GEEK News
June 05, 2015 - 02:04 PM
Inside the 2026 GeekWire Awards: Innovators reshaping how we work, build, and learn
Tracy Drinkwater, founder of the Seattle Universal Math Museum, accepts the 2026 GeekWire Award for STEM Educator of the Year, presented by First Tech Federal Credit Union, at the Showbox SoDo in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Conversations with finalists and special guests at the annual GeekWire Awards about AI, innovation, startups, and the forces...
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Expedia Group sees reward and risk in the rise of AI-powered travel
Expedia Group CEO Ariane Gorin. (Expedia Group Photo) More than 30% of Expedia Group’s self-serve customer support interactions are now handled by AI. Its fastest-growing marketing channel is getting its brands to show up in AI responses. And the company now has travel booking integrations across both ChatGPT and Claude. Expedia Group CEO Ariane Gorin offered new details about the...
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Photos: Inside the 2026 GeekWire Awards
The scene at the 2026 GeekWire Awards at Showbox SoDo in Seattle on Thursday night. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) Hundreds of Pacific Northwest tech community members turned out to honor each other, network and party at the 2026 GeekWire Awards in Seattle on Thursday. The shimmering scene inside Showbox SoDo — highlighted by crystal accents to mark the event’s 15th anniversary — included...
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2026 GeekWire Awards revealed: Big winners — and big love for Seattle — at annual tech celebration
Members of Maison de V’s circus and dance community perform at the opening of the 2026 GeekWire Awards at Showbox SoDo in Seattle on Thursday. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) The love for Seattle runs deep. During a night of celebration for innovators, entrepreneurs, educators and even soccer stars who power and support the region’s tech community, the overriding message at the 2026...
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Helion makes big bet on ‘Tiny Merge’ fusion testbed to meet aggressive Microsoft timeline
Helion Energy is building Tiny Merge, a fusion device that is one-eighth the size of its seventh generation prototype and will serve as a testbed for faster iterations of its designs. (Helion Photo) EVERETT, Wash. — With just three years left on a hard deadline to prove its fusion approach works, Helion Energy is still wrestling with fundamental questions — and it’s building a new, smaller...
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Bid on the ultimate Seattle World Cup suite experience, and support a great cause
From left, Microsoft deputy general counsel Brian DeFoe, Seattle Sounders FC captain Cristian Roldan, and GeekWire co-founder John Cook on stage at the 2026 GeekWire Awards, announcing an online auction for a private suite at the FIFA World Cup Round of 16 knockout match at Lumen Field on July 6, with proceeds benefitting Seattle Children’s Hospital. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) There’s...
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Allen Institute for AI launches big computing cluster for $152M project backed by Nvidia and NSF
Workers install equipment in the data center housing the new Ai2 computing cluster funded by Nvidia and NSF. (Ai2 Photo) The Allen Institute for AI says it has brought online and started using a powerful new computing system funded by Nvidia and the National Science Foundation, the first big milestone in a $152 million project to build open AI models for scientific research. Ai2, as the...
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Report: As AI electricity demands soar, Microsoft weighs retreat from ambitious carbon-free energy pledge
Microsoft’s Fairwater data center near Atlanta is part of the company’s broader AI expansion. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft is considering scaling down or scuttling a pledge to match its electricity use with carbon-free power around the clock by 2030, according to Bloomberg. As tech companies race to bring more energy-hungry data centers online, their climate targets are growing...
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Report: Boston Celtics investors set to bid on Seahawks
Lumen Field in Seattle, home of the Seahawks. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Former Boston Celtics majority owner Wyc Grousbeck and Aditya Mittal, an investor in the NBA team, are preparing a bid to purchase the Seattle Seahawks, according to a report Thursday by Sportico. The report cites multiple people familiar with the process in saying that Grousbeck and Mittal submitted a letter of...
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Opinion: The AI capex conundrum
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy at AWS re:Invent in 2025. (GeekWire File Photo) Generative AI bear Gary Marcus called the AI capex boom the “greatest capital misallocation in history.” Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan reaches the opposite conclusion in his “AI in a Bubble?” research package. Sheridan argues that this is not a hope-and-hype cycle like 1999 but a scale and monetization...
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Microsoft employees learn details of voluntary retirement package: Here’s what the company is offering
A Microsoft-branded beanie at the company store at the tech giant’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Microsoft employees eligible for the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program are learning the details of the package Thursday morning, including the size of cash payments, length of healthcare coverage, and vesting of stock awards if they take the...
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Opinion: The myth of Washington’s tax burden, by the numbers
Washington state’s Legislative Building in Olympia, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Brent Roraback) [Editor’s Note: Sales consultant and former startup founder Ron Davis is a candidate for the Washington state Legislature, who has written for GeekWire previously on startup sales hiring practices. GeekWire publishes guest opinion pieces representing a range of perspectives. The views expressed are...
