GEEK News

Modern Warfare III was the worst-reviewed Call of Duty in years, but still managed to sell more units than almost any other video game in 2023. (Activision Image) The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the new Call of Duty will launch on Xbox Game Pass, which marks a significant gamble for...

Loretta Napoleoni’s new book is “Technocapitalism: The Rise of the New Robber Barons and the Fight for the Common Good,” published by Seven Stories Press. [Editor’s Note: This week’s GeekWire Podcast features an interview with author Loretta Napoleoni, conducted by Ross Reynolds, the longtime...

A corporate sign at Expedia Group’s Seattle headquarters. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Expedia Group abruptly dismissed two of its top engineering leaders due to what the online travel giant called a “violation of company policy.” The Seattle-based company did not provide further...

Boeing’s Starliner space capsule sits atop its United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket during preparations for launch. (ULA Photo) Update: Mission managers have reset the first crewed flight test of Boeing’s Starliner space taxi for no earlier than May 25 to give Boeing, NASA and United Launch...

After crabs like these caught in the Bering Sea have been processed, seafood companies are stuck with the problem of disposing of the shells. Tidal Vision has developed a green chemistry technology for turning the discarded shells into a useful, sustainable industrial chemical....

Daniel Diez. (Agility Robotics Photo) Daniel Diez, a longtime tech and communications leader who was most recently chief commercial officer at augmented reality company Magic Leap, joined Agility Robotics as its chief strategy officer. The Corvallis, Ore.-based company known for its Digit...

From left: Aviel Ginzburg, Tyler Brown, Art Litvinau, and Ryan Dao. The tech vets, led by Ginzburg, are creating a new entrepreneurial community in Seattle. (Seattle Foundations Photo) An entrepreneur and investor with roots in the defunct Techstars Seattle program plans to...

The throttle on new Lime e-bikes. (Lime Image) Lime is bringing the latest generation of its electric bikes to Seattle, adding the option to use a throttle rather than just pedal-assist to power the machines. Seattle is one of the first cities in the world to get the new model, the company said...

Jellypod uses AI to create podcasts from emailed newsletters. (Jellypod Image) After about three years at Amazon working on Alexa voice services, Pierson Marks listened to his own internal dialogue and left to launch a startup. A Southern California native who studied computer science at...

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee addresses the crowd at the Nordic Innovation Summit on May 13, 2024. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a climate stalwart who based his past presidential run on the issue, traces his passion for clean energy in part to a trip he...

GoodShip raised a $8 million Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners that will boost its software platform that helps companies get a better handle on their shipping logistics data. Customers including KBX Logistics, Kellanova, Mark Anthony Services, and Simmons Foods use GoodShip to...

Seattle is the 13th fastest-growing big city in the U.S. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle’s population growth suffered a bit of a bump in the boom as the city fell out the top 10 fastest-growing big cities in the country, according to new U.S. Census Bureau data released...

Nexme, a Seattle-based startup that helps streamline tours for prospective homebuyers, announced Thursday it will be acquired by Finaya, a new real estate services company out of Silicon Valley. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Co-founders Arian Abdulkader and Vanessa Alvarez...

Retired Seattle Storm star Sue Bird is teaming with cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase to donate $25,000 to Techbridge Girls, a nonprofit that promotes science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) opportunities for girls. The funds will help grow and scale two Techbridge Girls...

(Alaska Airlines Photo) AI is already changing the way people search for information online and a bigger shift could be imminent. Google this week revealed more details about its vision for AI-generated search results, and some e-commerce companies including Amazon recently released their own AI...

Gordon Pan, president of Baird Capital, right, makes a point enthusiastically to Jonathan Sposato, GeekWire chairman, left, at the GeekWire Awards VIP reception at the Showbox SoDo in Seattle on May 9, 2024. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) It has been a rough couple of years for startup...

Microsoft’s Thermal Energy Center at its Redmond, Wash. headquarters. The center taps geothermal energy from the earth to provide clean power. (Microsoft Photo) In 2020, Microsoft made an ambitious commitment to make its operations carbon negative within a decade, removing more carbon from the...

