GEEK News
June 05, 2015 - 02:04 PM
Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Aug. 30, 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 Aug. 30, 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 Stuart Reges was disciplined by the University of Washington after including a parody land...
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Cowboy Space leases a huge facility in the Seattle area to produce hardware for orbital data centers
An artist’s conception shows one of Cowboy Space’s data centers in Earth orbit. (Cowboy Space via LinkedIn) California-based Cowboy Space is leasing a 291,035-square-foot industrial facility in Kent, Wash., to support the production of hardware for its planned constellation of AI data center satellites, according to the company that arranged the lease. “According to Newmark Research, the...
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NBA’s Ballmer crackdown echoes Microsoft antitrust, SF vs. Seattle housing, and a Seahawks tech twist
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: The NBA suspends former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for a year and hits the Clippers with $30 million in fines and five lost draft picks over allegedly sham endorsement deals for Kawhi Leonard, drawing comparisons to the Microsoft antitrust era. A new Redfin report says San Francisco’s housing market is booming on AI wealth while Seattle slumps, with the...
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Seattle Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging they trained their AI on its journalism
The Seattle Times and Newsday sued Microsoft and OpenAI on Friday, accusing the tech companies of using their journalism to train AI products without permission. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Microsoft was sued Friday by the parent company of its hometown daily newspaper, The Seattle Times Co., which joined with Newsday to accuse the Redmond tech giant and OpenAI of using their...
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WSU President Betsy Cantwell builds custom AI agents — but won’t ask them to predict the Apple Cup
Betsy Cantwell, president of Washington State University, poses alongside an appropriately colored painting at Seattle’s Washington Athletic Club. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) WSU President Betsy Cantwell is a full-on techie. She spent more than two decades in national laboratories working on space exploration, energy and defense, followed by top leadership roles at state universities...
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‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ exhibit makes a weekend run in Seattle, with fan art and 35 years of history
Sonic on display at the 210 Gallery in Pioneer Square on Sept. 3, as part of a media preview event. (GeekWire Photo / Thomas Wilde) If you attended the Sunset Market in Seattle’s Pioneer Square on Thursday night, you might’ve noticed that one of the local galleries had been transformed into a shrine to, of all things, Sonic the Hedgehog. That’s because on Labor Day weekend, Seattle is...
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Startup Spotlight: Food photographer uses 25-year archive to build an AI tool that eliminates costly reshoots
A hamburger photographed by SP Studio, left, and then tweaked by Scott Pitts in Pallat to add tomatoes. (Pallat Images) Longtime Seattle food photographer Scott Pitts spent 25 years capturing commercial imagery for major brands, and now he’s using that quarter-century archive to train Pallat. The new AI-powered production system is designed to eliminate costly reshoots while keeping real...
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Etzioni on AI: What kids tell chatbots, but not you
Teens are taking questions about their health, their moods and their friendships to chatbots — often without telling anyone. (GPT-5.6 Sol) Kids are heading back to school across the country with a tool in their pocket that will do their homework, answer the questions they’re too embarrassed to ask an adult, and never tell anyone they asked. “…say like the side of my stomach is like...
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NASA’s chief talks up nuclear power during ‘Inspiration Tour’ of Northwest space ventures
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman addresses hundreds of Rocketdyne employees during his stopover at the company’s facility in Redmond, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle) REDMOND, Wash. — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman came to Rocketdyne’s facility here today to give a pep talk to the space company’s employees — and lay out his vision for the future of America’s space effort. Isaacman...
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New Seahawks co-owner with deep Seattle tech roots says, ‘I’m the 12th man … I want to represent that’
Sunny Gupta and the Seattle Seahawks mascot Blitz during a game at Lumen Field. (Photo courtesy of Sunny Gupta) Sunny Gupta has been a diehard Seattle Seahawks fan for almost 20 years, hosting tailgates and sitting in the exact same club-level seats with his family and friends since 2007. Now, the longtime Seattle tech entrepreneur is taking his place in the franchise’s new ownership group as...
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Two familiar Seattle tech figures turn up on Seahawks co-owner list as sale is finalized
The Seahawks open the 2026 season at Lumen Field on Sept. 9 against the New England Patriots. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser) The sale of the Seattle Seahawks to the Khosla family officially closed on Thursday, completing a historic ownership transition for the NFL franchise. But a small surprise emerged in the final paperwork. Nestled among a newly revealed co-owner lineup were a...
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Startup takes on AI hallucinations with $25M and an HQ rooted in a small Washington town
Kevin Owens, co-founder and CEO of Resect AI. (Resect AI Photo) Resect AI, an artificial intelligence startup led by a team of scientists and engineers in Washougal, Wash., launched out of stealth Thursday with $25 million in funding to commercialize an open-source technology designed to catch AI hallucinations before they happen. Unlike traditional AI monitoring tools that evaluate...
