GEEK News
What’s Howard’s end? Former Starbucks CEO is ripping Washington state again
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) For the second time in the past 60 days, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has penned an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that takes direct aim at the state’s political leadership, calling Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson “inept” and noting that Gov. Bob Ferguson continues to “burden businesses with one tax increase...
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General Fusion set to become first publicly traded fusion stock
British Columbia-based General Fusion on Friday completed its deal to become the first publicly traded fusion stock. The 24-year-old company is trying to harness the atom-smashing reactions that power the sun, aiming to create commercially viable amounts of electricity — a feat no one has yet accomplished. General Fusion has closed its merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III, allowing...
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Data vs. gut instinct: Seahawks coach leans into analytics to support, not drive, in-game decisions
Seattle Seahawks head coach and self-professed football nerd Mike Macdonald just doesn’t understand why any coach or team would ignore the chance to lean into data and analytics. “Why wouldn’t we use the best information out there?” he said during an interview this week on the Dan Patrick Show. “Why would you be scared about things that are going to possibly help you?” Macdonald...
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The awkward timing of the Xbox CEO’s new Federal Reserve gig
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. (File Photo) Which is worse, sailing your superyacht through the city where your company just made mass job cuts, or getting named to a U.S. Federal Reserve panel on jobs and productivity three days after announcing thousands of layoffs? It might not be a full Zuck, but Microsoft Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is getting lots of attention, and not in a good way, for the latter...
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Opinion: The WALL-E Economy
A scene from Pixar’s 2008 film WALL-E. (Image: Disney/Pixar) [Note: Armon Dadgar, a UW computer science alum, was co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure automation company that was founded in 2013, went public on the NASDAQ in 2021, and sold to IBM in 2025. In his role, he spoke with thousands of companies adopting cloud across a wide range of industries, giving him a unique...
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Why the video game industry may be sliding toward its next big crash
4 generations of Xbox hardware. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde) Commentary: The last couple of weeks have served as a capstone to what’s become a bad few years for the international video game industry. Now it appears the larger sector is headed directly into a significant crash, as several unsustainable practices all seem to be approaching a crisis point at once. The first and most obvious...
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Judge denies FTC request to presume Zillow-Redfin deal ‘unlawful’
This story originally appeared on Real Estate News. Illustration by Real Estate News/Shutterstock A federal court has turned down the Federal Trade Commission’s request to declare a rentals deal between Zillow and Redfin “presumptively unlawful” before trial next month. On Wednesday, July 8, Judge Anthony J. Trenga of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied...
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Pulse Space wins $40M contract from Space Force to work on space laser power system
An artist’s conception shows a satellite receiving energy from a laser beam. (Credit: Pulse Space via Vimeo) Bellevue, Wash.-based Pulse Space says it has received a $40 million award from the U.S. Space Force to develop technologies for laser-based power beaming and orbital tracking systems. The startup, founded in 2022, is working on a system that would collect energy using solar arrays...
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Echodyne opens $40M radar factory near Seattle to meet booming demand for drone detection
Echodyne CEO Eben Frankenberg, left, gives a tour of the company’s new manufacturing facility in Woodinville, Wash., to U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, center, and Sen. Maria Cantwell on Wednesday. (Echodyne Photo) Echodyne, the Seattle-area radar-platform company, cut the ribbon Wednesday on a new $40 million manufacturing facility designed to meet growing demand for its drone-detection and...
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Despite business angst, Washington climbs in CNBC’s state rankings — but still trails its former standing
Seattle’s skyline, the economic engine of Washington state. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) For much of the past year, the narrative surrounding Washington state’s business climate has taken a decidedly negative turn. Business leaders have criticized a wave of new taxes approved by lawmakers. High-profile companies have announced expansions elsewhere. Entrepreneurs have questioned whether...
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Microsoft’s carbon emissions climb 25% as tech giants grapple with AI’s energy toll
Inside a Microsoft data center. (Microsoft Photo) Microsoft has just four more years to reach its ambitious goal of removing more planet-warming carbon that it produces. But the company’s annual sustainability report, released Thursday, shows it’s moving in the opposite direction, as its 2025 emissions spiked 25% over the previous year. Despite the troubling increase, Microsoft leaders say...
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Supply chain startup Auger, led by ex-Amazon operations chief, raises $50M and lands big customers
Auger co-founders Leigh Anne Clark and Dave Clark at the company’s Bellevue, Wash., office. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) While investors spent much of the spring concerned that frontier AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI would consume the software industry, Dave Clark was closing a funding round for exactly the kind of enterprise software those models are supposedly going to...
