This time-lapse image of Venus and the Pleiades shows the tracks of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. The image received an award in the 2021 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest. (Torsten Hansen / IAU OAE / Creative Commons Attribution) SpaceX founder Elon Musk wasn’t kidding about his plans to go big...
We start our tour with a banana bread latte: blonde espresso, oat milk, hazelnut syrup, brown sugar syrup, caramel drizzle, and cinnamon. Not on the menu, but exactly the kind of order Starbucks says its new AI companion will handle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) This week on the GeekWire...
A Washington State Ferry model 3D printed by Gino Palileo of Seattle. (Photo courtesy of Gino Palileo) When Gino Palileo moved to Seattle from the Philippines in 2015, his first job in his new city was at an ice cream shop at the waterfront ferry terminal. Watching the green and white ferries...
An Atlas 5 rocket rises from its Florida launch pad in December to send 27 Amazon Leo satellites into orbit. (United Launch Alliance Photo) Amazon says it’s been harder than expected to secure rides for its Amazon Leo broadband internet satellites, and now it’s asking the Federal Communications...
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship lifts off for an suborbital trip in April. (Blue Origin Photo) Blue Origin is pausing flights of its New Shepard rocket for at least two years as it shifts resources toward developing vehicles designed to land astronauts on the Moon. In a statement...
Icertis CEO Samir Bodas in 2022. Photo by Anthony Bolante via Icertis In 2021, the independent judges for the GeekWire Awards nominated Samir Bodas as one of the finalists in the category of CEO of the Year. He said no thanks. The co-founder of Icertis, one of the region’s most valuable...
(BigStock Photo) Zillow Group let go of about 200 employees recently as part of performance-related role reductions, the Seattle-based real estate company confirmed to GeekWire on Friday. “After thoughtful consideration, we made the decision to separate a small number of employees whose...
An artist’s conception shows a nuclear power plant on the moon. (Lockheed Martin Illustration) Almost 60 years after America won the first space race, the moon is once again the focus of a competition between superpowers: Who’ll be the first to put a nuclear-powered base on the lunar...
Seattle startup Electric Era landed $5.05 million in National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Program funding to install six charging stations along interstates and highways in Washington state. The company builds DC fast-charging systems that include giant batteries to help deliver and...
Steve Rabuchin. (LinkedIn Photo) — After more than 20 years at the tech giant, Steve Rabuchin has retired from Amazon, leaving the role of vice president of Project Kuiper, the internet-providing satellite project that was recently rebranded as Amazon Leo. Rabuchin’s career at the company...
Shoppers line up outside Amazon Fresh at 23rd and Jackson in Seattle’s Central District on Thursday. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper) Amazon built its in-person grocery brand on the promise that shoppers could “just walk out.” On Thursday in Seattle’s Central District, they couldn’t even walk...
T-Mobile Park in Seattle, home of the Mariners. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) After last season’s historic Seattle Mariners playoff run, there might be a lot more fans looking to tune into the team’s games on television this season. Now they’ll have new places to do it. The Mariners, who...
An artist’s conception shows Interlune’s robotic harvester on the moon. (Interlune Illustration) Seattle-based Interlune is raising additional investment to support its campaign to identify and extract resources on the moon that can be brought back to Earth, starting with helium-3. The...
(GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) A cloud hanging over Seattle is usually a good thing, if you’re here for the rain, or if you work in that aspect of the tech industry. But the cloud of economic uncertainty is a less welcome occurrence. The tech boom is showing more signs of tech gloom...
Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol opens the company’s investor day Thursday in New York City. (Photo via Starbucks News Blog) Vibe coding is transforming software development, making it possible for anyone to describe what they want a program to do, and leaving it to the AI to write the code. Now...
From left: Sound Games co-founders Sergio Abril, Jacobo Abril, Mike Schmid. (Sound Games Photo) Sound Games, a new Seattle startup developing video games that work across multiple platforms with a single purchase, announced $6.5 million in seed funding. The startup is betting on a “pay once,...
Arkero co-founders, from left: Daniel Shi, who oversees business operations; CEO Shivaas Gulati; and Vamsi Narla, who leads product and engineering. (Arkero Photo) Arkero, a Seattle-area startup focused on using AI to help manage the day-to-day operations of sports organizations, raised $6...