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Tech Moves: Microsoft names execs; DAT, Oracle and Hiya departures; new Zillow policy lead
Aneesh Raman. (LinkedIn Photo) — Aneesh Raman has taken the role of chief economic opportunity officer at Microsoft. He previously held the same title at LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary where he worked for five years. The job is focused on “helping companies, including our own, build and deploy AI tools in ways that will unlock new levels of economic opportunity and human capability for...
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Tech industry’s robotics talent crunch has UW’s new grad program nearly full before day one
University of Washington College of Engineering Vice Dean Jihui Yang, right, and professor Xu Chen walk a robot dog on the UW campus. (Photo courtesy of Xu Chen) Robotics jobs in the Pacific Northwest are multiplying faster than universities can train people to fill them. The University of Washington thinks it has an answer — or at least a start. This fall, UW’s College of Engineering will...
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Blue Ring for a Red Planet: Blue Origin wins $700M from NASA for Mars Telecommunications Orbiter
An artist’s conception shows the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter in Martian orbit. (Blue Origin Photo) Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won a contract worth up to $700 million to boost NASA’s telecommunications capability in Martian orbit, using a version of the company’s Blue Ring multi-mission space platform. The contract calls on Blue Origin to deliver a high-performance Mars...
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Uber laying off 93 Washington state workers, hitting engineer and management roles at Seattle office
Dara Khosrowshahi, now CEO of Uber, speaks at the 2016 GeekWire Summit. (GeekWire File Photo) Uber is laying off 93 Washington state-based employees as part of a sweeping global restructuring that will eliminate roughly 10% of the company’s workforce. The cuts heavily impact the transportation giant’s Seattle hub, targeting those assigned to the downtown engineering center as well as...
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How a new $7.5M UW facility aims to spark U.S. battery innovation
Staff in the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds use machinery in the expanded battery lab. (UW Photo) The University of Washington on Thursday celebrated the opening of a public-access battery manufacturing lab that aims to propel energy innovation. The new lab — the first of its kind on the West Coast — is housed within the UW’s Clean Energy Testbeds, a site that has helped launch multiple...
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UW pays $600K to settle lawsuit with computer science professor over parody land acknowledgment
University of Washington computer science professor Stuart Reges. (Twinkle Don’t Blink Photo via Fire.org) The University of Washington has agreed to pay $600,000 to resolve a high-profile First Amendment lawsuit brought by computer science professor Stuart Reges, who was disciplined after including a parody land acknowledgment in a course syllabus. The settlement, announced Thursday by the...
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AI learns nature’s code: Allen Institute, UW and Fred Hutch launch $95M open science initiative
Jack Boylan, left, Allen Institute research associate, and Jesse Gray, AI BioDesign executive director of strategy and platform, at the DNA sequencer inside the initiative’s new lab. It reads millions of designed DNA sequences at once, revealing which ones worked. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Three of Seattle’s top scientific institutions are launching a nearly $95 million research...
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Qualtrics cut 117 jobs tied to Seattle headquarters, new filing shows
Qualtrics Tower in downtown Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo) Qualtrics is cutting 117 jobs connected to its Seattle headquarters, according to a state filing that provides new details of the layoffs that the experience management technology company made two weeks ago. Engineering and product teams were hit hard. The filing lists software roles from entry-level through principal engineers,...
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McGraw Hill acquires Teachally, an AI startup for teachers led by Seattle tech vet Daniel Bernstein
Teachally founder Daniel Bernstein is also known in Seattle tech as the founder of Sandlot Games. Daniel Bernstein spent much of the past decade as an M&A advisor, selling other people’s software companies. This time the company was his own, and he found a buyer in McGraw Hill. The education publishing giant on Wednesday announced the acquisition of Teachally, a small startup led by...
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NBA suspends Steve Ballmer for 1 year, fines L.A. Clippers $30M over salary-cap scheme
Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, center, at a game inside Staples Center in 2018. (GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota) The NBA dropped the hammer on Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer on Wednesday, suspending the former Microsoft CEO from all league and team activities for one year and fining the franchise $30 million following a year-long investigation into illegal salary-cap...
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How to make industry giants chase you, and other lessons from 28 years inside T-Mobile
Longtime T-Mobile exec Mike Katz touts the company’s T-Satellite service in Bellevue, Wash., in June 2025, with a slide taking shots at Verizon and AT&T — a tradition dating to the early Un-carrier years. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop) In 2012, T-Mobile was losing hundreds of thousands of customers a quarter. AT&T’s attempted acquisition of the Bellevue, Wash.-based wireless company had...