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T-Mobile exec Mike Katz exits after 28 years, as carrier reshuffles top ranks and taps ex-AT&T leader
Mike Katz speaks at a T-Mobile event in 2025. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) T-Mobile’s longest-tenured Un-carrier architect just Un-carriered himself. Mike Katz, who started selling VoiceStream phones at Circuit City 28 years ago and rose to help T-Mobile go from an also-ran into the wireless industry’s most formidable competitor, is leaving the Bellevue, Wash.-based carrier as part...
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Tech Moves: Seattle tech exec named Dropbox CPO; Xbox VP among layoffs; C-suite changes at T-Mobile
Mike Torres. (LinkedIn Photo) — Mike Torres, a former executive at Amazon, Microsoft and Google, has joined Dropbox as the company’s first chief product officer. “As a product leader, joining a company that helped pioneer product-led growth is energizing…” Torres said on LinkedIn. “In this role, my focus will be simple: help Dropbox ship the right things at the right time for our...
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The drive to make a better golf app: Former pro athlete bets big on ‘Barkie’ and AI as a caddie
Dane Renkert, co-founder and CEO of Barkie, an AI-powered app for golfers. (Barkie Photo) Perhaps the only downside to building a golf-focused startup is that it leaves less time to actually play golf. Dane Renkert will take that tradeoff, for now, as he works on something that he says will change the way people play and interact around the game. Renkert is co-founder and CEO of Barkie,...
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This startup lets companies teach AI about their brands — and the chatbots are listening
Optimly founder and CEO Apurva Luty pitches at the Tech Alliance’s Seattle Investor Summit + Showcase in Redmond. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Seattle startup Optimly, which helps brands manage what AI understands and says about them, went into the Flywheel Investment Conference in Wenatchee, Wash., in May as a last-minute entrant, and walked out with a triple crown. The company won a...
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Former GitHub CEO’s startup Entire unveils its answer to the crush of AI coding agents
Thomas Dohmke’s startup Entire is offering a solution to what he calls “the strain of billions of agents and developers hammering a central server.” (Photo by Vaughn Ridley/Web Summit Rio, May 2023, via Sportsfile, CC BY 2.0) Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke‘s startup Entire is rolling out a distributed network for mirroring code repositories, making the case that centralized platforms like he...
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10 new startups emerge from the University of Washington, with healthcare dominating the lineup
Leaders of startups recently spun out of the UW, top row, from left: Hilco Boerlage of Precision Cognition Labs; Jan Whittington of Climate Solutions International; Elena Cant of DetellaDx; Sura Alwan of PEAR-Net Society; and Min Sun of Colleague AI. Bottom row, from left: Jingcong Zhao of KeenSight Health; Vigneshwar (Viggy) Sakthivelpathi of Nanosync Labs; Chris Norn of Skape Bio; Joelle Tudor...
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Former Impinj CEO Bill Colleran tapped to lead Seattle AI coding startup Adronite
Bill Colleran is the new CEO of Adronite. Bill Colleran, a veteran technology executive who previously led Impinj and sold Innovent Systems to Broadcom, has joined Seattle-based AI coding startup Adronite as CEO. Edward Rothschild, who co-founded Adronite in 2023 and served as its first CEO, is transitioning to chief technology officer, where he’ll continue leading the company’s product...
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Chicago software company plants flag in Seattle area as new leadership team seeks AI talent
LogicGate CEO Diego Panama. (LinkedIn Photo) Enterprise software company LogicGate is establishing a Bellevue, Wash., office and rapidly expanding its Seattle-area executive team, betting on the region’s deep technology talent pool as it embarks on a new chapter under newly appointed CEO Diego Panama. The Chicago-based governance, risk and compliance software company recently signed a lease...
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Etzioni on AI: Does AI bolster or undercut democracy?
An aerial view of Shasta Dam in California. After a July 4 visit, computer scientist Daphne Koller argued that America’s signature achievement is taking what was scarce and making it abundant: water into power at Shasta, electricity into a grid anyone could plug into, computation into a pocket. AI, she reasons, is the next chapter, “making abundant one of the world’s scarcest resources: powerful...
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An agent in the empty chair: Amazon vets launch Primitive Labs, using AI to model customer behavior
Primitive Labs co-founders, from left: CTO Jean Farmer, CEO Rohit Talluri and COO Gabriel Fong. (Primitive Labs Photo) Rohit Talluri learned the tradition at Amazon: always keep an empty chair in the room to represent the customer — a reminder of the people who will ultimately use whatever gets built. Now, with AI coding tools creating software faster than ever, Talluri and his co-founders,...
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Filing shows Amazon cut 57 tech jobs in Washington state in recent weeks
Amazon’s headquarters buildings and the Spheres in Seattle’s Denny Triangle neighborhood in September 2024. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Amazon has cut a total of 57 jobs in Washington state across various teams, including roles at the director and senior manager levels, according to a filing made public Monday morning. People impacted by the cuts include 16 software engineers as well...
