05 juin 2015
Expedia stock soars 15% as B2B momentum fuels revenue growth
(GeekWire File Photo) Expedia Group topped estimates for its second quarter earnings with $3.8 billion in revenue, up 6% year-over-year, and adjusted net income of $546 million. Shares were up more than 15% in after-hours trading. “Our performance was driven by continued strength across...
Ballmer’s USAFacts warns against politicizing data after Trump fires BLS chief over jobs report
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer founded USAFacts in 2017. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) USAFacts, the nonpartisan organization led by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, rarely weighs in on political controversies. But the firestorm surrounding the firing of the nation’s top employment...
Startup’s plan to ditch Seattle for Bay Area sparks reaction about tech culture, work pace, AI and more
(GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) A drizzly, cool, grey morning in August feels like the perfect time to recognize that Seattle is not for everyone. Announcing that your tech startup is packing up for the Bay Area might be another way to throw a wet blanket over the Emerald City. The...
Tech Moves: Icertis names new CEO as Samir Bodas steps down; Smartsheet adds security leader
Anand Subbaraman, left, is the new Icertis CEO, succeeding Samir Bodas, who co-founded the company. (Icertis Photos) Icertis has named Anand Subbaraman as CEO, succeeding Samir Bodas, who will become executive chairman of the Bellevue, Wash.-based contract management software company....
New startup Wild Zebra brings AI tutor to thousands of students, raises $2M for wider rollout
Before each question, Wild Zebra’s AI tutor shows an AI-generated image, such as the one above, that matches the topic and interest. The idea is to spark their imagination, build context, and make students excited to dive in. (Wild Zebra screenshot) A new Seattle startup is building a personal...
Zillow revenue up 15% to $655M as mortgage and rentals business drive growth
(Zillow Image) Zillow beat estimates for its second quarter with $655 million in revenue, up 15% year-over-year. GAAP net income was $2 million, up from a $17 million loss in the year-ago period. Shares were down as much as 6% in after-hours trading but later recovered. The company’s...
Bill Gates business card up for auction, with significant date from Microsoft’s early days
A Bill Gates business card obtained on Nov. 6, 1980, during a visit to the Microsoft co-founder’s Bellevue, Wash., office. (Lelands Photo) Long before the days of tapping your smartphone against someone else’s to share contact information, small paper business cards did the trick — even for...
‘The hustle factor is real’: Why this fast-growing Seattle startup is packing its bags for Palo Alto
Nectar Social co-founders and sisters Misbah Uraizee (left) and Farah Uraizee. (Nectar Social Photo) Misbah Uraizee and Farah Uraizee want to win. And they believe their best shot at success lies in Silicon Valley, not Seattle. The co-founders of Nectar Social, fresh off a $10.6 million...
UW study: Politically persuasive AI chatbots offer potential benefits — and worrying influence
University of Washington graduate student Jillian Fisher presenting at the Association for Computational Linguistics in Vienna, Austria, on July 28. (UW Photo) If you’ve faced the frustrating challenge of trying to pull a friend or family member with opposing political views into...
OpenAI to provide ChatGPT to federal agencies for $1, and Seattle’s Slalom will assist worker training
OpenAI is providing U.S. federal government agencies access to ChatGPT Enterprise for $1 per agency for the next year, the company announced Wednesday, and Seattle-based business and technology consulting firm Slalom will help facilitate the initiative. The effort is led by OpenAI for...
Secretive startup backed by Concur co-founders uses AI to rethink customer experience software
SCALA.AI co-founder and CEO Ardie Sameti (left) and co-founder/executive chairman Raj Singh. Concur co-founders Raj Singh and Mike Hilton are backing a stealthy new Seattle-area startup called SCALA.AI that’s positioning itself at the intersection of customer experience, generative AI, and...
Blue Origin and five other companies study how orbital transfer vehicles can aid NASA
An artist’s conception shows the Blue Ring space platform in orbit. (Blue Origin Illustration) Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is among six companies that will be producing studies for NASA looking at low-cost ways to use orbital transfer vehicles to deliver spacecraft to hard-to-reach...
Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader retiring; Apptio co-founder Sunny Gupta will take over enterprise giant
Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader at the company’s ENGAGE customer conference in September 2023. (Smartsheet Photo) After leading Smartsheet for nearly two decades, Mark Mader is leaving the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant. The company announced Tuesday that Mader is retiring as CEO...
‘Open-weight’ debate: Allen Institute for AI says OpenAI needs to go further to be truly open
OLMo leader Hanna Hajishirzi of Ai2 and the University of Washington speaks during a 2023 event at the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) OpenAI’s new models may be “open-weight,” but a leading artificial intelligence research...
Seattle-based Avail acquired by Upstack in tech consultancy deal
Avail founder Dan Marsh. (LinkedIn Photo) Seattle-based tech consulting firm Avail Partners has been acquired by Upstack, a New York City-based IT advisory platform that helps companies purchase products from tech vendors. Avail focuses on cloud migration, cybersecurity, and datacenter...
Interlune will team up with Astrolab to send a camera to the moon for helium-3 survey
An artist’s conception shows Astrolab’s FLIP rover on the moon. Interlune plans to put a helium-hunting multispectral camera on the rover. (Astrolab Illustration) Seattle-based Interlune says it’s struck a deal with California-based Astrolab to send a multispectral camera to the moon to estimate...
Amazon will offer OpenAI’s open-weight models, sidestepping Microsoft via Apache 2.0 license
Image via Amazon OpenAI released its first open-weight AI models in more than five years, and Amazon quickly said they will be available on its Bedrock and SageMaker platforms — the first time the cloud giant has offered products from the ChatGPT maker. The surprise announcement comes at a...