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AI wealth fuels San Francisco’s housing boom while tech layoffs weigh down Seattle
The housing markets in San Francisco, left, and Seattle have been diverging for the past year. Prices started falling in Seattle on an annual basis about a year ago, while prices in San Francisco have been rising since November. (BigStock, GeekWire File Photos) While a fresh wave of AI-generated wealth is pouring fuel on San Francisco’s housing market, Seattle’s real estate scene is getting...
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Kids go from curious to frustrated playing with AI-stuffed toys, UW study finds
Aayushi Dangol, a recent University of Washington doctoral student in human centered design and engineering, explains an AI toy during a KidsTeam UW session. (UW Photo / Jacob Adams) We’ve come a long way from Lincoln Logs and Hot Wheels that couldn’t talk to us. Today, plush toys aren’t just stuffed — they’re stuffed with artificial intelligence, and new research from the University of...
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Seismic CEO on the Highspot merger: revenue, job cuts, Seattle, AI, and the Salesforce question
Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff inside Highspot’s longtime offices in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Highspot’s branding is still everywhere inside its longtime headquarters at World Trade Center East, overlooking the Seattle waterfront. But outside the corner office that once belonged to the sales software company’s co-founder and CEO, “Seismic” is scribbled on the whiteboard. That’s how...
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NewDays brings its AI-driven dementia care platform to Nevada, expands seed round to $16M
NewDays founders Daniel Kelly (left) and Babak Parviz. (NewDays Photo) NewDays, a Seattle startup using a generative AI therapy to treat people with mild dementia, has raised additional funding and closed its seed round with $16 million. The funding was led by Madrona and General Catalyst. The company also announced on Wednesday that it has expanded its services to Nevada, joining...
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Wyze treats home security like a social feed with new AI-powered ‘Stories’ feature
Smart home device maker Wyze wants to end notification fatigue by turning security footage into something more akin to an Instagram feed. The Kirkland, Wash.-based company launched “Wyze Stories,” a new AI-powered feature that stitches together clip sequences from multiple cameras into a single, chronological event. Instead of firing off separate alerts as a visitor moves from the...
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Madrona’s annual IA40 list shows an AI industry splitting in two
The winners on Madrona’s 2026 Intelligent Applications 40 list, grouped by funding stage. (Madrona Image) Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona released its sixth annual Intelligent Applications 40 list this week, naming 45 private AI companies (the five extras come from ties) that have collectively raised $410 billion from investors across the industry. Three of them — Anthropic,...
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Juno Propulsion wins $1.2M grant from NSF to advance non-toxic space propulsion system
The Juno Propulsion team includes, from left, fluid systems engineer Andrew Adams, facility operations engineer Cody Niggemyer, chief technology officer Ari Martinez and CEO Alexis Harroun. (Juno Propulsion Photo) The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to Tukwila, Wash.-based Juno Propulsion to support the startup’s development of a non-toxic propulsion system for...
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Drone meets bobcat: Police find novel use for UAV after wild animal breaks into Seattle-area home
A bobcat inside a home as seen on video captured by a Kirkland Police Department drone. (Kirkland Police Department Image) Most high-tech police drones are deployed for high-speed chases or search and rescue missions, but officers in Kirkland, Wash., recently launched one indoors for a wilder reason: tracking a live bobcat sitting at the top of a resident’s staircase. According to a...
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Seattle cannabis data startup Headset to pay $1M to settle allegations over pandemic-era loan
(Headset Image) Seattle-based cannabis data analytics company Headset has agreed to pay more than $1 million to resolve allegations that it improperly received and obtained forgiveness for a federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan. The settlement, announced Monday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington, stems from a May 2024 whistleblower lawsuit filed...
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Fermi Explorer team plans to launch a probe that will reach the star system next door … in 80,000 years
Philip Johnston, co-founder and president of the Fermi Explorer Mission, stands on an outcrop in Chile’s Atacama Desert and points at Alpha Centauri in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Johnston and his teammates aim to launch a probe by the end of 2029 that would reach Alpha Centauri roughly 80,000 years later. (Photo Credit: Alexis Trigo) A Seattle-area nonprofit group known as the Fermi...
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Compass and Northwest Multiple Listing Service settle 16-month legal battle
This story originally appeared on Real Estate News. (Illustration by Real Estate News/Shutterstock) Compass and the Washington state-based Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) have settled their year-plus-long lawsuit, Compass announced on Monday. A new marketing option Compass and NWMLS have agreed to a settlement through the creation of a new listing status that will allow...
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Amazon accused of rigging ad auctions to inflate prices in new suit filed by FTC and 22 states
Movable shelving towers that hold items that are autonomously moved to Amazon employees who pack them for shipping. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) Amazon is accused of artificially inflating the ad prices on its e-commerce site in a lawsuit filed Monday by Washington’s attorney general, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 21 other states. Amazon denies the allegations, saying its ad...
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