TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

BUSINESS JOURNAL PHOTO | Anthony Bolante

Protesters from the Backbone Campaign used giant helium balloons to suspend a "thought bubble" over the Hammering Man saying "I wish Amazon paid its fair share" during demonstrations at the Amazon.com shareholders meeting at the Seattle Art Museum on Thursday.

Show identification, prove that you own shares with proxy documentation, go through a metal detector and sign in. That was what people who wanted to get into the Amazon.com Inc. annual shareholders meeting Thursday at the Seattle Art Museum had to do.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave a presentation and the company announced it was severing ties with the controversial American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a free-market lobbyist group that has gained attention for opposing the federal health care overhaul and most recently for its support of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Many other corporations, including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Kraft have all pledged to stop supporting ALEC.

Protesters outside SAM attempted to deliver boxes of petitions signed by 511,160 people asking Amazon to stop supporting ALEC — after the company announced it was no longer supporting the organization. The protesters attempting to deliver the boxes to Amazon were stopped by police.

For a slide show of images from the protest, click here.

The protest continued inside the meeting, as a disruptive crowd repeatedly interrupted the presentations and called out to board members and Bezos asking the company to pay its fair share of taxes and treat workers fairly.

Bezos attempted to change the subject by drawing attention to Amazon’s growth, push into digital media and customer satisfaction.

“When you take good care of customers, they want to do business with you,” Bezos said.

Bezos, who was sporting standard dressy Seattle attire – nice jeans, a button-up shirt and navy blue blazer – pointed to an 89 percent customer satisfaction level for the company and called the $79 Amazon Prime subscription service the “best bargain in the history of shopping.”

Seattle music software company RealNetworks will have to pay $2.4 million in restitution as part of a settlement with the Washington Attorney General’s Office after the company was accused of unfair and deceptive practices in its billing and subscription services.

“Deceptive pre-checked boxes and fine print obligated consumers to not-so-free trials for subscription services they didn’t want in the first place,” Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna said in a press release. “People were charged for months — sometimes years — paying hundreds of dollars for subscriptions they knew nothing about.”

As part of the settlement, RealNetworks will have to stop offering a service that starts as a free trial but turns into a paid subscription that is automatically charged to a customer’s credit card. The company will have to provide an online subscription cancellation service and cancel subscriptions within two days of a request.

“The company has voluntarily made numerous changes since December 2009 to curb the practices that are at issue in the lawsuit and this, thankfully, has resulted in fewer recent complaints to our office,” McKenna said.

McKenna’s office and the Washington Better Business Bureau have received more than 500 complaints about these practices over the past seven years.

Amazon.com Inc.'s annual shareholder meeting, scheduled for 9 a.m. Thursday at the Seattle Art Museum, could see some protesting action.

Amazon shareholders aren't expected to protest too much; their shares are up 34 percent so far this year.

But a group called "Working Washington" said it wants Amazon to end "corporate indulgences like tax dodging, mistreatment of workers, and support for the shadowy ultra-conservative policy group known as ALEC" and the group plans a protest at the art museum on First Avenue beginning at 8:30 a.m.

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Phone now has a 7 percent market share in China, topping Apple Inc.'s iPhone, which now has a 6 percent share.

Forbes reports it took Microsoft two months to top Apple in China, which is expected to be the world's largest market for smartphones by the end of this year. Nokia, Microsoft's partner in smartphones in China, sells a Lumia 800 C smartphone that runs Windows for $570 in China, more than $200 less than an unsubsidized Apple iPhone.

Facebook Inc. stock showed signs that it might pull out of its debut dive Wednesday, but questions about the initial public offering look like they will stick around.

Official inquiries have begun and lawsuits have been filed after two days of stock drops that lowered the market cap of the social networking company by nearly $18 billion to a cap of $86.4 billion at the end of trading Tuesday.

Shares of the company (NASDAQ:FB) had risen by about 3 percent in afternoon trading on Wednesday. They closed Tuesday at $31 after selling for $38 in the IPO.

Amazon.com announced today it signed a deal with Paramount Pictures that will bring hundreds of older "legacy" films to its streaming video site, Amazon Prime Instant Video.

