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UW student Nastassya West in the KIRO Radio studios with her Chromebook and her dad, Brenden West.

We have lots to talk about on the GeekWire radio show this week, starting with Facebook’s surprising acquisition of Oculus, the virtual-reality technology company, for a whopping $2 billion. What does Mark Zuckerberg have in mind here? Facebook’s long-term relevance, for starters.

From there we delve into one of the more intriguing stories of the week — a lawsuit by two of Redfin’s very early employees that has the potential, at least, to complicate the real estate company’s widely anticipated IPO this year or next.

Then, we go inside the world of the Google Chromebook, and explore the trend toward low-cost web-based computers. We talk with University of Washington junior Nastassya West, who has been using a $199 Acer C720 and vastly prefers the machine to her Windows 7 notebook. Also joining us is her dad, Brenden West, a mobile app developer here in the Seattle region.

And we conclude with a discussion of the release of Office for iPad. We’re joined on the phone by Matt Rosoff, a longtime industry analyst and reporter who is editorial director for the news site CiteWorld based in San Francisco. We talk about the apps, why they took so long to get here, and what they say about new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s long-term plans for the company.

Listen to the show via the audio player below or this MP3 file.

App of the Week: March Madness Live for iPhoneAndroid and (we discovered after taping the show) Windows Phone!

Name that Tech Tune: Do you know this tune? Yes, it’s an easy one. If you think you know the answer, send it to contest@geekwire.com for a chance to win a pair of tickets to the GeekWire Awards on May 8. From the pool of correct answers, we’ll pick one person at random to win a pair of tickets.

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