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Microsoft uses Siri to ridicule iPad in latest commercial
By Taylor Soper at 6:04 pm on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
Microsoft is taking another swing at a competitor and this time it's Apple's iPad getting the backhand slap. In its latest Windows commercial titled "Less talking, more doing," Microsoft uses Siri's voice to show how Windows tablets can perform tasks that the iPad cannot, all at a cheaper price. Important to point out that the featured tablet is a 64GB Asus VivoTab … Read More...

Card-counting startup founders look to place a bet on Google Glass
By Taylor Soper at 4:12 pm on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
Colin Jones and Ben Crawford have a tremendous story to tell, and one that you may have already read about or watched. In a nutshell, the Seattle natives went from waiting tables to becoming expert card counters at the Blackjack table to organizing a Christian card-counting team that was backed by investors, shared profit and won millions. Now they're immersed in the … Read More...
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Report: Zulily rival Totsy is going down the tubes
By John Cook at 3:50 pm on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
Did Totsy just tumble? That's the word from PandoDaily, which reports that the money-losing New York-based flash sales site is chopping its staff of 83 and looking to sell its list of four million email subscribers. That could mean one less competitor for Zulily, the fast-growing Seattle e-commerce giant which, like Totsy, specializes in selling kids clothes, toys and … Read More...

Journalists, look out: Tableau Public projects will soon be even more public
By Todd Bishop at 3:46 pm on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
Tableau Software charges for its premium software and technologies to visualize data in interactive charts, with security protections for confidential information. The company's free Tableau Public service is different. As its name implies, Tableau Public is designed to be used with public data. It's popular among journalists, bloggers and others. Tableau cautions … Read More...

Startup lesson #2: Don’t ignore the enablers
By Barry Chu at 2:00 pm on 05/22/2013 | 2 Comments
[Editor's note: Seattle entrepreneurs Barry Chu and Dave Cotter share some of their startup lessons in starting the new mobile app SquareHub. The three-part series is running this week on GeekWire, starting yesterday with their thoughts about minimum viable products. In part two, they'll talk about how they determined product features. Part three, set to run Thursday, … Read More...

Remote Medical International lands $8M to offer medical aid worldwide
By Taylor Soper at 1:52 pm on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
To help broaden its reach and continue providing medical assistance in hard-to-reach places, Seattle-based Remote Medical International just landed $8 million in fresh funding from Columbia Pacific Management. Founded in 2003, Remote Medical has 100 employees that respond to incidents in remote places for customers mainly involved in industrial, offshore and … Read More...

Collaborate.org: A global intelligence dashboard that visualizes the world’s data
By Berit Anderson at 12:38 pm on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
Dr. Kevin Montgomery was working at NASA when he had his "A-ha" moment. During a trip to Hawaii, he visited a remote valley on the island of Kauai, accessible only by helicopter. As he stood in the wild of that pristine valley, home to a range of exotic species and endangered plants, gazing up at a 1,000 year-old temple, he had a realization: "We don't have the right to … Read More...

Sweet gigs: DoubleDown Interactive, Tableau and Breaking News
By Emily Shahan at 12:25 pm on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
Don't let those dark skies fool you, summer's just around the corner and what better way to start yours than with a radical new job? If you're looking, we've got some hot ones for ya. Highlighting local tech jobs, the GeekWire Job Board is the place to check for exciting new careers. Today we're featuring openings from some Seattle companies both big and small: Glu … Read More...

Amazon Web Services expanding in northern Virginia, plans to hire 500
By John Cook at 12:07 pm on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
Amazon.com is expanding its footprint in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, with Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell announcing today that the company's Amazon Web Services unit plans to open a new office in Herndon, Virginia area. The expansion could add as many as 500 engineering and IT jobs in the area, and it comes about two months after AWS reportedly struck a deal … Read More...

Check out the Apollo F-1 moon rocket engines that Jeff Bezos helped salvage
By Taylor Soper at 10:48 am on 05/22/2013 | 2 Comments
Back in March, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and his Bezos Expeditions team recovered significant pieces of two F-1 rocket engines that were used to launch rockets into space 40 years ago on the landmark Apollo missions, before plunging into the ocean. Bezos' F-1 Recovery Project team brought the parts to Kansas and now, after two months of cleaning and restoring, you … Read More...