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Seattle’s Cascade PBS spins out Local Public, a tech platform that builds streaming apps for stations
A screengrab of the Cascade PBS streaming app as built by Local Public. (Local Public Image) Seattle’s Cascade PBS has spun out its streaming app technology into a standalone company called Local Public, which is now building connected-TV and mobile apps for public media stations across the country. The goal is to provide local PBS stations nationwide their own branded, station-curated...
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A ‘painful’ reset for Xbox: 3,200 job cuts, studio spinoffs, and a vow to return to growth in 2027
(Microsoft Image) Xbox CEO Asha Sharma laid out a wide-ranging plan to overhaul Microsoft’s gaming division Monday, calling it the most significant restructuring in Xbox history and disclosing that the business has been losing 64 cents on every dollar invested in its game studios. As detailed in a memo to employees, the changes include roughly 3,200 job cuts through the fiscal year — about...
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Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs, about 2% globally, revamps salesforce and launches massive Xbox overhaul
Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters. (GeekWire File Photo) Microsoft is cutting 4,800 jobs, just over 2% of its global workforce, citing a need to revamp its sales and consulting division to keep pace with a rapidly changing tech industry, while overhauling its Xbox business in a push for long-term growth and profitability from gaming. The cuts include about 600 jobs in Washington state, home...
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Etzioni on AI: Elon Musk promised humanoid robots, but China delivered
The UWORLD U1 humanoid robot at its launch event in Shenzhen, China, on June 30. (UBTech Photo) On Tuesday in Shenzhen, the Chinese company UBTech unveiled the U1, a full-sized humanoid robot with silicone skin, blinking lashes, manicured nails, and an AI tuned to read your mood. It comes in male and female versions, and racked up more than 13,000 orders by the end of launch day, with...
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Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of June 28, 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 June 28, 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 GeekWire spoke with several longtime Microsoft employees who are taking the company’s...
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Xbox at a crossroads: 25 years later, Microsoft is done playing around
Xbox at a gamescom briefing in 2014. Microsoft is pressing its games division to turn a profit. (Microsoft Photo) In 2007, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 consoles started dying — overheating until three lights on the front blinked red, a defect gamers came to call the “red ring of death.” Microsoft’s response was to extend the warranty on every machine and take a charge of more than $1 billion to fix...
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Overland AI lands Marine Corps deal worth nearly $20M to build self-driving military vehicles
Overland AI’s autonomous ground vehicles lined up at the company’s proving grounds. (Overland AI Photo) Seattle-based Overland AI has landed a U.S. Marine Corps contract to produce autonomous ground vehicles, a milestone the defense-tech startup says makes it the first ground autonomy company to serve as the prime contractor on a military production deal. The nearly $20 million agreement —...
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Pet project: Seattle startup studio’s new app connects neighbors through their dogs
Sniff founder Amish Patel and Chewie, his standard poodle. (Photo courtesy of Amish Patel) Amish Patel knows his neighbors by their dogs’ names before he knows their own. It’s a pattern he noticed in his Seattle neighborhood — and one he’s now built an app around. Patel’s newest pet project — born out of his Conduit Venture Labs startup studio, is Sniff, an iOS app that turns the everyday...
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Meet the 17 startups that took part in Creative Destruction Lab’s latest Seattle accelerator
Emer Dooley, site lead for Creative Destruction Lab in Seattle, moderates an accelerator program session alongside mentors and startup founders. (CDL Photo) Startups innovating across advanced manufacturing and computational health made up the latest cohort of the Seattle accelerator run by Creative Destruction Lab (CDL). The nine-month, nonprofit program based at the University of...
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Nvidia recruits longtime Microsoft sales leader Nick Parker with $40M+ pay package
Microsoft executive Nick Parker at a conference in 2018. (Microsoft Photo) Nick Parker, a 26-year Microsoft veteran who led the company’s worldwide commercial sales business, is leaving to become Nvidia’s new sales chief — a high-profile talent shift between two of the biggest players in the AI boom. Parker will join Nvidia as executive vice president of worldwide field operations,...
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Amazon Leo says its latest launch gives it enough satellites to start broadband internet service
An Atlas 5 rocket lifts off from its Florida launch pad, sending 29 Amazon Leo satellites into orbit. (United Launch Alliance Photo) Amazon says the overnight launch of 29 satellites should clear the way for its Amazon Leo network to start offering commercial high-speed internet service from space this year, in direct competition with SpaceX’s Starlink network. United Launch Alliance’s...
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Inside the race to power AI data centers with fusion energy — and the surprise detours along the way
Zap Energy’s fusion device creates a purplish glow from its hydrogen plasma. (Zap Photo) Subscribe to Positive Charge: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, All Episodes AI data centers face mounting community backlash and local moratoriums, while surging power demands knock tech giants off course from their climate ambitions. Could fusion be the solution to both problems,...
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