GeekWire

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified this week in Google's antitrust case in Washington, D.C., supporting the U.S. Justice Department's contention that the search giant unfairly leverages its market power to stifle competition, a charge that Google vehemently disputes.  On this episode of the podcast, we reenact portions of Nadella's testimony, explain the positions staked out by Microsoft and Go...

On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we dive deep into the landmark lawsuit filed by the FTC against Amazon with insights from former Amazon seller Jason Boyce , co-author of "The Amazon Jungle," host of the Day 2 podcast, and CEO of Avenue7Media , an agency that works with online sellers. We discuss the implications of the lawsuit for Amazon, consumers, and sellers in the context of the chang...

Kate Johnson is based in Denver in her role as Lumen Technologies CEO and president, but she has been spending a lot of time in the Seattle area recently, and not just because one of the local stadiums bears the company's name. Johnson sees the Seattle region an ideal test bed and proving ground for Lumen's offerings, including consumer and business broadband, voice, and data services. Yes, it hel...

It was a big week for Microsoft, with the unveiling of the company's latest Windows and AI features and new Surface devices at a special event in New York City on Thursday. This was preceded, by only a few days, by the surprise resignation of Panos Panay , the chief product officer in charge of the company's Windows and Devices division. Shortly after that announcement, Bloomberg News reported tha...

Chris Pirillo is an entrepreneur, creator, event organizer, and online community leader who has been a guide to the world of tech for everyday users since the early days of the web. On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we catch up with Chris about his latest project, CreatorTech.net , an email newsletter and monthly meetup focused on the intersection of creativity and artificial intelligence....

Our guest on this special episode is journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson, whose new book about Elon Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla founder and X (Twitter) owner, was published this week . Isaacson addresses the question of whether Musk is "calculated or crazed," as one anecdote in the book puts it; discusses Musk's role in some of the world's most vital infrastructure, including SpaceX's Starlin...

Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast to talk about the company's latest warehouse robots, explaining how they represent the emergence of the larger vision that prompted him to join Amazon more than eight years ago. Our conversation at Amazon HQ in Seattle followed a trip by GeekWire's Todd Bishop to Austin and San Marcos, Texas, to see...

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made it clear in a recent internal meeting that he wants employees to "disagree and commit" to the company's policy of working three days in the office, and find somewhere else to work if it doesn't work for them. We discuss the news in our first segment this week, and ponder why Amazon seems to be getting a bigger backlash than other big companies implementing similar polici...

On this week’s GeekWire Podcast, we're featuring an episode of Shift AI , a podcast hosted by Boaz Ashkenazy , CEO of AI solutions provider Simply Augmented , with guest Matt McIlwain of Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group .  A thriving tech hub requires access to ideas, people, and experiments that produce collective lessons sooner and with greater fidelity than anywhere else...

How can startups differentiate themselves in the new era of AI? We've been discussing that question a lot recently on the GeekWire Podcast, and on this episode, we'll get a first-hand look from business and technology veteran Pete Christothoulou, who has been immersed in this world for many years. Christothoulou is the former CEO of Marchex, the call and conversational analytics company, who is no...

How can baseball embrace technology and new traditions while honoring its legacy and listening to its fans? Those were the questions at the heart of the Seattle Mariners CEO's conversation this week with Taylor Soper, at the GeekWire Rooftop BBQ and Mariners Day at the First Mode headquarters in Seattle.  Stanton brings his experience as a longtime business and tech leader to his role with the Mar...

This week on the GeekWire Podcast , we look at how Amazon is positioning itself in the emerging era of generative artificial intelligence. We play and assess clips of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explaining the company's AI strategy on its earnings call this week. We also discuss the history of AI usage by startups, and consider advice from investors and startup leaders at Seattle Tech Week for emerging...