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Zillow Group leans into AI as revenue climbs 18% in flat housing market
Bigstock Photo Zillow Group says its engineers are shipping 40% more code each, on average, thanks to internal use of AI tools, allowing them to move features faster from concept to launch. That’s one of the AI claims the company made in its first-quarter shareholder letter Wednesday, which read at times less like a financial recap and more like a tech strategy blueprint. “We’re...
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GeekWire test ride: Lime’s new bike packs a zippy punch into a compact, easier-to-use device
GeekWire’s Kurt Schlosser cruises the Burke-Gilman Trail in Seattle on a new LimeBike electric bicycle from Lime this week. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Lime’s newest electric bike is being billed mostly as an accessibility upgrade, but don’t let that undersell it — this thing is nimble, punchy and genuinely fun to ride. The new LimeBike, which plays on the company’s original name, is...
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XBOW, the unicorn with a Seattle mailbox, raises another $35M for its autonomous hacking platform
The XBOW team photo from the company’s website shows employees gathered in Malta, where founder and CEO Oege de Moor is based. The company lists Seattle as its headquarters. (XBOW Photo) The headquarters address of one of Seattle’s newest billion-dollar startups isn’t a trendy office tower or a sprawling corporate campus — it’s a mailbox at a Pioneer Square coworking space. XBOW, the...
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Tin Can launches program to help schools and neighborhoods go smartphone-free together
Tin Can landline phones in a variety of colors. (Tin Can Photo) Tin Can, the Seattle startup behind the screenless, Wi-Fi-enabled landline phone for kids, is launching a new feature aimed at the groups that have been driving its rapid growth: schools, neighborhoods, and parent organizations looking to ditch smartphones together. The company is calling it Tin Can Communities — a program that...
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Seattle-area tech vets buy a cricket team — in Boston — to further feed the sport’s talent pipeline
The new ownership group of the New England Eagles Minor League Cricket franchise, clockwise from top left: Vandana Thomas, Anand Subbaraj, Gaurav Seth, Satheesh Santhamurthi, and Manoj Naidu. (LinkedIn Photos) After more than a decade building cricket fields, sponsoring youth teams, and developing local talent in the Pacific Northwest, a group of Seattle-area tech veterans has taken their...
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Early Amazon engineer and serial founders raise $15M to keep AI agents in the loop
SageOx co-founders, from left: Milkana Brace, Ajit Banerjee, and Ryan Snodgrass. (SageOx Photo) SageOx, a Seattle startup building tools for teams where humans and AI coding agents work side by side, has announced $15 million in seed funding. The company launched in January. The round was led by Canaan Partners, with participation from A.Capital, Pioneer Square Labs and Founders’...
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PSL’s T.A. McCann is running a startup again, as the CEO of Lev — an ‘AI co-founder’ for startups
T.A. McCann inside Pioneer Square Labs’ Seattle offices. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) Serial entrepreneur and investor T.A. McCann has started companies at the front edge of every major tech wave for three decades, from the web and cloud services to mobile and social apps. Maybe it was inevitable that AI would pull him back in. After eight years as managing director of Seattle...
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Microsoft’s new Xbox chief nixes Gaming Copilot for mobile and console, shakes up leadership
Asha Sharma was named Xbox CEO in February after leading Microsoft’s CoreAI group. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft is pulling the plug on its AI-powered Copilot assistant for Xbox, winding down the feature on mobile and canceling its planned launch on consoles. The pullback, announced Tuesday by new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, comes barely a year after the company debuted the gaming chatbot as a...
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Tech Moves: Amazon VP is now Chewy CTO; Smartsheet names CFO; Microsoft exec joins NetApp
Yunyan Wang. (LinkedIn Photo) — Yunyan Wang has left Amazon to become chief technology officer at Chewy, the leading online pet retailer. Wang spent more than 12 years at the Seattle-based tech giant, most recently as vice president of Commerce & Supply Chain Services. “(Wang’s) track record driving innovation at world-class companies makes her the perfect addition as we double down on...
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Seattle’s CopilotKit raises $27M, as some of the biggest names in tech adopt its AI agent protocol
CopilotKit co-founders Uli Barkai, head of growth, left, and CEO Atai Barkai. (CopilotKit Photo) CopilotKit, a Seattle startup with roots in the former Techstars Seattle accelerator, has raised $27 million for technology that lets AI agents work inside existing software applications. The company created AG-UI, an open standard for how AI agents communicate with software, letting agents...
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Moment Energy lands $40M to scale EV battery repurposing at planned Texas gigafactory
Artist’s rendering of Moment Energy’s planned Austin, Texas, gigafactory. (Moment Energy Image) Moment Energy, a British Columbia-based startup repurposing used electric vehicle batteries, has announced a $40 million investment to help fund construction of a massive factory in Texas and more than triple its headcount. The company, headquartered just outside Vancouver, has now raised more...