LexisNexis closing Bellevue offices, 80 people impacted
By John Cook at 10:42 am on 05/22/2013 | 1 Comment
LexisNexis is closing its Bellevue operations at the end of this year, a decision that will impact about 80 people. The company's Legal & Professional services business, which employs about 10,000 worldwide, established operations in the Seattle area through its acquisition of online document retrieval startup CourtLink in 2001. The company issued this statement … Read More...

Report: Teens leave Facebook for Twitter, because they want less drama
By Taylor Soper at 10:10 am on 05/22/2013 | 3 Comments
Facebook is still the social media king, but teens are using Twitter and Instagram at an increasing rate recently because, well, there's just too much drama and gossip on Facebook. That's the latest from a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which found that even though 94 percent of teenage social media users still have Facebook, more and … Read More...

Bruce Montgomery biotech startup Cardeas Pharma raises $34 million
By John Cook at 9:48 am on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
It has been a good week for the Seattle life sciences community. On Monday, Seattle genomics tool maker NanoString Technologies filed for an initial public offering that could raise up to $86 million. Now, comes word that Cardeas Pharma Corporation, a biopharmaceutical company led by Seattle biotech veteran Bruce Montgomery, has raised $34 million in funding. New … Read More...

Microsoft vets raise cash for productivity startup Tipbit, backed by Ignition and Andreessen Horowitz
By John Cook at 9:25 am on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
A startup by the name of Tipbit — backed by Ignition Partners and Andreessen Horowitz —wants to make you more productive. The company is currently accepting folks into a beta program, noting in an email to prospective users that the service is designed to make "everyday business tasks faster and easier." We discovered Tipbit through an SEC filing, which indicated … Read More...

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen collaborates with Heart, Joe Walsh and other rock stars on new album
By Todd Bishop at 9:23 am on 05/22/2013 | 1 Comment
Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, Jimi Hendrix aficionado and avid guitar player, is coming out with a new album in August — and he has some pretty impressive collaborators helping him out. Chrissie Hynde, Joe Walsh, and Anne and Nancy Wilson of Heart are among the big names who perform with Allen and latest his band, "the Underthinkers" on the album, called … Read More...

From shopping advice to walking devices, startups with UW ties show off their successful ideas
By Taylor Soper at 8:48 am on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
The entrepreneurial talent coming out of the University of Washington was on full display Tuesday evening at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. For the fourth installment of the Seattle Tech Meetup, five local startups with UW ties gave five-minute pitches to a crowd of more than 200 on the UW campus. But perhaps the most powerful … Read More...

Chart: The top 10 biggest private tech buyouts (and where Tumblr ranks)
By John Cook at 8:15 am on 05/22/2013 | 1 Comment
In the wake of Yahoo's blockbuster $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, Bloomberg News has produced a pretty nifty chart of the top 50 acquisitions of private technology companies. Skype leads the pack, but not Microsoft's $8.5 billion buy in 2011 since at the time the Internet communications giant was owned by publicly-traded eBay. In fact, eBay's $2.5 billion purchase of … Read More...
Amazon to pay royalties for fan fiction in new ‘Kindle Worlds’ program
By Todd Bishop at 6:55 am on 05/22/2013 | 1 Comment
Ready to write some fan fic? Amazon may have some money for you. The company says it will license rights to popular books, games, movies and other content to let independent authors write their own stories based on those worlds, and receive royalties from sales of their fan fiction through the company's Kindle Store. The unusual initiative, dubbed "Kindle Worlds," … Read More...

SEO guru Vanessa Fox sells search analytics startup Nine by Blue to RKG
By John Cook at 6:00 am on 05/22/2013 | 2 Comments
Seattle entrepreneur Vanessa Fox has been bootstrapping her search analytics business, Nine by Blue, for the past six years. Today, the former Google employee is cashing out, in part because she's found the right partner in Charlottesville, Virginia-based search marketing firm RKG. "We've built up Blueprint as a robust enterprise-level search analytics platform and … Read More...

