GEEK News
June 05, 2015 - 01:04 PM
Elon Musk’s Starlink swagger, SpaceX vs. the cloud giants, and Seattle’s tech universe revisited
John Cook studies the 2009 Puget Sound Tech Universe map while recording this week’s GeekWire Podcast, with WTIA’s 2026 Washington Tech Universe map on the table behind him. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) This week on the GeekWire podcast: SpaceX reports its first quarter as a public company, and Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver a majority of the world’s internet within a decade,...
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Seattle AI Film Festival returns with 200 films that try to change your mind about AI cinema
A scene from the short film Subway 3 from director David Ahn, which will be shown at the Seattle AI Film Festival later this month. As debates over AI’s role in creative work intensify, the second annual Seattle AI Film Festival (SAIFF) is betting that filmmakers don’t have to choose between human creativity and artificial intelligence. The festival — now in its second year — returns this...
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Jimothy raids the corporate pantry: Amazon adds extra $200K to food bank gift after raccoon art auction
A painting of Jimothy, the viral raccoon, by Seattle artist Ryan Henry Ward. (@henry_beyond_museums via Instagram) A friendly challenge sparked by a portrait of Jimothy, Seattle’s favorite short-spined raccoon, has now drawn in 11 regional heavyweights — and with a big new donation from Amazon, driven the total raised for the Ballard Food Bank past $270,000. Amazon announced Friday that it...
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This is way mo’ fun: Baby blue Waymo ‘Ojai’ spotted in Seattle, adding to robotaxi test fleet
A new Waymo Ojai vehicle spotted in a Fred Meyer parking lot in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood on Friday. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Waymo has added one mo’ type of vehicle to its fleet in the Seattle area, where the company has been testing for the launch of its autonomous taxi service sometime down the road. GeekWire spotted a boxy baby blue Ojai in the parking lot of a Fred Meyer...
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As Washington state’s AI task force winds down, the debate over how much to regulate is far from settled
From left: Ryan Burns of Responsible AI Washington, Amy Harris of the Washington Technology Industry Association, Yuki Ishizuka of the Washington Attorney General’s Office, and Katy Ruckle of Washington Technology Solutions, at Wednesday’s panel on the state AI task force’s final report. (GeekWire Photo / Grace Kaste) Members of Washington’s AI task force point to the state’s new AI...
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Etzioni on AI: Murphy’s Law of AI
When you give AI a goal, it will pursue it, whether or not you like the implications. (Created with GPT-5.6 Thinking) Between July 21 and August 6, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each disclosed that AI under evaluation had broken into other companies, and the UK’s AI Security Institute disclosed that models it was testing had tried. Each AI was told to win a game, and it found an unexpected way...
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Startup Spotlight: HitchPiggy wants to turn empty car seats into a new rideshare marketplace
HItchPiggy founder Skylar Windham, left, on a trip to Florida with his friend and former graduate school professor Alexis Cancemi. Planning a trip to a college campus, concert or Northwest landmark? Portland startup HitchPiggy is betting the ride you need may already be headed out on the road. The company’s new marketplace allows drivers to post trips they’re already planning and connect...
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Salesforce cutting 59 jobs across Seattle and Bellevue offices
Salesforce offices in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Salesforce is cutting 59 jobs in Washington state, impacting a wide variety of tech roles at offices in Seattle and Bellevue, according to a new state filing. The layoffs at the San Francisco-based enterprise software giant, as well as data visualization company Tableau, are effective Oct. 5 according to...
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Microsoft 2.5: How EVP Charles Lamanna is helping turn Microsoft into the ‘Copilot company’
Charles Lamanna, EVP of Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, at a GeekWire event in March 2026. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) GeekWire is profiling over the next few weeks some of the people and teams that are shaping the evolution of Microsoft in what we’re calling its “Microsoft 2.5” era. The Copilot Super App cat is only partially out of the bag. Sometime in the coming weeks,...
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This startup just raised $6M for an AI tutor that helps kids figure it out themselves
A Wild Zebra math problem framed around baking, one of the interests the student selected. After the student works out that each section is 1/12 of the cookie, the AI confirms the step and asks the next question rather than finishing the problem. (Wild Zebra images, click to enlarge) Seattle-based edtech startup Wild Zebra has raised $6 million to expand its AI learning...
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Zillow revenue climbs 18% but layoff costs push company to a loss, amid executive changes
Zillow Group’s revenue rose 18% to $772 million in the second quarter, beating its own forecast, but a $36 million restructuring charge from severance and other costs stemming from this week’s layoffs pushed it to a $4 million net loss. The Seattle-based online real estate company, which on Tuesday laid off more than 500 people, or 7% of its workforce, expects the restructuring to cost...
