Technology

Out of all of the hardware announced so far at this morningbig Amazon event, the Echo Glow is perhaps the oddest entry. Ita $30 colorful glowing sphere. Why? Because Amazon said so. Tapping the top of the device will cycle through a number of different colors. It can blink. It has a campfire mode.

Beyond that, I&m a little at a loss to explain why the thing needs to exist. But, then, this is the company that introduced an Alexa-powered Big Mouth Billy Bass. At this point, the Amazon team seem more intent on demonstrating all of the different products that can work with the Alexa ecosystem — even those that aren&t particularly useful.

Anyway, here it is. It exists. And you can preorder it today for $30. Once it arrives, let me know if you figure out what itfor.

Amazon is partnering up with Food Network on a new recipe service for its Echo Show line of devices, borne out of the interest it saw in users for recipes and cooking videos on the smart video speaker. The new Food Network Kitchen service, which is launching in October, will be available on phones and tablets, too, and will offer recipe saving and cooking directions & as well as exclusive live and on-demand cooking classes for Echo Show users.

On stage at their Amazon Devices Event in Seattle, Amazon showed off the upcoming service on stage, including a demo featuring an on-demand cooking class with celebrity chef Bobby Flay. It looks likely that you&ll at least get access to on-demand cooking lessons from a range of Food Network talent, since Amazon SVP of Devices Dave Limp also referenced Alton Brown on stage.

You can also ask Alexa for specific guidance at any step of the process, and she&ll provide answers to your clarifying questions.

Limp said that &you&re going to be able to have live classes as well,& which makes it sound like this will be a pretty full-featured competitor to something like what Peloton offers for fitness. Limp added that the live class instructors are still developing and &practising these in the studio,& so we didn&t get a chance to see yet how an actual live class will work on the Echo Show.

He did however have Bobby Flay speak directly about how he feels about the service, and the chef said that heexcited about it because he &get(s) to be in basically any kitchen in the world, anywhere in the world, and I can teach people anywhere in the world how to cook.& Plus, he noted that it&ll have something like 80,000 recipes on board at launch.

This could be huge for Amazon, especially as it seeks to distinguish itself among the growing number of smart screen devices for use in the home. As it ramps up other efforts around health and fitness, too, this could be a key component.

BetterCloud started out as a way to add a missing operations layer on top of Google G Suite. Later it added support for other SaaS tools, and last year it built an API, so developers could build integrations on top of BetterCloud. Today, it announced a new Integration Center, a place where users can build and share integrations with the community.

Last yearAPI announcement was really aimed at developers building integrations for a particular company. Todayannouncement is about sharing connectors and having a central place to exchange them, says BetterCloudchief product officer, Jim Brennan.

&We&re launching the new BetterCloud Integration Center, which is a single place for users to discover, install and configure any integration. Those integrations can be built by us, or now they can also be the integrations built by the community, because our users now have the ability to share anything they&ve built using that API [we announced last year],& Brennan explained.

In addition to having a place to exchange the integrations, the company has tried to make it easier to build them by offering step-by-step approach for those who need it, while leaving power users to use the API. Brennan says that original API involves more intensive developer knowledge, while also requiring you to go to a separate developer portal. The new experience is not only simpler, italso integrated right inside BetterCloud.

To show how these integrations work, the company is including 32 integrations out of the box with todayannouncement to such popular services as Zoom, Atlassian, GitHub, PagerDuty, Intercom, AWS, Tableau, Duo, Splunk and Datadog.

BetterCloud was founded in 2011. It has raised almost $107 million, according to Crunchbase data. Its most recent round was a $60 million Series E led by Bain Capital Ventures in 2018.