Signal is “just too short of a messaging format” for substantive business discussions, Jeff Bezos said in a deposition, as quoted in Amazon’s latest court filing. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) At a company known for putting its most important ideas and strategies into comprehensive...

Bill Gates, left, and Mark Zuckerberg in a recreation of the Facebook founder’s Harvard University dorm room. (Instagram Photo via @zuck) Bill Gates left Harvard to start Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to concentrate on Facebook. But the two tech moguls made it back to...

Baskar Sridharan. (Amazon Photo) — Baskar Sridharan, a longtime Seattle-area software engineering leader who was most recently a vice president at Google, joined Amazon Web Services as a vice president leading the AI/ML Services and Infrastructure team. Sridharan spent more than five years at...

Since its inception, the WTIA Founder Cohort has supported over 300 companies. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) announced the selection Tuesday of 39 startups for the 11th iteration of its WTIA Founder Cohort. Part of the WTIA...

Melinda French Gates at a 2019 event for her book “The Moment of Lift.” (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Melinda French Gates is walking away from a 2,000-employee philanthropy with assets totaling more than $75 billion. But some say her departure from the Gates Foundation, announced Monday,...

A photo from August 2022 shows Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship sitting on its West Texas launch pad in advance of the company’s most recent crewed mission. (Blue Origin Photo) Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has set the date for the long-delayed start of its next chapter in...

Vivek Ladsariya. (PSL Photo) Seattle’s venture capital ecosystem is getting some fresh Bay Area talent with the addition of Vivek Ladsariya, a veteran investor who recently relocated from Silicon Valley to take a new role as managing director at Pioneer Square Labs (PSL). Ladsariya spent the...

Adam Selipsky at AWS re:Invent 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky is stepping down from the role, three years after returning to the company to lead the cloud giant, according to an internal memo from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to employees Tuesday...

Students at Lake Washington Institute of Technology get hands-on lab training. (LWIT Photo) Amazon says it’s establishing a logistics facility in Everett, Wash., and partnering with a technical college in Kirkland, Wash., to boost the supply chain and workforce pipeline for its Project Kuiper...

Bill Hilf is leaving his role as CEO of Vale Group (formerly Vulcan Inc.) at the end of May. (Vale Group Photo) Bill Hilf, the veteran tech executive and longtime CEO of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s holding company, formerly known as Vulcan Inc., is stepping down after more than seven...

Dr. Hengqi (Betty) Zheng, principal investigator for the trial at Seattle Children’s. (Seattle Children’s Photo) The Allen Institute for Immunology, a division of the Seattle-based Allen Institute, is teaming with Seattle Children’s Research Institute to launch a study aimed at understanding the...

Melinda Gates speaks at the University of Washington in December 2017. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Melinda French Gates announced Monday that she will resign as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Seattle-based philanthropic organization she started with her ex-husband in...

Aerial co-founders Doug Logan, left, and Michael Li. (LinkedIn Photos) Seeking to untangle the mess of documents and data that companies hold onto and wade through, Seattle startup Aerial raised $2 million for its AI-powered answer to unstructured business data analysis. The pre-seed funding...

Helion Energy employees working on a component of its Polaris device, a seventh-generation fusion prototype that it expects to produce electricity. Microsoft has an agreement with the startup to purchase its clean power — if the company is able to produce it. (Helion Photo) The rapid growth of...

Skytap CEO Bradley Schick. (Skytap Photo) New York-based IT infrastructure services giant Kyndryl announced Monday that it acquired Skytap, a Seattle-based company founded 17 years ago that sells cloud migration software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Skytap helps companies run...

Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of May 5, 2024. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...

Gaurav Oberoi, CEO of Lexion, which announced an agreement to be acquired by Docusign this week, speaking on the GeekWire Podcast at the GeekWire Awards. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we go inside the GeekWire Awards, our annual event recognizing the top...

Robert McPherson, the Seattle singer known as “The Drunken Tenor,” belts out his song set to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” at the GeekWire Awards in Seattle on Thursday. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) For the sake of the innovators in the crowd at Thursday night’s GeekWire Awards,...