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Microsoft’s new research finds an AI ‘paradox’ holding companies back
Caption: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discusses the company’s Copilot initiatives. A new Microsoft study finds that the biggest barrier to AI at work isn’t the technology — it’s the organizations around it. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) [Editor’s Note: Agents of Transformation is an independent GeekWire series, underwritten by Accenture, exploring the adoption and impact of AI and...
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Data centers at sea: Panthalassa nets $140M led by Peter Thiel for wave-powered AI
A Panthalassa wave energy system. (LinkedIn Photo) Wave energy had largely been bobbing around in the background of the U.S. clean energy sector — until now. On Monday, Oregon-based Panthalassa announced a $140 million round led by Peter Thiel. The new funding from the PayPal co-founder and others will allow the startup to finish building its pilot manufacturing facility near Portland....
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Seattle schools’ new cellphone rules are in effect — what it means for different kids, and why now
(BigStock Photo) For years, the rules around cellphones in Seattle Public Schools depended largely on which school — or even which classroom — a student walked into. That ended today. The district enacted its first districtwide cellphone policy on Monday, setting a single standard for all students across every building for the first time. We broke down how the new rules work, who is...
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Microsoft’s OpenClaw team takes on the personal assistant challenge
Microsoft’s unofficial Ninja Cat mascot rides the OpenClaw lobster. (Image via Omar Shahine’s blog) Bob. Clippy. Cortana. Copilot. Microsoft has been trying to unlock the personal-assistant puzzle for decades. Now a fledgling team inside the company that’s been experimenting with OpenClaw — an open-source framework that acts both a virtual assistant and platform for building and managing...
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Building belonging: How GeekWire’s STEM Educator of the Year uses Legos to bridge the tech gap
Project LEDO founder Fidel Ferrer, second from left, working with Lego robotics students in his program. (Project LEDO Photo) Through Lego robotics and a STEM curriculum, Project LEDO serves as both an inspiration and a safety net for low-income kids and students of color in Portland, Ore., and surrounding areas. “In a climate where school funds no longer cover vital STEM enrichment,...
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Interlune wins $6.9M NASA contract to create system to extract helium-3 and hydrogen from moon dirt
Interlune test engineer Alex Lewandowski and mechanical engineer Jessica Wu check test equipment for the mass spectrometer system in the Regolith Lab at the company’s Seattle headquarters. (Interlune Photo) NASA has awarded a $6.9 million contract to Seattle-based Interlune for the development of a system that can extract gases such as helium-3 and hydrogen from lunar soil and rocks. The...
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Amazon turns its logistics empire into a new business, taking on UPS and FedEx in freight and shipping
Amazon is opening its logistics network to outside businesses through a new offering called Amazon Supply Chain Services. (Amazon Photo) Amazon launched a new business that opens its entire logistics network to outside companies — sending shares of UPS and FedEx tumbling and marking the latest example of the tech giant under CEO Andy Jassy turning its internal capabilities into products and...
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AI best practices: If at first you don’t succeed, prompt, prompt again
An AI prompt screen, as reimagined by Google Gemini. [Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series by Oren Etzioni about AI usage and best practices. See also “AI Coach or AI Ghostwriter? The Choice Is Yours,” and “How to read with AI.”] A friend asked ChatGPT for input on a professional matter and received a banal, lackluster response. I suggested she try a different approach: ask for 15...
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Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of April 26, 2026
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 April 26, 2026. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on GeekWire Microsoft says its voluntary retirement program will result in a $900 million charge in the...
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Elon takes the stand, Big Tech drops big numbers, and a Seattle VC gets in on a billion-dollar deal
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: What it was like inside the Oakland federal courthouse where Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Microsoft, with jury selection revealing just how hard it is to find anyone neutral about Musk these days. Meanwhile, Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership the same morning the trial began — and less than 24 hours later, OpenAI’s models...
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Seattle mayor’s ‘bye’ to millionaires who leave state over taxes is no laughing matter to some in tech
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson makes a waving gesture while commenting on millionaires threatening to leave Washington state during her appearance at Seattle University earlier this month. (Screenshot via YouTube / Seattle Channel) Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is being greeted with a bit of backlash over a recent “goodbye.” During a conversation earlier this month at Seattle University, Wilson...
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Calculated joy: Why GeekWire’s STEM Educator of the Year built a museum to fix math trauma
Tracy Drinkwater engaging with visitors at the Seattle Universal Math Museum, which she founded. (SUMM Photo) Tracy Drinkwater bristles when people — sometimes proudly — declare they “can’t do math.” No one, she notes, would similarly boast about being bad at reading or history. But she understands the sentiment. Math education, she argues, was designed decades ago to produce NASA...
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