GeekWire

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. Bill Gates talks about how work will change after the coronavirus ... and how school shouldn't. A Seattle startup that is trying to make a safer football helmet gets a new lease on life. And Lego and Nintendo bring Super Mario into the physical world in a surprising way. We have a lot of tech news to discuss on this wee...

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. Amazon is under pressure as workers in dozens of its warehouses test positive for the coronavirus, and an Amazon exec makes a major blunder in employee relations. Amid the gloomy COVID-19 news, there are some stories that fill us with hope. And it was never a dull moment with John Legere as CEO of T-Mobile. As the compa...

Kevin Scott is Microsoft’s chief technology officer, its executive vice president of AI and Research, and the author, with Greg Shaw, of the new book, “ Reprogramming the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley, Making AI Serve Us All. " Scott, who joined Microsoft with its acquisition of LinkedIn, goes back to his roots in rural Virginia in the book, making the case that...

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. Seattle’s latest week under the cloud of the coronavirus began with Gov. Jay Inslee’s long-expected shelter-at-home announcement . It requires all but essential workers to stay at home and limits what everyone else can do outside of home. We also take a look at how Seattle’s big tech firms are respondi...

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. It was another tumultuous week in Seattle, the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis, with restaurants and bars ordered closed, gatherings of more than 50 people banned, and the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths continuing to climb. Among the week’s events: A worker at a tech company in Seattle became the first pe...

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. The gravity of the COVID-19 virus outbreak hit home hard in Seattle this week: Large events were banned, schools were closed, and thousands of people struggled to adjust to working from home. Restaurants began to feel the pinch – some even closed temporarily – as people stayed home. The Seattle Archdiocese s...

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. Seattle became ground zero in the U.S. coronavirus outbreak this week and tech firms were trying to adjust. Meetings and conferences were cancelled or moved online and many firms told employees to work from home for the rest of the month. GeekWire was no exception: Our annual awards event has been postponed. How will th...

GeekWire Podcast listeners, we’re sharing this special episode of our GeekWire Health Tech Podcast with you given the widespread interest in the novel coronavirus outbreak. For more GeekWire Health Tech episodes, see geekwire.com/healthtech . A new generation of cutting-edge vaccines could dramatically accelerate the global response to future outbreaks such as the current coronavirus epidemi...

On this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast, a conversation with veteran tech journalist Steven Levy, Wired editor-at-large, about his new book Facebook, The Inside Story . GeekWire editor Todd Bishop spoke with Levy this week during a University Bookstore event in Seattle. And as a special bonus for GeekWire Podcast listeners, stick around to the end for a chance to win your own signed copy o...

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. In a surprise move, Seattle-based travel site Expedia laid off about 12 percent of its workforce this week, including 500 people in Seattle. Chairman Barry Diller had called the company a “bloated organization” on a recent earnings call. It sounds like he is cracking down and wants more focus, more profit an...

America's housing crisis is a nationwide problem, but it's especially acute in San Francisco and Seattle, home to the country's largest technology industries. The "terrible twins," as New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty describes them, represent a perfect storm of rapid job growth, an influx of wealth, and rampant single-family zoning that makes it difficult to densify housing. In an interview...

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. PBS’s Frontline profiled the Amazon empire and painted a complicated picture of unrelenting ambition. Frontline spent a year examining Amazon’s impact on commerce, technology and society, and landed interviews with several current executives and former employees. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t sit for an...

Here’s what we’re talking about on this week’s episode of the GeekWire Podcast: Voting online is fast, convenient and also … vulnerable. In the wake of the Iowa caucuses app fiasco, we tried voting with a smartphone in a Seattle regional election . While there are valid concerns about security in mobile voting, organizations behind this test are confident it will be safe a...

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast: Amazon’s second headquarters may be closer to Seattle than you think . Amazon says it plans to grow its presence in Bellevue , in the Seattle suburbs, to 15,000 employees in the next few years. That could be comparable to the number of employees working in the official HQ2 site of Arlington, Va. Will the company f...

Here's what we're talking about on this new episode of the GeekWire Podcast:  Amazon employees are responding to threats of termination for their climate advocacy by intentionally violating the company’s corporate communications policy. More than 350 workers criticized Amazon’s contribution to climate change , violating corporate PR rules that prevent employees from discussing com...

How can we create modern workplaces where everyone can thrive? That's one of the questions at the heart of the new book, Female Firebrands , by human resources professional Mikaela Kiner, founder and CEO of Seattle-based Reverb Consulting . "Female Firebrands" profiles 13 women from a variety of backgrounds, exploring the realities of the modern workplace through their eyes and experiences. The bo...

Did the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia really hack into Jeff Bezos' phone? It sure looks that way , based on a forensic analysis of what happened after a video was sent to the Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner via WhatsApp by Mohammed bin Salman, a.k.a. MBS. A United Nations report this week called the incident part of a broader campaign against the Washington Post seeking to stifle its coverage...

Apple doubled down on artificial intelligence and boosted its presence in Seattle with the acquisition of Xnor.ai, an Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence spinout with roots at the University of Washington, as first reported by GeekWire this week . It was a win for those institutions, and investors including Seattle's Madrona Venture Group, but it's also an example of an ambitious startup s...

CES is becoming less of a place where companies unveil game-changing products, and more where they show attention-grabbing ideas. That's one of the takeaways from GeekWire's CES 2020 coverage team, managing editor Taylor Soper and photographer/videographer Kevin Lisota, who just returned from several days at the big technology show in Las Vegas. On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, they recap...

More than half of the U.S. population over age 12 has now listened to a podcast, according to Edison Research . The medium has fundamentally altered the landscape for audio content, liberating and empowering both listeners and creators. And big acquisitions such as Spotify’s purchase of Gimlet Media signal that the business of podcasting is coming of age, too. But there remains an economic g...

From Amazon to Zillow, big successes to surprising failures, it was an extraordinary year for technology and innovation emerging from and impacting Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. That's the consensus from GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop, who independently compiled their own lists of the biggest stories of the year, then compared notes in this year-end GeekWire Podcast discussion...

John and Todd make it through the rain and into the studio to discuss some of the  biggest stories of the week: Car2go's exit from North Americ a, which will leave Seattle without a free-floating car-sharing service for the first time in many years; and the sudden downfall of Vicis , the high-tech football helmet maker backed by some of the NFL's biggest names. Plus the answer to last week's...

The hacking of multiple Ring cameras this week brought the sometimes abstract world of tech security and privacy into stark relief, as hackers watched and harassed families and children in their homes, demonstrating the frightening real-world consequences of weak password security.  On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we explain what happened in the incidents, discuss practical tips...

The leaders of Amazon's cloud division made a few things clear this week at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference in Las Vegas: AWS has broad ambitions in the $3.7 trillion enterprise tech market , looking for growth well beyond the current cloud sector. The company is urging more companies to move their computing to the cloud, at the same time it's developing hybrid technologies to run clo...

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we go behind-the-scenes of some of the biggest and most interesting stories we covered this week: Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, who overcame Amazon's opposition to win another term, tells us what she plans to do now . An innovation in solar energy, backed by Bill Gates, promises to dramatically reduce global carbon emissions . Amazon’s new smar...