TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

T-mobile’s announcement this week that it will lay off an additional 900 workers, after an announcement in March that it was closing call centers around the country and shedding 1,900 jobs, is all part of a larger plan to boost the company’s bottom line.

To do that, T-mobile is shifting its focus from being a generic mobile provider to a plan to become the most cost-effective mobile provider for businesses.

Several months ago, T-mobile CEO and President Philipp Humm said the company was “prioritizing and investing in initiatives designed to get T-mobile back to growth in the years ahead – beginning with the transformation of our network.”

Bellevue-based T-Mobile will lay off 900 employees, but it's uncertain how many will be in the Puget Sound area.

The Seattle Times reports the wireless company is planning layoffs and shifting to outsourcing more work, just a few months after shutting down seven of its national call centers. T-Mobile employs 4,800 people in the Puget Sound area and 36,000 nationwide.

In the battle for television platforms, Microsoft Corp. is leading competitors with its Xbox.

According to the New York Times, a report by Forrester Research indicates Microsoft currently leads with Xbox users watching online video through their television sets and holding that audience’s attention for the longest amount of time, with half of all Xbox users connected to the internet.

Want a computer that runs Windows 7 without all the desktop clutter that usually comes with a PC? Microsoft will be happy to get rid of all that clutter, for $99.

Seattle-based ClearSign Combustion Corp. said its initial public offering of its shares raised gross proceeds of $13.8 million.

ClearSign, which trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange with the symbol "CLIR," develops technologies to improve performance of combustion systems such as boilers, furnaces, kilns and turbines.

Today is the final day to enter "Social Madness," the social-media competition sponsored by the Puget Sound Business Journal, a sister publication of TechFlash.

Nominate your company to compete today.

Companies of similar size compete against each other to gain votes and followers on three social media platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. There are three stages to the competition. Think of it like the NCAA March Madness (thus the name Social Madness) or the NBA’s road to the final four. All the teams participate in regular season play. Top teams (companies) in each division move on to regional playoffs. Finally, regional winners move on to the national tournament. Winners of the national tournament win cash for a designated charity.

More than 140 companies have already signed up to demonstrate their social media prowess in this competition.

Facebook Inc. said Tuesday it will offer more shares in its initial public offering and it raised the price target for its stock to between $34 and $38.

The number of shares offered was raised by 50.6 million, bringing the total to about 388 million shares.

The new shares and target range means the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social networking giant could raise as much as $14.75 billion this week.

The upper end of the previous target range was about $13.5 billion, which already would have made Facebook's IPO the biggest from Silicon Valley since Google Inc. went public in 2004.

Facebook has a rapidly growing Seattle office that has grown from two employees to 90 in just two years, and the impact of the IPO on Seattle should continue to grow along with Facebook's presence here.

A Seattle online medical information company is being scooped up by a similar Utah company.

Medify, which compiles data from medical studies and research and turns it into information patients can use to have more informed discussions with doctors, has been acquired by Alliance Health Networks, based in Salt Lake City. The amount was not disclosed.

“We’re quite excited about the merger with Alliance,” Medify co-founder and CEO Derek Streat said.

Streat and co-founder Jay Bartot are both familiar faces in the Seattle startup world. They've been involved in starting seven companies, including Classmates.com and Farecast, a travel site that was purchased by Microsoft in 2008.

Seattle is the nation's No. 13 most "well-read" city, according to Amazon.com Inc., and Bellevue ranks No. 16.

The Seattle online retailer ranked cities by sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format since June 1, 2011, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents.

So readers don't have to buy an external light to use their Kindle at night, Amazon.com Inc. is planning to introduce a Kindle e-reader with front lighting this July, according to a new report.

Reuters reports Amazon also plans to introduce a Kindle Fire tablet with a larger 8.9-inch screen in time for the holiday shopping season.

Competition for Seattle’s best tech minds just got even tougher.

Amazon announced Monday it is hiring more than 1,000 new people for its Seattle offices.

The company is looking for technical developers to work on software engineering, management of software development, user interface and user experience design, and technical program management.

Amazon will be competing with Microsoft, which is hiring more than 1,500 new tech workers in the same geographic area.

The resignation of CEO Scott Thompson settles one question at Yahoo Inc., but there are many more to resolve if the foundering Internet giant has a future.

Four CEOs in five years, soon to become five in five years, isn't a recipe for investor confidence.

But now activist investor Daniel Loeb, who uncovered the discrepancies in Thompson's resume that led to his demise, has most of what he wanted.

He has seats on the board for himself and two allies, and he has a media leader in Ross Levinsohn as interim CEO.

Loeb pushed for the Sunnyvale company to quickly end its long impasse over substantial investments in Asia and focus on its strengths in content and media. Selling the assets would free up billions that could be invested in improving Yahoo's content offerings, he argued.

You’ve decided to plunge into entrepreneurism with a startup, and your next step is to build your initial team. This is critical because a strong team is the secret sauce that makes a company successful.

It seems so easy: Find the smartest, most qualified people for every job, hire them and watch them do great things for your company. If it were that simple, we’d all be retired. In reality, it’s neither easy nor simple, which is why aspiring entrepreneurs regularly ask me about how to form their core teams. Here are some common aspects of this topic that I’ve been asked about over the years.

Bring balance to the core

The nucleus of your team should complement your strengths and bring unique talents and experience to the table. This means ensuring your team’s skills, talents and experiences balance each other.

Yahoo Inc. photo

Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson

Yahoo Inc. CEO Scott Thompson agreed to resign over the weekend, and the company compromised with the activist shareholder who uncovered false academic claims Thompson had made.

The Sunnyvale-based Internet hub and hedge fund Third Point LLC announced the news on Sunday afternoon, 11 days after the discrepancies in Thompson's biography were made known. A report on Monday said another factor in the resignation was a recent cancer diagnosis that Thompson told the board about last week.

Media Chief Ross Levinsohn will be the interim CEO, the company said.

In a memo to Yahoo employees on Sunday, Levinsohn said, "Importantly, today's announcements lay to rest the unfortunate and serious distractions surrounding our senior leadership and the composition of our board going forward."

Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures has joined forces with mobile and computer graphics processor company Nvidia to purchase 500 patents for wireless technology from IPWireless.

The companies did not disclose how much they paid for the patents, which cover Long Term Evolution, LTE-Advanced and 3G/4G cellular technologies, but the two companies will share licensing rights. IPWireless, which will be purchased by General Dynamics later this year, will retain a license to use the patents it sold.

Some of the patents cover standard-essential technology, which many companies use. Debate over licensing fees for technology that is essential for many of the devices and services consumers have come to expect has led to enormous lawsuits. The current battle between Microsoft and Motorola Mobility, for instance, spans four states and two countries.

Intellectual Ventures has not responded to questions about whether it will make the standard-essential patents available for licensing under fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms.