out accounts. Benefits Network performance has been improvedThe website is more stable and secureIT systems have
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Business
Knoah Solutions Calls on Cloud Brigade to Resolve Complex Telephony Issue
24-7intouch.com Summary: Customer Since 2012 Located in Las Vegas, NVIndustry: Business Process Outsourcing and Contact Center SolutionsCompany Size: Midsize EnterpriseFounded and Status: Knoah Solutions was founded in 2006 and is now part of 24-7 Intouch Services Provided: Technical Consultation – Recommend solutions based on business requirements.System Engineering – Built custom solutions where no commercial option existed.Systems Integration
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AWS
AWS Hero at Cloud Brigade
The Amazon Heroes program was established to recognize innovators who have gone above and beyond in providing valuable information and unique perspectives in the Tech and AWS community. AWS Heroes are recognized all around the globe and being deemed one is a distinctive honor. Heroes clearly convey the new discoveries they have via blog posts,
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Team
Rainbow Unicorn Huntresses
Women of Cloud Brigade – Along with our duty as women to inspire, we also have the superpower ability to rapidly change our hats as needed and get.it.done.
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Tech Articles
16 Times Around the Sun and Counting
Cloud Brigade is celebrating its 16th birthday. It was March 23, 2005 when Chris Miller launched ScratchSpace Inc. What started as a freelance IT consultancy, has evolved into a trusted provider of technical business solutions and pillar in the Santa Cruz community.
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Business
AI Partnerships Corp. welcomes Cloud Brigade to its AI Network
Posted March 17th, 2021 on AI Partnerships Corp. blog Cloud Brigade and AI Partnerships Corporation (AIP) have joined a partnership to help innovate and shape the AI market. Every day they push the agenda to implement new ML/AI ideas to enhance the way society functions, and AIP is thrilled to have a partner who believes
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Business
Buoyancy Strong
2020 started like most years for us, with optimism, hopes, and dreams for what we could accomplish. Also typical, by March I know whether business is trending in a positive direction, and the timing this year was remarkable. Cloud Brigade was in the beginning stages of a business pivot which is anxiety inducing in itself,
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Business
Top 5 2021 Opportunities and Predictions
When you combine this past years unprecedented experiences with 15+ years as CEO, customer and partner interactions, countless technical training and certifications, and reading any technical trend article and email I can get my hands on, you might have a pretty solid understanding of which technologies and strategies to make a priority for your optimal
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AWS
Community Building Brigade-Style
Due to Chris’s public contributions around AWS services, he was invited to participate within the Beta phase of the AWS Community Builders program.
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Machine Learning
DeepRacer Santa Cruz Meetup
DeepRacer is a 1/18th scale autonomous racing car with an onboard computer, camera, and a growing list of sensors such as Lidar and stereoscopic vision. Introduced at the AWS re:Invent 2018 conference, the official DeepRacer league has over 1500 members across the globe.
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AWS
What Could You Do With $1000 of AWS Credits?
To the individual “the cloud” is this mystical place where we store photos and check email. To businesses small or large, the cloud provides a lot of benefits that were previously too expensive or out of reach.
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Tech Articles
Congrats on that thing you won ?!??
So I’ve been getting a lot of “Hey Congrats on that thing you won, um so what was it???”. .. allow me to simplify what just happened.
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Celebrating our Sweet 16, our Women, our Partners, & the Art of Protecting our Ass 🙂
March 25, 2021
Determination, uncertainty, struggle, teamwork, silver linings, triumph… Those were constant personal and professional And, just like the game, every step and level along the way has taught us valuable lessons, secured a broad range of skills, enabled us to achieve exciting prizes and established priceless partnerships.
Read how it all began on March 23, 2005 and the accomplishments, milestones and pathways throughout the past 16 years. The Brigades continue to evolve and improve, and are ready now more than ever to assist you with your business challenges. Help us celebrate by checking out the birthday blog below and contacting us today!
Priceless Customer Service, AI Music Production, and Psychedelics Studies on AWS
February 25, 2021
As we move into more healing times, this is the ideal opportunity for individuals and businesses alike to check themselves to make sure they are doing right by those around them and who they serve.
Life as we know it these days is already tense and stressful enough, where I don’t think we realize just how important being kind, having patience, and expressing gratitude for one another is. Whether it’s because my standards are so low, or whether I’m just desperate for the littlest bit of kind, supportive gestures, it completely makes my whole day when people and businesses are decent around me, or heaven forbid, go above and beyond, and frankly, this makes me want to promote/shout their efforts from the rooftops!
Our Best Newsletter of 2021
January 14, 2021
In this issue we further highlight the milestones and possibilities Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have to offer. As these technologies become more mainstream everyday, keep reading to learn how we’ve applied these service offerings and the endless possibilities of how it can help you.
In addition to putting our data to good use with AI and ML, we’ve seen huge strides with Marketing Analytics and how various tools, experience and our services can give you the insight to help take your business to the next level…
We Survived 2020, Barely. Are You Welcoming 2021?
December 23, 2020
Determination, uncertainty, struggle, teamwork, silver linings, triumph… Those were constant personal and professional themes this year for myself and our team at Cloud Brigade.
Learn more about how, even with a global pandemic, an 86,507 acre backyard wildfire and losing my home, our team at Cloud Brigade was able to successfully pivot its focus to solving more strategic business challenges and processes with AI and software development projects, increase the employees, achieve AWS national awareness for Machine Learning innovation, and deliver 2021 predictions…..
Clients
Life is better in the cloud
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