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Disaster hits home: How Amazon and other companies are responding to Washington state wildfires
Amazon has 12 Disaster Relief hubs around the world — including this one in California handling wildfire relief supplies — designed to respond quickly to natural disasters with delivery of emergency materials. (Amazon Photo) Amazon’s Disaster Relief team responds with emergency supplies to support victims of crises around the world. Recent efforts have provided aid following a hurricane in...
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Google to cut 52 employees in Washington state
Google’s Kirkland Urban campus in Kirkland, Wash. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Google is laying off 52 employees in Washington state, according to a state filing released Wednesday. The job cuts include software engineers, engineering and product managers, mechatronics engineers, UX designers and recruiters located in Kirkland, Redmond and Seattle offices as well as remote...
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The startup idea that convinced a UW computer science legend to leave Google after 27 years
Google veterans leaving to launch Discovery Loop, from left: Oriol Vinyals, Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeff Dean, and Quoc Le. (Discovery Loop Photo) Speaking in June at the University of Washington Allen School commencement, AI pioneer Jeff Dean told computer science graduates how he “got the itch to join a startup in 1999,” landing at Google when it had a grand total of 20 people above what is now a...
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Washington state’s next-gen ferry era kicks off with 3 new hybrid boats in $1.15B deal
Older ferries like this vessel sailing across Washington’s Puget Sound are scheduled to be upgraded or replaced with electric-hybrid ferries to cut greenhouse emissions. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) The sun is setting on Washington state’s aging diesel-powered ferry fleet as work begins on new hybrid-electric vessels. Eastern Shipbuilding Group in Panama City, Fla., has started...
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Live dating show reveals Seattle’s relationship with tech is still complicated
Comedian and “Love Isn’t Blind” host Allison Goldberg, center in pink, during the touring live show. (Photo via Love Isn’t Blind) Can’t a tech bro catch a break? A live dating show that has made stops in Seattle sheds a little bit of light on how tech workers in the city are received, according to a new report from Axios Seattle. Allison Goldberg, comedian and host of “Love Isn’t...
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Zillow layoffs hit 91 jobs in Washington state, with senior roles bearing the brunt
Zillow Group’s headquarters at 1301 Second Ave. in downtown Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo) Zillow Group’s layoffs will eliminate 91 jobs in Washington state, landing heavily on senior staff, according to a notice the company filed with the state Employment Security Department. The filing under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act is the first detailed...
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He, it, but rarely she: When AI models write kids’ stories about animals, female characters vanish
Prompted by GeekWire to create three separate children’s stories about animals — a bear, a bird and a cat — Google Gemini Storybook rendered three male characters. A new UW study dives much deeper into AI models’ gendering of animal characters. (Google Gemini Images) A bear is almost certainly a “he.” A bird is usually an “it.” And a female wolf? She practically doesn’t exist. When artificial...
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What’s working in climate tech (and what’s not): 4 big ideas from a rooftop full of investors and founders
Investors and innovators at the kickoff happy hour at 2026 Pacific Northwest Climate Week. (GeekWire Photos / Laura Scott) Subscribe to Positive Charge: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, All Episodes Most climate news these days is grim. But at a rooftop happy hour during Pacific Northwest Climate Week, the mood in Seattle was upbeat — and not out of wishful thinking...
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SpaceX earnings: Elon Musk says Starlink could deliver most of the world’s internet within a decade
A Falcon 9 rocket arcs into the night sky during a February 2023 launch. Most of SpaceX’s launches carry Starlink satellites built at the company’s factory in Redmond, Wash. (SpaceX Photo, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0) The satellites rolling off the line in Redmond, Wash., are paying for Elon Musk’s AI ambitions — and he says the company’s satellite internet business is only getting...
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Zillow cuts more than 500 jobs in its largest layoff of the year
GeekWire Illustration Seattle-based online real estate company Zillow Group laid off more than 500 employees Tuesday, about 7% of its global workforce, its second and largest round of cuts this year. The layoffs are about “ensuring we have a disciplined cost structure and getting more efficient, with the right people in the right positions,” Zillow Group CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in a...
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Tech Moves: Salesforce/Tableau exec departs; startups AIM and Gravitics add to C-suite
Teri Hatfield. (LinkedIn Photo) — Teri Hatfield was named chief revenue officer for Iterable, a customer engagement platform. The Seattle-area tech executive most recently served as executive vice president of sales and solutions at Salesforce and CRO of Tableau, which Salesforce acquired in 2019. She joined Tableau in 2012 and spent more than a decade in sales leadership roles at Verizon...
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‘Some things are better without AI’: How KEXP’s new tech chief will amplify human connection
Jyoti Shukla, chief product and technology officer at KEXP, inside the live room at the Seattle radio station. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle indie radio powerhouse KEXP has hired tech veteran Jyoti Shukla as its first chief product and technology officer, with an unusual mandate in an era ruled by automated playlists: to build digital products that put human connection ahead of AI...
