Category: Technology

Padmashree Koneti, senior director of product operations, Puppet, speaks at the 2018 GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) While software continues to eat the world, the philosophies and tactics used to build that software are constantly changing. Getting from idea to working software has never been easy, and companies that never needed cutting-edge expertise in software development are finding themselves out-shipped by smaller, nimbler competitors. The solution to this has been billed as “DevOps,” a mindset in which the roles of software developers and systems operators are no longer as separate as they once were. This has changed the way that companies think about building, testing, and… Read More

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. 12, 2018. Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter. Most popular stories on GeekWire Inside the stolen passenger plane: ‘I played video games before, so I know what I’m doing, a little bit’ Audio and video from the fatal flight of a stolen Horizon Air passenger plane are providing a fuller picture of the incident Friday evening in the skies south of Seattle. … Read More Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch venture rolls… Read More

On the heels of Elon Musk’s angst-filled, market-moving interview with The New York Times, YouTube techie Marques Brownlee offered up lighter, brighter fare from a one-on-one chat with the Tesla CEO at his electric-car factory in Fremont, Calif. Musk discussed the wonky side of vehicle production and the prospects for building cars in the same price range as, say, a Toyota Prius (which is the top trade-in for the more expensive Model 3). “Getting to, like, a $25,000 car — that’s something we could do,” Musk told Brownlee. “If we work really hard, I think maybe we could do that in three years, four years.” That comment was the flip…

An artist’s concept shows a York Space Systems satellite in orbit. (York Space Systems Illustration) Two years ago, Chuck Beames presided over Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s effort to build the biggest airplane in the world. Now he has his eyes set on another big frontier: small satellites. Beames, who left the president’s post at Allen’s Stratolaunch venture in 2016, is gearing up for his first launch as executive chairman and chief strategy officer for York Space Systems, a startup based in Denver. “It’s very exciting,” Beames told GeekWire during an interview on the sidelines of last week’s SmallSat Conference in Logan, Utah. “We’re really democratizing space for the entrepreneur.” Beames… Read More

Rainway CEO Andrew Sampson at Techstars Seattle Demo Day in April. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper) Game-streaming technology startup Rainway has raised $1.5 million in seed funding to build out its team and expand its service for playing high-end video games on any device. Startup Spotlight: Rainway lets people play PC games on any device The funding from Palo Alto-based GoAhead Ventures is the latest sign of momentum for Rainway since it moved permanently from Atlanta to Seattle after participating in the Techstars Seattle startup accelerator this year. Rainway makes a web-based platform that lets you access your PC or cloud service provider from any remote device to play games,… Read More

On a humid morning in June, classrooms along a third-floor corridor in a New York University building hummed with high-pitched chatter. The space serves as the hub for summer programs in computer science run by the California-based company iD Tech Camps. In one room, a group of children, ages seven to nine, knelt on the carpet next to small white robots, which they were learning to program with handheld tablets. Nearby, other kids worked on laptops, recording YouTube videos or designing video games. Down the hall, a group of teenagers jotted notes as an instructor diagrammed a linear-regression algorithm on a whiteboard. While some planned to return the following week,… Read More

Writing is a mobile art. People do it on laptops, tablets, and phones. They write—or type—while walking, waiting for a doctor’s appointment, commuting to work, eating dinner. Although writing’s mobility might seem a product of modern digital gadgetry, there’s nothing new about writing on the move. Digital tools are but the latest take on a long tradition of writing in transit. Preceding smartphones by centuries, writing boxes were among the first mobile writing inventions. Small and portable, these wooden boxes were equipped with a flat or sloped surface for writing and an interior space for storing materials like paper, inkwells, quills, pens, seals, and wax. Many also included compartments for… Read More

Amazon is reportedly working on a recording device that would mesh with its Fire TV service. Amazon is working on a new type of device that can record live TV and stream it on demand, encroaching on technological turf occupied by TiVo, Bloomberg News reported today. Bloomberg quoted an unnamed source as saying that the device, internally code-named “Frank,” would have physical storage and connect to Amazon’s Fire TV boxes. The concept reportedly allows for transmitting the video stream wirelessly to smartphones. The source said that Amazon hasn’t made a final decision on the project, and that its rollout could be canceled or delayed. Amazon didn’t immediately respond to GeekWire’s… Read More

(GeekWire Photo / Monica Nickelsburg) After waiting all summer for Seattle to work out its rules for bikesharing companies, Uber’s JUMP has filed for a permit from the city to begin operating its service, according to a company representative. “If JUMP is granted a permit, we will work hard to bring bikes to Seattle as quickly as possible, likely starting in the fall,” said Nathan Hambley, an Uber representative, in a statement emailed to GeekWire. The move comes as no surprise: JUMP has been demonstrating its bikeshare service, which includes dockless e-bikes, all around the city over the summer. Assuming JUMP’s permit is granted, that means three companies will now… Read More

Lenovo’s Smart Display, which is based on the voice-enabled Google Assistant AI platform, is already on the market. Now Google is said to be gearing up for its own Smart Display device. (Lenovo Photo) Google is aiming to challenge Amazon’s Echo Show by releasing its own smart speaker equipped with a screen in time for this year’s holiday season, Nikkei Asian Review reported today. In a report from Taipei, the Japan-based publication quoted an unnamed industry source as saying that Google is planning to ship an initial batch of 3 million units. “It’s an aggressive plan,” the source said. Google declined to comment on the report. “We do not comment…