RESOURCES

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 […]

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?

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 […]

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 […]

Machine Learning

Creating Simplicity in the Workplace with NLP

Challenge: If your business has a general email address such as info@yourBusiness or help@yourBusiness, then you probably know how much work can go into answering customer emails in a timely manner. You may even pay an employee or 10 to answer emails all day long. If this is the case then you know all too […]

Machine Learning

AI Simplifying Health Tracking

About/Background There seem to be new diet apps and exercise software all the time. There are great running apps that track your distance and speed and output how many calories they think you just burned. There are apps that track what foods you are eating that can connect to the manufacturer of those foods and […]

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.

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.

AWS

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

AWS

Machine Learning Gives Santa Cruz Traffic the Green Light

Background Ever wonder why it takes a half-hour or more to travel 2.5 miles on Mission Street on the West Side in Santa Cruz, California? The traffic lights only seem to laugh as you watch them cycle through from green to red without putting your car into gear. The Cloud Brigade team knew using a […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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! […]

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?

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?

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.

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.

Resources

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.

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.

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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.

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.

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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.

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.

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.

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.