Titan sub investigators blame OceanGate for safety lapses and say fatal disaster was ‘preventable’
In a 2017 image, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush is framed by the carbon-composite cylinder that became the hull of the ill-fated Titan submersible. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) In a report issued today, the U.S. Coast Guard panel investigating the loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its...
Microsoft’s new AI reverse-engineers malware autonomously, marking a shift in cybersecurity
Microsoft says its new system “automates what is considered the gold standard in malware classification.” (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft says it has created an advanced AI system that can reverse-engineer and identify malicious software on its own, without human assistance. The...
Seattle leaders pass tax hike for big companies, cuts for small biz – but voters get final word
View of Seattle’s downtown and Harbor Island, the city’s maritime shipping hub, from the Smith Tower. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) With a mix of hand-wringing and can-do enthusiasm, Seattle City Council members this afternoon unanimously passed a tax overhaul that would eliminate business...
Microsoft cuts another 40 jobs in Washington state, continuing layoffs amid AI investment surge
Microsoft has laid off more than 15,000 people globally since May. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft laid off another 40 employees in Washington, bringing the total number of job cuts in its home state to 3,160 since May, according to a public filing. These latest cuts are on a...
Seattle’s LevelTen Energy to lay off workers amid shrinking support for U.S. wind and solar power
Pacific Northwest wind turbines. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle-based LevelTen Energy, a startup facilitating the deployment of clean energy projects, is laying off 60 workers according to a new Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) released by the Washington state...
Gates Foundation unveils record-setting $2.5 billion initiative focused on women’s health
Gates Foundation headquarters in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper) The Gates Foundation today announced a $2.5 billion, five-year initiative focused on women’s health that will support innovation in care, bolster data collection and aims to catalyze additional investments. The effort...
Microsoft study shows jobs most — and least — impacted by generative AI
Roofers and other jobs requiring physical labor are least vulnerable to AI impact, according to a study from Microsoft. (Photo by Zohair Mirza on Unsplash) AI may be coming for your job — but not if you’re operating machinery, building tires, or replacing roofs. A new study from Microsoft...
Amazon lays off staff and restructures Wondery podcast unit
Amazon is laying off 110 people as part of a restructuring of its Wondery podcast network business, according to Bloomberg. Amazon is moving existing Wondery operations into the company’s Audible unit or a new “creator services” team, Bloomberg reported, citing a memo to staff. Wondery...
From Army diver to carbon capture: How a Pacific deployment sparked a veteran’s climate mission
Tyler LeRoy aboard an Army Logistics Support Vessel to conduct an underwater demolition training range off the coast of Virginia Beach. (Photo courtesy of LeRoy) [Editor’s note: “Tech Vets: Profiles in Leadership and Innovation,” is a GeekWire series showcasing U.S. military veterans leading...
Qbeast, led by Azure and AWS vet, raises $7.6M to optimize analytics on open data platforms
Qbeast, a data optimization startup based in Bellevue, Wash., raised a $7.6 million seed round led by Peak XV’s Surge (formerly Sequoia Capital India). Qbeast helps customers optimize analytics on open data platforms such as Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg. It says its indexing layer can deliver...
Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of July 27, 2025
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 July 27, 2025. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
Crypto billionaire takes his $28M space trip with five others on Blue Origin’s rocket ship
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship rises from its West Texas launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube) Controversial crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun finally got his suborbital ride into space today from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, four years after he put in the winning $28 million bid...
Have we hit ‘Peak AI’? Microsoft, Amazon, and a pivotal week for Seattle tech
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Microsoft soars past Wall Street expectations, briefly hitting a $4 trillion valuation, while Amazon faces sharper scrutiny over its AI strategy. We break down the contrasting earnings results, analyst reactions, and what it all means for the future of AI —...
Space entrepreneurs see defense projects as next frontier for funding and innovation
The Golden Dome is envisioned as a network of satellite sensors and interceptors that could protect America from incoming missiles. (Lockheed Martin Illustration) Will the Golden Dome be a golden opportunity for commercial space ventures? That may be a bit of an exaggeration. But at a Seattle...
New round of layoffs at Glowforge impacts multiple teams at Seattle laser engraver maker
Glowforge co-founder and CEO Dan Shapiro with one of the company’s laser engravers in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) A new round of layoffs has hit Seattle laser engraver maker Glowforge. Co-founder and CEO Dan Shapiro told GeekWire that the startup merged its sales and...
Tech Moves: Protect AI founders get roles at Palo Alto; F5 board chair to retire; new Chainguard hires
Co-founders of Protect AI, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in April 2025, from left: Badar Ahmed, Daryan Dehghanpisheh and Ian Swanson. (Protect AI Photo) — Two co-founders and former executives of Seattle-based Protect AI announced their new roles at Palo Alto Networks, the California...
Finding value from AI: These tools boost coding, writing, video editing, researching, travel planning
From top left, clockwise: Markiesha Patrice; Joe Heitzeberg; Elizabeth Russo; Darian Parrish and Joe Golden; Robert Mao and Xuchen Yao; Gayathri (G3) Venkataraman and Mamtha Banerjee; Ti Zhao and Beth Kolko; and Gregory Kennedy. (GeekWire Photos / Taylor Soper) Everybody is...
Starbucks pioneered mobile ordering. Now the coffee giant is ditching pickup-only stores.
Starbucks is ending its pickup-only store concept, including at this location in Seattle near the Space Needle. (GeekWire Photos / Taylor Soper) I stopped by one of Starbucks’ mobile-focused pickup-only locations in Seattle this week after the company announced that it was...
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