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Amazon tops $3 trillion and Microsoft surges as Wall Street sets aside AI spending fears, for now
GeekWire Illustration Microsoft and Amazon both saw their stocks surge again Monday, riding a post-earnings tech wave across the stock market that pushed Amazon past $3 trillion in value for the first time. The gains follow earnings reports last week in which both companies’ cloud platforms exceeded expectations. Microsoft said Azure grew 43%, passing $100 billion in annual revenue for the...
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UW’s Allen School names Dan Grossman interim director as Magdalena Balazinska shifts gears
Magdalena Balazinska, left, outgoing director of the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and Dan Grossman, the school’s vice director and newly named interim director. (UW Photos) Top leadership is shifting at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, as Director Magdalena Balazinska‘s term concludes...
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This civic activist used AI to assess how state Supreme Court candidates might rule on the millionaires’ tax
Viet Nguyen in his Seattle home office, with two of the civic sites he built using AI: Culliton2026.org on the monitor and a dashboard on the King County homelessness authority on the laptop. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) The tradition of using new technology to shape political discourse goes back centuries in America, to the printing presses that enabled the spread of early publications like...
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Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of July 26, 2026
Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of July 26, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on GeekWire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says the company’s custom AI chip business is poised to become its...
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Amazon’s next big business, Satya Nadella’s DIY app, and a VC’s rallying cry for Seattle tech
This week on the GeekWire podcast: Microsoft and Amazon both reported quarterly numbers, and both stocks rose on cloud results that beat expectations. Is all that AI spending paying off? And in related news, Microsoft sees a rare annual headcount decline, hitting product R&D hardest. Plus: Satya Nadella builds a Power BI dashboard out of an analyst’s research report, and touts it on the...
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Seattle Tech Week notebook: AI, startups, and the best insights and takeaways we heard
Seattle Tech Week attendees fill AI House at Pier 70, spilling onto the deck overlooking Elliott Bay. (GeekWire Photos / Todd Bishop) Attending as many Seattle Tech Week events as possible and talking with as many people as I could, I was struck by the number of people looking for work and the volume of visitors from the Bay Area, including a number of investors looking to get a sense for what...
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Moving faster than planned, AI drug developer Accipiter Bio quietly tops up seed round with $10.5M
An illustration of a protein created by Accipiter Bio that has two active sites, shown in light and darker green, that can simultaneously bind two targets. (Accipiter Bio Image) Less than a year after emerging from stealth operations with $12.7 million and partnerships with pharmaceutical giants, Seattle-based biotech startup Accipiter Biosciences has added $10.5 million to its funding total....
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Microsoft R&D jobs drop for second straight year as total headcount falls for first time in a decade
The number of product research and development roles at Microsoft declined for the second straight year, according to the company’s annual regulatory filing, offering a new indication of how the tech giant is reshaping its workforce in the AI era. Microsoft’s total headcount declined by 5,000 people to 223,000 as of June 30, according to its Form 10-K, filed with the SEC this week. It’s...
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What’s his angle? Teen frustrated by plastic protractor reimagines the classic classroom tool
Wenxin Fang of Redmond, Wash., holds the ZeroPivot Protractor that he designed and is selling through a new Kickstarter campaign. (Photo courtesy of Wenxin Fang) Wenxin Fang was 14 years old when he realized he was fed up with fighting with a flimsy piece of plastic in math class. As an eighth grader at Evergreen Middle School in Redmond, Wash., Fang kept bumping into the limits of standard...
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New map traces Washington state’s tech ‘universe’ to a few key hubs, and shows what’s at risk
A small slice of the new “Washington Tech Universe” map. See the full version here. How interconnected is Washington’s tech industry? Enough that a large share of the state’s companies can trace their lineage to Microsoft, the University of Washington, Amazon, and a handful of other institutions. A new visualization from the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), unveiled this...
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‘World of Warcraft’ meets ‘Dungeons & Dragons,’ and more from Wizards of the Coast at Gen Con
(Wizards of the Coast press image) This year’s Gen Con is being held in Indianapolis July 30 through Aug. 2. In advance of the show, one of the biggest events on the calendar for North America’s tabletop gaming community, Wizards of the Coast invited press to take an early look at its scheduled announcements for the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. Wizards, headquartered in Renton,...
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AWS is ‘booming,’ but Amazon’s free cash flow turns negative on record AI spending
AWS CMO Julia White, left, and CEO Matt Garman at an event in April. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon Web Services revenue grew 37% last quarter, its fastest pace since the end of 2021, but the company is spending so much on data centers and infrastructure to fuel that growth that its free cash flow for the past 12 months turned negative for the first time since 2023. Overall, the...
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