Blake Resnick built a fusion reactor in his garage at age 14, and interned at McLaren Automotive, Tesla, and DJI, before dropping out of Northwestern University in 2017 to launch drone startup Brinc . Now, at age 23, he oversees a team of nearly 100 people making drones and other technology for public safety agencies, serving more than 400 customers. On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, record...

Microsoft staked its financial claim in the AI gold rush this week, announcing the pricing for its upcoming Microsoft 365 Copilot technology: a whopping $30/user per month on top of its existing enterprise subscription license fees. Wall Street loved it. One analyst called it "eye popping." Investors sent the company's shares to a new record on the day the pricing was announced. The upcoming produ...

This week, we take a closer look at Amazon's Alexa in a world where generative AI is enabling increasingly sophisticated conversations with digital assistants.  How does Alexa stack up against ChatGPT? Is that even a fair comparison? How will privacy play into all of this? And what's Amazon's commitment to Alexa in this era of corporate cutbacks. Those are some of the topics we discuss with Rohit...

If the use of generative AI in the workplace didn’t seem complicated enough already, just consider what it means for big cities and other governmental agencies. The implications of common AI problems such as algorithmic bias and attribution of intellectual property are magnified in the public sector, and further complicated by unique challenges such as the retention and production of public record...

For more than four decades, since the 1980s, pointing and clicking has been the primary method of using a personal computer. What if that changed to simply thinking, typing and doing? That's one promise of AI. Rather than remembering the keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot, or the setting to shift the screen into dark mode, you could just tell the computer what you want it to do in natural lang...

"Our rule is, we risk capital — we don't risk people." That was the guiding principle for Everett-Wash.-based OceanGate, as described by its CEO, Stockton Rush, at the GeekWire Summit in October 2022. Rush's engineering decisions, and his tolerance for risk, as reflected in his comments at our event, are getting new scrutiny after the apparent implosion of OceanGate's Titan submersible, near the s...

Our guest this week is Jason Del Rey, a business reporter who covered Amazon, Walmart and the business of online retail for more than a decade at Recode and Vox Media. His new book is "Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for our Wallets," which takes an inside look at what he calls "the defining business clash of this generation—a battle waged for our loyalty and wallets, with hundre...

This week: the origins of data, and the future of the digital species. Our guest is business and tech leader Bob Muglia, a startup investor and advisor who played key roles in the emergence of Microsoft's database, server, and business software products, and served as the CEO of data warehouse company Snowflake Computing. He's the author, with Steve Hamm, of a new book called  "The Datapreneurs: T...

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday unveiled the company's new $3500 Vision Pro headset, declaring a new era for spatial computing, and it was difficult not to notice the similarities to Microsoft's unveiling of its HoloLens headset back in 2015.  The comparison of Vision Pro and HoloLens, and the way the devices match a certain historical pattern, is one of our topics this week in a broader discussion a...

Hundreds of Amazon employees walked out of the office in Seattle this week, gathering in between the company's headquarters towers while holding signs, participating in chants and listening to speakers urge the tech giant to do better. It was part of a global walkout that organizers said drew participation from more than 2,000 Amazon employees worldwide.  So why did they walk out, and what do they...

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we're coming to you from our mobile recording studio, aka Todd's car, as he and John make the most of their time in a clogged parking garage to discuss the comments they had just heard from T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert at the Technology Alliance annual State of Technology luncheon. Topics include artificial intelligence, national security concerns over Chinese hacki...

The theme at this week's GeekWire Awards was Star Wars, but we didn't need to go to a galaxy far, far away to find the force that promises to reshape the technology industry. The game-changing potential of AI was on the minds of many finalists and attendees, and integral to the business models of many of the companies featured on stage. This episode features conversations with finalists and attend...

We're back this week on the GeekWire Podcast as humans, not bots, we promise, but we've still got a lot of AI to talk about. On this week's episode, Todd shares highlights from his visit to Google I/O, including two of the generative AI tools that demonstrated the potential of technology to change the way we process and convey information.  Todd and John wrestle with the implications of these AI t...