ballmer-headshot
Steve Ballmer

August is supposed to be the month when the tech industry takes a breather, relaxing for a few moments before charging back into the heavy product release cycles of the fall.

Well, I’ve got just one thing to say: Where the heck did our August go?

Things were super busy here at GeekWire, both on the news front (we’re still in shock over the Steve Ballmer news) and behind-the-scenes as we prepare for two blockbuster events coming up, GeekWire Sounders Day on Sept. 4 and the GeekWire Summit on Sept. 12. We also made some news of our own this month when we tapped former Northwest Entrepreneur Network executive director Daniel Rossi as our chief business officer, part of our plan to accelerate our startup in new and creative ways in the months to come.

But the thing we love the most is tracking hot news stories, and there were plenty of them here in the dog days of summer.

Here’s a look at the top stories in August, based on page views.

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Photographer Anthony May captured this amazing photo of the Seattle skyline.

Contour closes Seattle HQ, shocks employees — execs mum on status of GoPro rival (67 comments, 1,700 Facebook likes)

The coolest photo ever of Seattle’s skyline is going viral (4 comments, 1,300 Facebook likes)

RealNetworks posts $18.5M loss, Glaser still ‘very confident’ in turnaround (10 comments, 89 Facebook likes)

Instagram, Vine stop working at same time; people use Twitter to freak out (6 comments, 125 Facebook likes)

Obama veto in Apple’s Samsung dispute throws a new twist into patent cases (21 comments, 69 Facebook likes)

Update: Amazon back online after 40-minute outage (16 comments, 102 Facebook likes)

Contour co-founder: ‘We weren’t done showing the world what we could do’ (27 comments, 195 Facebook likes)

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Photo via PopCap

Google Chromecast: Welcome to the Post-Nerd Era (27 comments, 57 Facebook likes)

Xbox 360 vs. Wii vs. PS3: Who won the console wars? (13 comments, 6 Facebook likes)

Photos: PopCap’s Zombies take over the Space Needle (4 comments, 328 Facebook likes)

Xfinity X1: How Comcast roped me back in to cable (17 comments, 50 Facebook likes)

Hey everyone, Jeff Bezos lives in Seattle and Amazon is not a ‘Silicon Valley’ company (30 comments, 258 Facebook likes)

Full memo: Big Fish CEO announces job cuts, cancellation of cloud games business and closure of Ireland and BC facilities (11 comments, 58 Facebook likes)

Microsoft’s next CEO needs to consider these 10 changes (27 comments, 136 Facebook likes)

Nap on the bus without missing your stop, and more innovations from Microsoft’s summer interns (4 comments, 526 Facebook likes)

Thanks again to everyone for reading GeekWire, and we look forward to seeing many of you at Sounders Day and The Summit.

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