TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

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What exactly did Bill Gates discuss with Barack Obama in the Oval Office in March?

OK, it was probably something innocuous, such as a simple get-to-know-ya or a discussion of education or global health -- the primary subjects of the Microsoft chairman's work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But as noted by the Associated Press, the White House didn't disclose the focus of the Obama-Gates meeting when it released a broader list today of past Oval Office visitors -- lending an air of mystery to the situation.

It's far from a complete reversal, but Microsoft this afternoon informed shareholders that it would be changing its relocation benefits policy after hearing criticism over the company's money-losing purchases of the homes of Stephen Elop, the Microsoft Business Division president, and other top executives.

Have you seen the video of students from Keith Valley Middle School in Horsham, Pa., doing the Microsoft Bing Dance? The fact that it was apparently a grassroots student phenomenon makes it slightly less disturbing than it would appear on the surface, but still, you gotta wonder how the parents of these children will feel.

Even better is this factoid from the official Microsoft Bing blog: "Stacy, the school’s cheerleading instructor spent 12 days teaching the sixth graders the 'Bing dance' with the grand finale being an all-school assembly where the school’s new mascot was announced."

DuBois

Denis Du Bois: "Excitement...fear. Opportunity...risk. Urgency... indifference." Pacific Northwest Clean Tech Open Co-chair Byron McCann opened last night's regional awards ceremony with a dramatized series of opposites.

It fit, because the theme of the evening was contrast and anachronism. The region's hottest new technologies were showcased in Seattle's second-oldest theater. Our governor headlined the ceremony for a cleantech business plan competition that blossomed with no state financial support.

"We must all make these choices," McCann continued. "Urgency is critical. The one commodity we don't have a lot of is time."

Silicon Florist's Rick Turoczy

Rick Turoczy: Welcome back to part 2 of the Venture Northwest recap. If you missed part 1 yesterday, you can catch up over here. What's Venture Northwest, you ask? It's a pitch event put on by the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN). No cash prizes. Just the opportunity for startups to pitch potential investors.

Think DEMO or TechCrunch 50 only on a much smaller scale. Got it? Good. Let's get to the remaining folks with pitched their companies on stage.

The hallmark of any real geek at Halloween, of course, is the emoticon pumpkin in the front yard. This one in my neighborhood caught my attention on a walk this week.

Have any particularly geeky Halloween plans, pumpkins or costumes to share? Comment below, or submit images to the shared TechFlash photo pool on Flickr, and we'll publish the best of them here. Happy Halloween, everybody.

Amazon.com's new app for reading Kindle books on PCs sparked a new round of talk that electronic books are inherently prone to piracy. Now comes word that Amazon is considering some rather unique piracy-prevention measures. The online retail giant recently patented a method for "programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content" so that "illicit copies of the excerpt may be recognized."

As noted by theodp on Slashdot, Amazon says the method could apply to various kinds of copyrighted material including books, short stories, reviews, articles and papers. Given the firestorm Amazon created when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell books from people's Kindles, the public may not be so keen on the idea of Amazon fiddling with digital works. Plus, imagine what such a system could do to famous literary quotes: "All the world's a theater platform"?

Car Toys' Glen Hamilton

Car Toys Inc. sells GPS navigation devices, car stereos and cell phones at its 49 brick-and-mortar stores and through its website. But the Seattle-based electronics chain also does a lot of its selling through the nation’s biggest online retailer, Amazon.com.

“It’s been good or better than any of our online channels,” said Car Toys’ online director Glen Hamilton, who said his company’s sales via Amazon have increased 300 percent this year.

Amazon.com Inc. has turned third-party sales into one of the pillars of its business strategy since opening its website to other retailers a decade ago. Third-party sellers have helped Amazon rapidly expand its product selection, and contributed to the company’s continuing growth in a tough economy. But Amazon's rivals are now trying to get in on the action. Big retailers Wal-Mart and Sears recently invited other merchants to sell products on their websites.

Constantine

Hutchison

Last week, we conducted a poll for the upcoming Seattle mayoral election. Interestingly, the techie -- T-Mobile USA executive Joe Mallahan -- was just edging out the environmentalist -- Mike McGinn.

But there's another important race happening on November 3, which could have even bigger implications for the region's tech industry. In the race for King County Executive, County Council Chair Dow Constantine is facing off with former TV news anchor Susan Hutchison. Hutchison has some interesting connections to the tech industry, having served as the executive director of former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi's foundation.

