Microsoft reaches carbon goal, but Greenpeace says its cloud is still too dirty

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Reaching a goal it established three years ago, Microsoft says it has reduced its carbon emissions as a proportion of its revenue by 30 percent, compared with 2007 levels. “I’m pleased to report that we’ve met this goal through a combination of energy efficiency measures and an investment in high-quality externally verified renewable energy and carbon… Read More…

Raveld reveals Klout-like score for cloud spending on AWS

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It may start getting easier to make optimal Amazon Web Services purchasing decisions. Or, at least, less expensive. Raveld, a Seattle-based startup formed last year, is launching a new free service to help organizations decide which AWS resources they need. At its heart, it is a report containing what the company calls the Raveld Score,… Read More…

Amazon’s DynamoDB: What it is, and why it matters

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Guest Commentary: Amazon Web Services this morning announced a new service called DynamoDB — rolling out, in public form, a cloud database technology already used by several of Amazon’s internal teams. So what problem does it aim to solve? And is it worth a look? GeekWire wrote about the offering earlier today, but after listening to the… Read More…

Amazon launches ‘DynamoDB’ cloud database service

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Amazon Web Services has been dropping hints about a big announcement planned for this morning, and this is it. The company just launched a new cloud database service called DynamoDB, going public with technology that it has been using internally for Amazon Cloud Drive, IMDb, Kindle, and the Amazon.com advertising platform. Amazon, which competes against cloud services… Read More…

Q&A: Facebook engineering VP Jay Parikh explains what they look for in developers (and much more)

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One of the first things that struck me upon entering Facebook’s 17-month-old engineering office in downtown Seattle today was the … silence. Despite the open newsroom-style environment on the 8th floor of 101 Stewart, coders worked away with very little verbal communication. Just the tap, tap, tap of keystrokes — presumably using Facebook chat to… Read More…

New Zealand cloud computing company sets up shop in Seattle

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GreenButton, a New Zealand company that helps businesses more easily move information to the cloud, has established new offices in Silicon Valley and Seattle. “Our presence in Silicon Valley and Seattle is critical to our success – both are large, diverse and highly literate technology communities,” said GreenButton CEO Scott Houston in a statement. “This… Read More…

Ignition, Trilogy bankroll cloud database startup Xeround

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Cloud database startup Xeround has reeled in $9 million in venture capital financing from Benchmark Capital and Giza Venture Capital. Seattle area investors Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership also participated in the latest funding round for the company, which describes itself as “an elastic, always-on database-as-a-service for your MySQL applications.” Xeround moved its headquarters from Israel to Bellevue… Read More…

Startup Spotlight: Road trip leads to disaster recovery startup Doyenz

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You’ve got a lot of time to think when traveling by RV from South Carolina to Washington state — a good 2,300 miles. Ashutosh Tiwary didn’t spend his time singing car-trip songs or playing the license plate game. Instead, Tiwary took full advantage of the hours, brainstorming for much of the voyage by phone with Przemek Pardyak… Read More…

Startup Spotlight: Vizua looks to bring medical image viewing into the future

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Started by former Microsoft employees and a French scientist, Vizua is looking to transform the way radiologists share MRI, CT and ultrasound scans. Historically, radiologists would send a CD full of images via the mail to colleagues for second opinions. But with Vizua, they can upload the images to a private cloud where they can be… Read More…

Parallels names new finance and tech chiefs, prepping for possible IPO and acquisitions

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Parallels, known for its software that lets Windows run on Macs, has hired new finance and technology chiefs, aiming to boost the cloud-services side of its business and prepare for future growth, including a possible initial public offering and acquisitions. The company’s new chief technology officer is Microsoft veteran Michael Toutonghi, who is leaving his… Read More…

Data furnaces: The next big thing in home heating?

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Data centers produce massive amounts of heat, so much so that companies like Facebook have gone to extreme lengths to develop innovative cooling systems to make sure that servers don’t overheat. But what if you could turn the excess heat from data centers into a home heating solution? Researchers at Microsoft and The University of… Read More…

Ignition’s Frank Artale leads $15M round in ServiceMesh

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Back in August, I interviewed Frank Artale of Ignition Partners about the torrid investment pace that he’d engaged in since joining the Bellevue venture capital firm in March.  Well, that pace has continued right into the fall, with the former Microsoft and Citrix exec earlier this month leading a $40 million investment in Palo Alto,… Read More…

EMC boss Joe Tucci loves being in the backyard of Amazon and Microsoft

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EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci is in Seattle today, celebrating the grand opening of the company’s new 140,000 square foot “Center of Excellence” in the heart of Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. It is a big bet by EMC on Seattle, which operates similar engineering facilities near Boston, Raleigh-Durham and Silicon Valley. It also follows the… Read More…

Startup Spotlight: Lightning strikes (literally) to create online backup startup Newline

Photo: Leszek.Leszczynski

Entrepreneurs often talk about when lightning strikes, that special a-ha moment when inspiration hits. But for former Microsoft engineer Kory Gill lightning struck literally at his Woodinville home during a winter storm in 2007. “We heard it hit, and it was loud,” recalled Gill, noting that it knocked out the sprinkler system, cable modem and… Read More…

Users report Gmail outage

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At about 11:25 a.m. Pacific time today, my connection to Gmail failed on both my PC and my Mac. And it doesn’t look like it is just me. After posting to Twitter, a number of Gmail users also reported problems. We are tracking the situation and we will update the post as we learn more…. Read More…

Rappin’ for TappIn to make files available wherever you wander

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There’s no shortage of services that allow consumers to access files in the cloud, from Dropbox to Box.net to SugarSync to Google Docs. But even with all of the competition and clutter in the market, Seattle’s TappIn believes it can carve a niche. The company, which until today was known as HomePipe Networks, has added a… Read More…

GeekWire Radio: Educating the next generation of geeks

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In honor of back-to-school season, this week’s GeekWire radio show and podcast comes with an educational theme — featuring excerpts from past interviews with technology educators and one very impressive high school student. Our guests are Ed Lazowska (Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science at the University of Washington), Daniil Kulchenko (the 15 year-old entrepreneur who… Read More…

Maritz sees Windows PCs below 20% in era of cloud, devices

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Paul Maritz is now the CEO of VMware, but he was previously the longtime chief of Microsoft’s platforms group — overseeing products including Windows and generally considered third in command at the company in the 1990s, behind Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. So it’s always interesting to hear what he says about Windows these days… Read More…

Amazon Web Services bracing for Hurricane Irene in Virginia

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Seems like Amazon.com’s data center in Northern Virginia just can’t catch a break lately. And now here comes Hurricane Irene. Officials at the Amazon Web Services facility — a key piece of infrastructure for many high-profile websites, say in an online message to their customers that they’re “closely monitoring Hurricane Irene and making all possible preparations, e.g…. Read More…