Rajeev Badyal, vice president of Amazon Leo, discusses Amazon’s plans for satellite broadband services while Chris Weber, Amazon Leo’s vice president of business and product, looks on during the Technology Alliance’s State of Technology Luncheon in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Brian M....
S. “Soma” Somasegar at Microsoft in 2014, giving a tour of the revamped Developer Division offices. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) S. “Soma” Somasegar, a fixture in the Seattle tech community who led Microsoft’s Developer Division as part of his 27-year tenure at the company before...
From left: Expedia Group chairman Barry Diller, CEO Ariane Gorin, former CEO and current Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and founder Rich Barton at Expedia’s Explore partner conference in Las Vegas this week. (Expedia Group Photo) From her office overlooking the atrium at Expedia Group’s sunlit...
Tin Can co-founder and CEO Chet Kittleson, right, speaks with Pioneer Square Labs Managing Director Greg Gottesman at Seattle Flow Startup Day at Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle on May 15. (Dan DeLong Photo) This past Christmas, Chet Kittleson was in the back of a minivan watching his...
The Washington Youth Aerospace team, from left: Nikhil Sirivara, Daniel Tadesse, Mikhail Antipin, Bao-Ky Tran, Antoine Vigneron and Anay Mediwala, pose with the rocket supplies vendor who found the motor the kids needed for a successful launch in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of Sudheer...
A screenshot of TerraByte’s software platform pinpoints cargo ships, warehouses, solar farms, mining sites and areas of deforestation. One complex query generated more than 2,000 results that can be further filtered. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: TerraByte AI) A stealthy...
StitcherAI co-founders Varun Mittal (left) and Udam Dewaraja. (StitcherAI Photo) StitcherAI, backed by $3 million in pre-seed funding, launched today with an unusual approach to help companies get a handle on AI and cloud spending before the bills get out of control. Founded by a pair of...
Reporters and lawyers line up outside the federal courthouse in Oakland for jury selection. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) A jury ruled unanimously Monday that Elon Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft, finding the defendants not liable on all...
Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo) Layoffs at a Starbucks support center in Seattle will impact 252 corporate jobs, including a number of vice presidents, directors and senior managers, according to a new state filing on Monday. A Washington Worker Adjustment and...
The Gates Foundation marked its 25th anniversary in May 2025 with a panel, from left: Emma Tucker, Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief; Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation; and Bill Gates. (GeekWire screenshot from live stream) The Gates Foundation’s trust no longer owns any shares of...
Matt Wood speaks at the AWS Summit in New York in July 2024. (Amazon Photo) Matt Wood, who spent more than 14 years helping to lead Amazon Web Services’ artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives before leaving the company in 2024, is returning to the company in a newly created...
From left: Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The courtroom spectacle in Oakland has obscured a bigger question, argues AI industry veteran Oren Etzioni: Can a charity be converted into a corporation? (GeekWire File Photos) We are watching a courtroom drama in...
United Nations’ Under-Secretary and Special Envoy for Digital and Emerging Technologies, Amandeep Singh Gill, appears via Zoom to deliver the opening keynote at Seattle University’s 2026 Ethics and Tech conference on May 15, 2026. (Photo: Ken Yeung) Big tech companies are deploying compute...
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 10, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on...
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: As the Musk v. OpenAI trial heads to the jury, we dig into what Microsoft’s internal board memos and executive testimony revealed about the origins of the company’s massive bet on AI, and why this case matters beyond the billionaire drama. Plus, Howard...
“Lean Startup” author Eric Ries, left, discusses his new book “Incorruptible” with GeekWire’s Todd Bishop at Seattle Flow Startup Day 2026. (Photo by Dan DeLong for Seattle Flow) When Eric Ries wrote his landmark book “The Lean Startup,” published in 2011, the introduction ended with a bold...
Jon Friedman. (LinkedIn Photo) — Microsoft has named Jon Friedman as its first chief design officer. Friedman, who has been with the tech giant for more than 22 years, said the new role recognizes the challenge of innovating in an AI-dominated world where customers need products they can trust,...
The Seattle Seahawks perfume is L’essence de victorie. (Image via Seahawks.com) The release of 2026 NFL team schedules on Thursday night marked the return of the “social media Super Bowl” — and the actual Super Bowl champs were might in the mix. The Seattle Seahawks used a fun play on perfume...