In this race, transportation is a key issue. And Hutchison has come out in favor of a plan to route light rail over the Highway 520 bridge -- a direct pipeline to Microsoft. Constantine supports the voter-approved plan to take light rail over the I-90 bridge. We're curious where the tech industry is coming down on these two candidates, so cast your vote in the poll above.

Karl Siebrecht

Former aQuantive executive Karl Siebrecht was very close to taking another job when a friend and one-time competitor, former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt, introduced him to Seattle-based AdReady. After taking a look at the technology, which allows small advertisers to quickly set up and manage online display ad campaigns, Siebrecht was instantly hooked.

The 40-year-old exec -- who cut his teeth in the ad business over the past 10 years at aQuantive's Atlas unit and Microsoft -- immediately wanted to be a part of what he viewed as a revolutionary product in the online ad space. So, he asked whether there was room to get involved. AdReady Chief Executive Aaron Finn quickly obliged, tapping Siebrecht as president and chief operating officer.

Siebrecht's been on the job for less than a month, but we caught up with him to chat about competition from Google, the effectiveness of display ads and his previous career as a diver in the U.S. Navy.

Why did you join AdReady? "In a nutshell, my view is that AdReady has a great technology, a great team and it is serving a market that I think has vast potential. I have been in this online ad industry now for over 10 years.... I have watched this industry grow and mature from a point where no one really thought it was an industry to now -- it is however many tens of billions of dollars. It has evolved pretty quickly, but I still think there are parts of it that I would consider are greatly underserved, and in particular it is the display part of the business."

Credit: Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Wal-Mart and Target have engaged in a price war over popular books. Now they're telling customers: Don't buy too many. The retailers are limiting online orders of the books to between two and five copies, trying to prevent other booksellers from buying truckloads of the heavily discounted titles and reselling them.

Wal-Mart caps the books at two per order, Amazon has a three-copy limit, and Target draws the line at five, the Wall Street Journal reports. The retailers are selling the books — including Stephen King's "Under the Dome" and Sarah Palin's memoir "Going Rogue" — for $9 (or slightly less), far below list price and cheaper than what many smaller booksellers would pay for them at wholesale.

Hank Skorny

RealNetworks today announced a new hire that's notable both because of the person taking the job and because there's a bit of a mystery around the job he's taking. The company named Hank Skorny to the newly created position of "Senior Vice President, Media Cloud Computing and Services."

Skorny is a well-known entrepreneur who founded Thumbspeeed, a Bellevue-based mobile messaging company that was acquired in 2007 by OZ Communications, which was subsequently bought by Nokia. He has worked for companies ranging from Infospace Mobile and AOL Mobile to Adobe, Microsoft and Apple. RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser gave Skorny high praise in a news release announcing his appointment -- calling him "one of the great innovators in the PC, Internet, and mobile industries" over the past 25 years.

So what is this new position that Skorny is taking at Real? By way of explanation, the news release offers only a cryptic quote from Glaser calling it a new effort "to build an innovative set of products and services that leverage cloud computing to make digital media available to consumers whenever and wherever they want it."

from iprojectideas.blogspot.com

Are you a parent who likes to do science experiments with your kids? Well, then you might be Balloon Boy’s father, and you should probably lay low for a while. But if you’re anybody else, check out oursciencefair.com.

Our Science Fair is a web service for schools and parents who host or participate in science fairs. It modernizes the registration process, turning it from one dependent on convincing hundreds of preadolescents to take a paper packet home to their parents, get it filled out, and then bring it back to teacher in a timely manner; to one dependent on the parent spending 30 seconds or less online signing up their little Dr. Kevorkian -- ahem -- Einstein.

The service is Sammamish resident Rajeev Goel’s brainchild, inspired by his brave commitment last spring to coordinate his daughter's science fair at Cascade Ridge Elementary.

The Seattle online brokerage ShareBuilder Securities is likely to be sold by its parent company ING, an annoucement that comes nearly two years after the Dutch financial company gobbled up the firm for $220 million. The announcement, made today by ING Direct CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann at ShareBuilder's new Pioneer Square office, comes after ING said it plans to sell its U.S. operations by 2013.

Nonetheless, The Puget Sound Business Journal's Kirsten Grind reports that the ShareBuilder unit -- led by Dan Greenshields -- still plans to double in size to about 600 employees in the next two years. More from Grind's report here.