Amazon increases its tuition assistance for hourly workers
By Todd Bishop at 5:46 am on 05/22/2013 | Leave a Comment
Amazon.com says it will boost the amount of tuition assistance available to its hourly employees who pursue associate degrees or vocational certificates. The company will now pay up to $3,000 a year (totaling up to $12,000 over four years), which is an increase from $2,000 a year (or up to $8,000 total) when the program began. The company announced the change this … Read More...

Xbox One: How Microsoft is trying to change the game
By Todd Bishop at 11:34 pm on 05/21/2013 | 6 Comments
It was great that Microsoft included several former Xbox bigwigs — Robbie Bach, J Allard, and Ed Fries — in the opening video montage at the Xbox One unveiling today. Seeing them was a reminder of just how much has changed since the game-centric early days of Microsoft's console business. In fact, the Xbox is officially not a video-game console anymore. It's an … Read More...

UW’s Ed Lazowska: ‘Washington is the ass end of the donkey in just about every aspect of education’
By Taylor Soper at 11:03 pm on 05/21/2013 | 6 Comments
The incredible talent that the University of Washington pumps out every year was on display during Tuesday's Seattle Tech Meetup, as five startups with UW ties gave five-minute pitches to the crowd at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. But unfortunately for the state, the UW is one of the few bright spots amidst an otherwise struggling … Read More...

Xbox One: Watch the new Kinect detect a heart rate from across the room
By Todd Bishop at 5:31 pm on 05/21/2013 | 1 Comment
Microsoft has significantly upgraded the sensing capabilities of the second-generation Kinect sensor that will ship with the newly announced Xbox One game console. One example: The Kinect can detect a user's heart rate optically. See the video above for a demonstration of the capability during a tour of the Microsoft Xbox campus today. The idea is to incorporate this … Read More...

These sensor-infused socks track your steps and ID injury-prone running styles
By Taylor Soper at 4:05 pm on 05/21/2013 | 2 Comments
In the past few years, you've heard of smartphones, smart-watches and most recently, smart-glasses. Now, courtesy of a Redmond-based startup, we have yet another ordinary product attached to your body that's becoming more intelligent: smart socks. Meet Heapsylon, a company founded two years ago by three Microsofties that is developing what is essentially a pedometer … Read More...

Startup lesson #1: Reid Hoffman is wrong
By Barry Chu at 2:47 pm on 05/21/2013 | 5 Comments
[Editor's note: Seattle entrepreneurs Barry Chu and Dave Cotter share some of their startup lessons in starting the new mobile app SquareHub. The three-part series is running this week on GeekWire, starting today with their thoughts about minimum viable products. In part two, they'll talk about how they determined product features. Part three, set to run Thursday, will … Read More...

Photos: Check out Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s V-2 rocket arriving at Paine Field
By John Cook at 2:36 pm on 05/21/2013 | 9 Comments
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's latest extravagance — a German-built World War II-era V2 rocket — has arrived at his Flying Heritage Collection at Paine Field in Everett. The rocket, one of only 16 remaining in the world, stands 46-feet tall (just shy of the museum's 50-foot high ceiling). The V-2 arrived in three primary sections on Monday, and has now been … Read More...

NFL commish says new multi-year partnership with Microsoft will ‘change the game of football’
By Taylor Soper at 1:55 pm on 05/21/2013 | 2 Comments
The nation's most popular sport is about to get real geeky thanks in large part to technology from Microsoft. During today's big Xbox One launch in Redmond, Microsoft announced a new multi-year partnership with the NFL that will, according to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, "change the game of football." NFL.com is reporting that the deal is for five years and … Read More...

Official word: Xbox One requires Internet connection, but not ‘always on’
By Todd Bishop at 1:33 pm on 05/21/2013 | Leave a Comment
Remember all that controversy over the reports of a required "always on" Internet connection in the new Xbox? First, reports surfaced that Microsoft would require a persistent Internet connection, then the word was that it wouldn't. Here's the official word from a newly published FAQ from Microsoft. Does Xbox One require an “always on” Internet connection? A: … Read More...
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