Rec Room’s shutdown is one of the biggest Seattle startup implosions in recent memory — and it raises questions about whether the AI boom should be paying attention to what happened with VR. Plus, MLB’s new robot ump system is already creating drama, and we road-test Amazon’s new FedEx Office returns deal. Read More
Tyler Swartz, a Seattle native and cycling enthusiast, was laid off from his tech job at Reddit and wanted to start something that served Seattle’s community of e-bikers. Read More
Convoy co-founder and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Dan Lewis drew on his experience building the one-time unicorn trucking startup to share lessons for entrepreneurs at this week’s Seattle AI Startup Summit. Read More
Bound for the Moon, astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft encountered a challenge familiar to many of us back here on terra firma: Microsoft Outlook. Read More
Founded by former AWS energy leaders, British Columbia-based Soma Energy emerged from stealth with $7 million and tech to optimize the power grid for data centers and utilities. Read More
The performance by Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine was uploaded to KEXP on Feb. 5. Since then it’s attracted more than 6.7 million views and the greatest comment section we’ve seen in some time. Read More
The company was inspired by old paper dolls, where pants, shirts, jackets and other items can be moved around. In this case, clicking on images creates instant digital paper dolls. Read More
This award takes notice of the next dominant force in Pacific Northwest tech, and the finalists are: Overland AI, Carbon Robotics, Stoke Space, Chainguard, and MotherDuck. Read More
Scientists took their best swing at the torpedo bat design, which relies on a slightly different shape in which wood is removed from the barrel tip and added to the bat’s sweet spot. Read More
Microsoft announced MAI-Transcribe-1, a new speech-to-text model, and made its in-house MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-Image-2 models broadly available to developers for commercial use for the first time, expanding its proprietary AI capabilities beyond its OpenAI partnership. Read More
University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs selects its second climate tech cohort. Meet the eight startups tackling EV adoption, biochar and sustainable packaging. Read More
The latest edition of commercial real estate firm JLL’s Innovation Geographies report reveals that while Seattle is outpacing traditional hubs like New York and London in talent migration, a shortage of “investment-grade” real estate is creating a bottleneck for the city’s next era of tech expansion. Read More
David Pogue’s new book “Apple: The First 50 Years” is packed with stories about the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft. One stands out: the time a Microsoft engineer drove Steve Jobs so crazy at a birthday party that he went home and invented the iPad. Read More
Robinhood filed a preemptive federal lawsuit to block Washington state from enforcing gambling laws against its prediction markets business, days after the state’s attorney general sued Kalshi over the same issue. Read More
The Sustainable Innovation Award finalists this year are energy companies Helion, OCOChem and TerraPower; fashion recycler Ravel; and agtech startup IUNU. Read More
At Microsoft’s global nonprofit summit, 1,500 groups tackled the AI paradox: bridging the gap between tech potential and the high costs of real-world deployment. Read More
Oracle’s layoffs affect more than 230 software developers and an additional 48 software development employees in Washington and include workers in senior director and vice president roles. Read More
The announcement, via LinkedIn, notes that the layoffs come after “an unsuccessful team-wide effort to secure funding following the cancellation of a major project.” Read More
Another round of layoffs at Meta will affect 168 employees in Washington state, with jobs in Meta’s virtual reality division being particularly hard hit. Read More
In the Rec Room community Discord server, thousands of posts illustrated the impact that the loss of the gaming app will have on players. Many questioned whether the news was a joke, what went wrong, and where they will go now for such entertainment and community. Read More
Seattle startup Oumi launched a commercial platform to help companies build custom AI models, betting that smaller, specialized models will beat general-purpose alternatives from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. Read More
Amazon Leo has landed its highest-profile customer yet, reaching a deal with Delta Air Lines to provide satellite-powered Wi-Fi on 500 aircraft starting in 2028. The agreement gives Amazon’s fledgling satellite internet venture a big new partner as it races to catch up with SpaceX’s Starlink. Read More
In her debut column for GeekWire, longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley digs into the recent wave of reorgs, hiring freezes, and leadership shakeups in Redmond, and asks whether it’s business as usual or something bigger. Read More
Snap has acquired select assets from Rec Room Inc., with some employees joining the Spectacles hardware subsidiary, as the Seattle-based social gaming company shuts down its platform on June 1. Read More