Customers can rent and purchase movies and television shows on Amazon’s streaming service, which launched a little more than year ago and is similar to the popular Netflix streaming service. The site boasts that it has more than 120,000 titles available for rent or buy, and Amazon has been steadily adding to that, signing a deal with Viacom earlier this year for popular Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon shows.

The Prime Instant Service is a $79 per year subscription service that lets customers choose from 17,000 streaming videos and television shows.

Netflix, which first made streaming video popular, has several competing options, including a streaming-only option for $7.99 a month (or $95.88 per year) and, for an additional $7.99 per month, new releases delivered by mail.

Ever had trouble setting up that new Ikea furniture, or needed eggs for a Sunday morning omelet but didn’t want to run to the store in your jammies?

Well, TaskRabbit has an answer to your dilemma: Hire a TaskRabbit runner to do it for you.

The national errand and task company is opening a Seattle branch May 29 and has hundreds of TaskRabbit runners poised to pick up your groceries or weed your garden.

All you have to do is name your price, and the runners will bid on doing your task for you. You choose the winner and the job gets done. The runner doesn’t get paid until you report the job is completed to your satisfaction.

“We were overwhelmed with requests to come to Seattle,” TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque said.

The company, which Busque started in 2008, already has services in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Austin and other major cities.

If you're in the market right now for a PC and want to buy one with Windows 7, Microsoft Corp. will charge $15 to upgrade to the Windows Pro 8 operating system, when it becomes available later this year.

The Wall Street Journal's All Things D reports the upgrade is important because some back-to-school computer buyers may be considering alternatives to a Windows 7 PC, even though the PCs are Windows 8-ready, instead of waiting for one equipped with Windows 8, the system that's expected to be officially released in November.

Microvision Inc. said it's received a letter from the NASDAQ stock exchange, saying its shares were in danger of being delisted from the exchange because the company's market cap doesn't meet minimum requirements.

The Redmond maker of ultra-miniature projection display technology currently has a market cap of about $25 million, below the NASDAQ Global Market exchange requirement of $50 million. The company has until Nov. 12 to regain compliance.

Facebook stock dropped again by nearly 9 percent on Tuesday, its third day of trading as a public company.

The Menlo Park company's shares closed at $31, down more than 18 percent from the $38 a share price they sold for in their initial public offering.

The Oatmeal

The Oatmeal's Tesla-Edison comic has generated an online debate

Are you Team Tesla or Team Edison?

Seattle web comic artist Matthew Inman — or, as he’s better known, The Oatmeal — wrote a blog post last week heralding early 20^th Century inventor Nikola Tesla as “the greatest geek who ever lived.”

In the long comic, The Oatmeal argued that Tesla invented alternating electrical current, allowed another inventor, Gugliemo Marconi, to freely use his patents in developing long distance radio, and came up with the idea for radar, among other things.

The comic also villainizes Thomas Edison as a pet-electrocuting, misguided, evil man who poisoned his assistant with radiation while testing early X-rays.

Alex Knapp, a social media editor and staff writer for Forbes, wasn’t about to let The Oatmeal’s version of history be the end of the conversation.

Movie-by-mail and video streaming business Netflix Inc. has created the new position of vice president of original content and has moved a 10-year veteran of the company into the job, where she will oversee original programming.

Cindy Holland, a Stanford University graduate who's worked 10 years at Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), was in charge of licensing television shows in the United States for the company. She started out at Netflix buying DVDs for the company.

Jason Ropell, a former NBCUniversal Inc. vice president who's worked at Netflix for a year on acquiring shows in Canada and Latin America, will take over Holland's former responsibilities in the United States. He'll keep Canada, but someone else will be put in charge of Latin America.

Microsoft Corp. says there will be 350 million devices sold this year that use its Windows 7 software.

Bloomberg reports Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer said Windows is the "most popular" software system, sparked by corporate demand for programs with Windows 7.

Apple is the world's most valuable brand, according to a study.

Starbucks Corp. shot up 30 places on the world's most valuable brand list, ending up at No. 42, while Amazon.com Inc. fell four places to No. 18 and Microsoft Corp. stayed at No. 5.

Apple Inc. stayed at No. 1, with an estimated brand value of about $183 billion, according to Millward Brown's 2012 BrandZ Top 100 list.

Former Yahoo Inc. CEO Scott Thompson has stepped down from the board of directors of F5 Networks Inc., according to a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.