Retired Seattle Storm star Sue Bird is teaming with cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase to donate $25,000 to Techbridge Girls, a nonprofit that promotes science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) opportunities for girls. The funds will help grow and scale two Techbridge Girls...
(Alaska Airlines Photo) AI is already changing the way people search for information online and a bigger shift could be imminent. Google this week revealed more details about its vision for AI-generated search results, and some e-commerce companies including Amazon recently released their own AI...
Gordon Pan, president of Baird Capital, right, makes a point enthusiastically to Jonathan Sposato, GeekWire chairman, left, at the GeekWire Awards VIP reception at the Showbox SoDo in Seattle on May 9, 2024. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) It has been a rough couple of years for startup...
Microsoft’s Thermal Energy Center at its Redmond, Wash. headquarters. The center taps geothermal energy from the earth to provide clean power. (Microsoft Photo) In 2020, Microsoft made an ambitious commitment to make its operations carbon negative within a decade, removing more carbon from the...
Signal is “just too short of a messaging format” for substantive business discussions, Jeff Bezos said in a deposition, as quoted in Amazon’s latest court filing. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) At a company known for putting its most important ideas and strategies into comprehensive...
Bill Gates, left, and Mark Zuckerberg in a recreation of the Facebook founder’s Harvard University dorm room. (Instagram Photo via @zuck) Bill Gates left Harvard to start Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on Facebook. But the two tech moguls made it back to...
Boeing’s Starliner space capsule sits atop its United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket during preparations for launch. (ULA Photo) The first-ever crewed flight test of Boeing’s Starliner space taxi has been rescheduled for no earlier than May 21 to give Boeing, NASA and United Launch Alliance...
Baskar Sridharan. (Amazon Photo) — Baskar Sridharan, a longtime Seattle-area software engineering leader who was most recently a vice president at Google, joined Amazon Web Services as a vice president leading the AI/ML Services and Infrastructure team. Sridharan spent more than five years at...
Since its inception, the WTIA Founder Cohort has supported over 300 companies. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) announced the selection Tuesday of 39 startups for the 11th iteration of its WTIA Founder Cohort. Part of the WTIA...
Melinda French Gates at a 2019 event for her book “The Moment of Lift.” (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Melinda French Gates is walking away from a 2,000-employee philanthropy with assets totaling more than $75 billion. But some say her departure from the Gates Foundation, announced Monday,...
A photo from August 2022 shows Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship sitting on its West Texas launch pad in advance of the company’s most recent crewed mission. (Blue Origin Photo) Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has set the date for the long-delayed start of its next chapter in...
Vivek Ladsariya. (PSL Photo) Seattle’s venture capital ecosystem is getting some fresh Bay Area talent with the addition of Vivek Ladsariya, a veteran investor who recently relocated from Silicon Valley to take a new role as managing director at Pioneer Square Labs (PSL). Ladsariya spent the...
Adam Selipsky at AWS re:Invent 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky is stepping down from the role, three years after returning to the company to lead the cloud giant, according to an internal memo from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to employees Tuesday...
Students at Lake Washington Institute of Technology get hands-on lab training. (LWIT Photo) Amazon says it’s establishing a logistics facility in Everett, Wash., and partnering with a technical college in Kirkland, Wash., to boost the supply chain and workforce pipeline for its Project Kuiper...
Bill Hilf is leaving his role as CEO of Vale Group (formerly Vulcan Inc.) at the end of May. (Vale Group Photo) Bill Hilf, the veteran tech executive and longtime CEO of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s holding company, formerly known as Vulcan Inc., is stepping down after more than seven...
Dr. Hengqi (Betty) Zheng, principal investigator for the trial at Seattle Children’s. (Seattle Children’s Photo) The Allen Institute for Immunology, a division of the Seattle-based Allen Institute, is teaming with Seattle Children’s Research Institute to launch a study aimed at understanding the...
Melinda Gates speaks at the University of Washington in December 2017. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Melinda French Gates announced Monday that she will resign as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Seattle-based philanthropic organization she started with her ex-husband in...
Aerial co-founders Doug Logan, left, and Michael Li. (LinkedIn Photos) Seeking to untangle the mess of documents and data that companies hold onto and wade through, Seattle startup Aerial raised $2 million for its AI-powered answer to unstructured business data analysis. The pre-seed funding...
Helion Energy employees working on a component of its Polaris device, a seventh-generation fusion prototype that it expects to produce electricity. Microsoft has an agreement with the startup to purchase its clean power — if the company is able to produce it. (Helion Photo) The rapid growth of...
Skytap CEO Bradley Schick. (Skytap Photo) New York-based IT infrastructure services giant Kyndryl announced Monday that it acquired Skytap, a Seattle-based company founded 17 years ago that sells cloud migration software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Skytap helps companies run...
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 May 5, 2024. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
Gaurav Oberoi, CEO of Lexion, which announced an agreement to be acquired by Docusign this week, speaking on the GeekWire Podcast at the GeekWire Awards. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we go inside the GeekWire Awards, our annual event recognizing the top...
Robert McPherson, the Seattle singer known as “The Drunken Tenor,” belts out his song set to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” at the GeekWire Awards in Seattle on Thursday. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) For the sake of the innovators in the crowd at Thursday night’s GeekWire Awards,...
Dopl Technologies co-founder and CEO Ryan James at the Flywheel Investment Conference in Wenatchee, Wash. (Photo courtesy of Flywheel) Seattle startup Dopl Technologies has developed a telerobotic ultrasound system intended to bring specialist care to patients in rural areas. Dopl’s mission...
Pictory co-founders Vishal Chalana, left, and Abid Mohammed accept the Startup of the Year award. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) It was a mix of robot trophies and blow-up dinosaurs at the GeekWire Awards on Thursday night in Seattle, as the prehistoric “Land Before Tech” theme gave way to our...
GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop, left, and John Cook open the 2024 GeekWire Awards at Showbox SoDo in Seattle on Thursday. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) After giving a nod to tech’s bygone era of gadgets and gimmicks, we celebrated the new entrepreneurs shaping the future of innovation in...
(GeekWire File Photo / Nat Levy) In a surprise reveal, Microsoft said Thursday it plans to launch a mobile gaming store later this year. The news came out during an on-stage interview with Xbox president Sarah Bond at a Bloomberg event. According to Bond, the as-yet-unnamed store will...
(Uber Photo) New legislation that would lower recently implemented minimum wage standards for Uber Eats and DoorDash delivery drivers in Seattle took another step forward on Thursday. The Seattle City Council’s governance, accountability, and economic development committee approved the new...
Cynthia Williams. (LinkedIn Photo) Cynthia Williams, a video game industry vet who recently departed Wizards of the Coast, was named CEO of Everett, Wash.-based pop culture collectibles maker Funko. Williams was previously president of Wizards, the Hasbro-owned game company behind Magic: The...
A vision-impaired fan uses a tactile/haptics device from Seattle startup OneCourt to follow the action via touch during a Portland Trail Blazers game in April. (Trail Blazers Photo / Stephanie Castillo) Athletes might possess the right touch to execute a perfect pass or shot. A Seattle startup’s...
Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless giant T-Mobile is closing in on a deal to buy a part of U.S. Cellular, one of the last major regional wireless carriers, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. T-Mobile and Verizon are in talks to buy parts of U.S. Cellular in deals that...
Pablo Castro is a Microsoft distinguished engineer working on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform. (Microsoft Photo) As a distinguished engineer working on the Microsoft Azure AI Search team, Pablo Castro has insight into the inner workings of generative AI, AI search, and the approach that Microsoft...
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, left, and Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown at the Technology Alliance State of Technology annual luncheon in Seattle on May 3. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper) Seattle and Spokane, Wash., may be on opposite ends of the state, with tech industries at very different stages of...
Microsoft President Brad Smith during an event with President Biden on Wednesday in Wisconsin. (Screen grab via @POTUS) Microsoft plans to invest $3.3 billion in an artificial intelligence-related initiative in Wisconsin, giving a boost to President Joe Biden’s job-creation efforts in the key...
From left: Lexion founders Emad Elwany, Gaurav Oberoi and James Baird when the company launched in 2019. (Lexion Photo) Six years later, the floor inside a conference room at the AI2 Incubator in Seattle still shows signs of Gaurav Oberoi’s dedication to solving customer problems. This is...