Starbucks’ Seattle headquarters. (GeekWire File Photo) Starbucks announced Friday that is laying off 300 additional corporate employees and closing several regional offices after earlier this week providing details on the elimination of 61 tech roles in Seattle. The cuts aim to “further...
This reconstructed image of a fresco from the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete shows three Minoan women with their hair in ponytails. “The Curve of the World” throws a spotlight on Minoan seafarers. (Credit: Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons) Long before Homer wrote the...
A sign at the Allen Institute for AI headquarters in Seattle, with the Space Needle in the background. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) The wave of departures from the Allen Institute for AI to Microsoft is bigger than previously known: A total of at least 10 former Ai2 staffers and researchers...
VueBuds, a prototype developed by University of Washington researchers who have embedded a rice-grain-sized camera into each earbud of a standard pair of Sony wireless earbuds. (UW Photo) Wireless earbuds seemingly sprang out of nowhere. Popularized by Apple’s AirPods, they were suddenly...
(GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) I can’t get “Road to Nowhere” out of my head. The 1985 Talking Heads anthem is built on contradiction — upbeat and anxious at the same time. Songwriter David Byrne once described it as “a resigned, even joyful look at doom.” That paradox felt...
Matt Souza, left, and Sam Shaddox, founders of Talairis Law Group. (Talairis Photo) Sam Shaddox and Matt Souza have spent years on the inside of big-time legal work, as attorneys at a major Seattle firm and later as general counsels at tech companies. They’ve watched as law firms charge startup...
Chris Weber, vice president of business and product for Amazon Leo, sports a T-shirt bearing Amazon Leo’s logo in the project’s signature krypton shade of purple during countdown coverage for an April satellite launch. (Credit: United Launch Alliance) REDMOND, Wash. — Chris Weber isn’t ready to...
CyberGym benchmark scores over time, showing the rapid improvement in AI vulnerability discovery capabilities. Microsoft’s multi-model MDASH system (top right) tops the leaderboard at 88.4%. (CyberGym / UC Berkeley) Mythos has been MDASH’d. A new AI-powered system from Microsoft surpassed a...
(Cowboy Space Corp. Photo) Cowboy Space Corp., a space startup growing out a new satellite and rocket engineering center in Seattle, raised $275 million in a Series B funding round this week that valued the company at $2 billion. The Bay Area-based company — formerly known as Aetherflux — was...
Kevin Scott, Microsoft CTO, in Redmond in May 2025. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott took the stand Wednesday and, for the first time, publicly addressed the internal email that Elon Musk’s lawyers have cited to support allegations that Microsoft knew OpenAI was...
(Google Gemini Image) [Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series by Oren Etzioni about AI usage and best practices.] I’ve been writing code since before most of today’s vibe coding founders were born. So when I sat down to try the latest vibe coding tools — Lovable, Claude code, and the...
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket lifts off from its Florida launch pad in April. (Blue Origin Photo) For more than a quarter-century, Jeff Bezos has been funding his Blue Origin space venture primarily with his gains from Amazon, the other big company he founded — but according to a report in the...
Pamela Bhattacharya. (LinkedIn Photo) — Pamela Bhattacharya has left her role as senior director of AI at Microsoft to join OpenAI as a member of its technical staff, where she is leading AI safety work with a focus on child safety. Bhattacharya spent nearly nine years at Microsoft as a...
(Bigstock Photo) LinkedIn is laying off workers across engineering, product and marketing, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, as the tech sector continues shedding roles. CEO Daniel Shapero disclosed the cuts in an internal memo cited by Bloomberg. The professional networking platform, which is...
Defense giant Anduril is operating its autonomous naval vessel manufacturing facility at the old Foss Shipyard on the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / John Cook) Anduril Industries announced a massive $5 billion funding round Wednesday as the fast-growing defense tech...
How an Alexa for Shopping price alert flows across the Amazon app, phone notification and Echo Show. (Amazon Image) Amazon.com and Alexa are finally talking to each other. The tech giant on Wednesday announced Alexa for Shopping, a new capability that connects its Rufus...
Sam Altman at OpenAI DevDay in San Francisco in November 2023. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Sam Altman faced pointed questions Tuesday about his personal financial ties to Helion Energy, the Everett, Wash., fusion startup that’s aiming to supply vast amounts of energy to both OpenAI and...