A charred forest in southern Montana where Mast Reforestation preps a site for burying the trees to trap their carbon and start restoring the landscape. (Mast Photo) For landowners, it’s devastating to lose acres of forest to a wildfire — and then there’s the challenge of what comes next....
(Bigstock Photo) Remember when everyone said Microsoft overpaid for LinkedIn? Nearly a decade later, the $26.2 billion “overpriced” acquisition now generates that much in revenue every 15 months. As Wall Street obsessed over Microsoft’s Azure growth rates and OpenAI accounting, LinkedIn...
The entrance to “Experience Center One” on Microsoft’s Redmond campus. (GeekWire File Photo) Microsoft’s big financial bet on artificial intelligence got even bigger in the December quarter, but it also showed continued signs of paying off for its cloud business. The company spent $37.5...
An Amazon Fresh store in the Seattle region. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper) Amazon will lay off approximately 400 workers in Washington state as part of its decision to close all Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores across the country, according to a notice filed with the state Employment Security...
(BigStock Image) Even for the person in charge of protecting the data of an entire city, total privacy is elusive. Ginger Armbruster, Seattle’s chief data privacy officer, recently found herself on the other side of a breach when she discovered a fraudster had used her leaked information to...
Expedia Group offices at the company’s waterfront campus in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle-based travel giant Expedia Group will cut 162 workers in Washington state, according to a new filing Wednesday with the Employment Security Department. The layoffs, confirmed...
Starbucks is reporting early signs of progress from its operational overhaul, with transaction growth turning positive for the first time in two years. (Starbucks Photo) The “mosh pit” at Starbucks is getting less intense. That’s the term former CEO Howard Schultz used for the peak morning...
Clearly AI CEO and co-founder Emily Choi-Greene testifies at a Senate Ways & Means Committee meeting on Tuesday in opposition to a new bill proposal that targets capital gains. (Screenshots via TVW) Emily Choi-Greene says she’s the type of person who supports tax increases on her ballot. But a...
Seattle-based Rover Group has acquired Meowtel, a cat-focused pet-sitting marketplace, as the company expands deeper into specialized care for pet owners. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2015, Meowtel has built a network of more than 4,000 cat sitters, serving over 125,000 cats...
AZX co-founders from left: Michael Albrecht, Aaron Goldfeder and Rich Evans. (Jamison Weeks Photography) AZX, a startup building bespoke AI solutions for customers that include utilities and energy companies, has raised a $6 million pre-seed round. The Bellevue, Wash.-based business launched...
Amazon is laying off another 16,000 corporate employees globally, the company confirmed Wednesday morning, the second phase in a restructuring that now totals 30,000 positions — adding up to the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history. The company is “reducing layers, increasing...
Entering an Amazon Go store in Seattle in 2020 by scanning a palm with Amazon One technology. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon is discontinuing its Amazon One palm recognition ID system for stores later this year, the company said in messages to users Tuesday night. The company will...
The original Amazon Books store in Seattle’s University Village, before it closed in 2022. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) In November 2015, an intrepid GeekWire photographer attached a camera to a pole in an attempt to get a look inside Amazon’s first bookstore before it opened. OK, so...
The Seahawks are going back to the Super Bowl. Seattle-based Redfin is going for the first time. The 20-year-old real estate company, under new parent Rocket Companies, released a teaser video on Tuesday for a Super Bowl ad that will feature Lady Gaga performing the Mister Rogers classic...
Shares of F5 were up more than 13% in after-hours trading after the Seattle-based security giant beat fiscal first quarter expectations with $822 million in revenue, up 7% year-over-year, and net income of $180 million, up from $166 million. CEO François Locoh-Donou called out customer demand...
3D-printed weapon parts. (Bigstock Photo) New legislative proposals in Washington state are putting 3D printing and similar technologies in the crosshairs when it comes to the use of the tech to create so-called “ghost guns.” But some industry leaders and hobbyists are alarmed by potential...
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is under pressure to show steady cloud growth to justify AI investments. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) Microsoft is heading into its earnings report facing what one analyst calls a “prove it” moment, with investors looking for signs that its massive AI bet is...
Johnathan Lancaster. (Truveta Photo) — Dr. Johnathan Lancaster — an oncologist, cancer genomics expert and former exec at Regeneron — has joined Seattle-area health data company Truveta as its new president and chief scientific officer. Lancaster, who spent the past six years at publicly...