TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

With U.S. newspapers cutting staff and turning off the printing presses, Zillow.com is seeing new opportunities to help the battered industry. The Seattle online real estate startup is offering its technology to the Web sites of 180 newspapers, according to The New York Times. “Newspapers have been left for dead by a lot of people,” Zillow Chief Operating Officer Spencer Rascoff tells the Times. “Readying their obituaries is very premature.”

Frontline will tackle the problems in the American health care system tonight with a program titled "Sick Around America" on KCTS-9 at 9 p.m.  And while it will focus on the millions of people who are uninsured or under insured, it also will hold up Microsoft's health benefits as a positive example.

German engineering giant Siemens is working with Amazon.com to test new cloud-based voice and communications software. Siemens rolled out the experimental product at the VoiceCon conference in Orlando and is gauging customer interest. The software runs on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) -- and marks another interesting collaboration for Amazon in the cloud computing arena.

Brad Smith

In a new blog post, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith voices continued support for the H-1B visa program that Microsoft and other technology companies use to bring foreign guest workers into the United States. Smith's post, titled "Appreciating our Immigration System," come in advance of the annual window in which companies file for the visas.

Sun Microsystems is laying off 24 employees in Bellevue on May 30, according to a company notification to the state of Washington. Sun confirmed this week that it's handing out 1,500 layoff notices, but declined to specify where the affected workers are located. The job cuts are part of a broad restructuring that Sun announced in November.

Struggling Seattle biotech Targeted Genetics today reported a fourth quarter loss of $10.8 million, more than double its loss for the same period in 2007. Revenues also declined to $2.2 million, with the company noting that it only has enough cash on the books to fund operations through June. The company said that it expects the stock -- which has traded below $1 for the past year -- to be delisted from the Nasdaq.

AuBeta Networks, a 9-year-old Seattle company that provided wide area network services to restaurants and retailers, has hit hard times and is in the process of selling its assets to Telekenex. In a letter to customers earlier this month, AuBeta CEO Ethan Hernandez apologized for service disruptions and said that the company is transitioning operations to San Francisco-based IP service provider Telekenex.

The computer security world is in suspense as the clock ticks down toward the April 1 climax of the potentially nefarious Conficker worm. The worm targets a vulnerability that Microsoft patched last October, but it has continued to spread to unpatched machines, which are set to use peer-to-peer technology to "get further instructions."

High-tech workers in Washington state earned an average wage of $95,900, the third highest in the nation, according to the annual CyberStates report from TechAmerica. In the past, the state has ranked first in high-tech wages in part because of the wealth created by Microsoft. The annual report, which ranks wages, employment, research dollars and other factors for every state, also found that Washington has the largest number of people working in the software publishing business. (47,600)

There's a growing consensus among Wikipedia fans, and others, that Microsoft should donate the contents of the soon-to-be-defunct Encarta encyclopedia to the collaborative online repository that contributed to its demise. But Microsoft may have other plans -- even if doesn't yet know what they are.

Microsoft, trying to build new momentum for its Windows Mobile platform, tonight named some of the initial companies expected to release apps for the Windows Marketplace for Mobile store after it debuts later this year. The Redmond company is trying to counter the momentum Apple has seen with its popular iPhone apps.

Here's the list issued by the company in a news release this evening.

With the dust finally starting to settle in the debacle known as Entellium, one question still remains. How did the fraudulent activities of Parrish Jones and Paul Johnston -- who were sentenced to prison Friday after inflating revenue -- go undetected for four years? 

Shortly after the fraud came to light last October, we reported that audits were never completed at the Seattle software startup. Experts at the time said that a simple review would have uncovered the fraud, causing a debate about the role of the company's primary venture backer: Ignition Partners. At the sentencing hearing Friday afternoon, some interesting details emerged about the audits, the responsibility of the board and why it is important to blow the whistle.

A new article by Vanity Fair reveals an interesting tidbit about a '90s flirtation between the New York Times and Amazon.com. In a piece titled "The Inheritance," writer Mark Bowden chronicles NYT publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.'s efforts to keep the storied newspaper alive in today's rapidly changing media environment. Bowden talks to former Times CFO Diane Baker, who said she forged a major deal with Amazon.com, only to see it shot down.

Internet advertising is not growing as fast as it once did, but it is still outpacing some of the more traditional advertising channels like newspapers and television. Advertisers spent $23.4 billion online last year, up 10.6 percent over 2007, according to the 2008 year-end report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. [PDF-19 pages] That compares to the entire advertising sector, which Nielsen said was down 2.6 percent last year.

This is starting to get almost funny. Microsoft today confirmed that it has hired yet another Yahoo executive, operations vice president Dayne Sampson -- the latest in a series of Yahoo engineers and executives to make the switch to Microsoft following its unsuccessful bid to acquire Yahoo last year.

Spaltudaq -- which may have had the hardest name to pronounce in the history of Seattle startups -- has changed its name to Theraclone Sciences. More importantly, the biotech company announced today new research that could be used to "reverse engineer" a vaccine for HIV.