TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

Owain Weinert at the Allied Star Police release party at PopCap headquarters.

Like many other nine-year-old boys, Owain Weinert likes to horse around with his little brother, hang out with friends and is a self-described "gamer geek" (Avatar, Halo Reach and Lego Universe are his some of his favorites).

But -- unlike most other nine-year-olds -- Owain just spent a week architecting a video game in the Seattle offices of gaming company PopCap Games, maker of the popular Bejeweled and Plants and Zombies.

The dream-come-true is part of a bittersweet tale. In March of 2010, Owain was diagnosed with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia and has spent the last year undergoing extensive chemotherapy treatments.

Drew Bamford, VP of user design at HTC. (Dan Schlatter/PSBJ)

The U.S. headquarters of Taiwan-based smartphone maker HTC is in Bellevue. With the recently unveiled HTC Sensation 4G smartphone and HTC Flyer tablet spread out on the table before him, interactive product designer Drew Bamford spoke about the company’s relationship with Microsoft Corp., patent controversies and the company’s newest toys.

Recently, we sat down and had a chat with Bamford, who is vice president of user experience at HTC. Here is what we talked about:

HTC was traditionally a Windows operating system user, but now you’ve moved toward the Android OS. How has it changed your relationship with Microsoft? We still have a strong partnership with Microsoft. I mean it’s obvious Android still has a lot of momentum in the market, and we’re selling a lot of Android phones. But from a strategic and even design standpoint, we’re still really just as committed to Windows phones. We think Microsoft did an excellent job with the design of Windows Phone 7, and it was a total revolution for them, and we get really good feedback on our Windows Phone 7 products. So the fact that right now it doesn’t have the same momentum as Android doesn’t cause us to waver in our commitment to Windows. We think it’s good for our customers to have choices — that’s what it comes down to.

Don't leave your MacBook unattended at Starbucks. (Apple photo)

The thief may be targeting you at Starbucks because you came in, chose a table and then left your laptop alone as you got in line to get a latte.

That’s the message in an eye-opening article today from The New York Times. Under the heading “Crime Scene,” the Times details how criminals are frequenting Starbucks, where they are finding it easy to “grab something to go,” such as an unattended purse or laptop.

The laptop crimes are leading to a rise in identity theft cases. Here are some more details from the article:

The Endeavour touches down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida after an earlier mission. (NASA photo)

When Space Shuttle Endeavour finally takes off from the Kennedy Space Center next week, it will carry a lot of Boeing with it.

The flight, which has been scheduled for April 29, was postponed Friday until May 2 or later. The problem was the failure of one of two heaters that keep an auxiliary power unit’s hydrazine fuel from freezing while the shuttle is in orbit.

Boeing engineers are among those responding to this issue, said Ed Memi, spokesman for the Boeing Space Exploration Division, headquartered in Houston.

The reusable spacecraft, which has completed 25 missions, was built in what is now a Boeing facility, and has been maintained and supported by Boeing in many ways.

Jay Greene (Brian Smale photo)

Journalist and author Jay Greene, of Seattle, has written a book called, “Design Is How It Works,” on how REI, Nike, Ace Hotel and other companies succeed by offering great design. Amazingly, in his view, it’s not technology that wins, it’s creating experiences that users crave.

You look at design as a business strategy. Where did you get the idea for this book? A couple of years ago, when I was at BusinessWeek, I wrote an article about Bang & Olufsen (the high-design audio maker), and I met with their chief technology officer. For all the beautiful stuff it makes — products of theirs are in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection — they don’t have a designer on staff. They contract out all of their design work, and the idea is to keep the designers apart from the corporate politics. And those outside designers control the product completely. If they don’t think the product meets their standards, the product doesn’t get made. A few months after the story came out, an editor at Portfolio (Penguin’s business book imprint) emailed me and said, “You should do a book about that.

So design people decide, people who aren’t even employed by the company? Bang & Olufsen’s idea is that if they’re going to succeed in a world populated by Sony, Panasonic and Phillips, they have to offer something different.

Microsoft has added the Hulu Plus subscription service to its Xbox 360, which will be available for free for 7 days to all Xbox users, and then only to Xbox Live gold members (a $60 annual fee). The Hulu service will stream current hit TV shows (30 Rock, The Daily Show, etc.) and classic movies through the console for $7.99 per month. Unfortunately, ads will also be a part of the service, though Hulu said the advertising is "limited." Microsoft touts the added benefit of using Kinect to access Hulu, using only your voice as the remote control.

In a Q&A-style blog post today, Sony said it is working on a plan to compensate users of certain PS3 games and may offer a goodwill gesture for users of its PlayStation Network, as its network outage stretches into a second week.

The Japanese electronics giant is scrambling to rebuild security and get its network back online following an external intrusion in which hackers stole personal information and -- possibly -- credit card data from an estimated 77 million users. On April 20th, Sony shut down its services after it discovered user account information for its PlayStation Network and Qriocity service had been compromised. The company is facing both FBI scrutiny and class-action lawsuits as a result.

In the blog post, Sony said it's "currently evaluating ways to show appreciation for your extraordinary patience as we work to get these services back online."

Q3 Windows Division revenue (Microsoft chart)

A day after Microsoft posted quarterly numbers that showed strong growth in revenue and profit, analysts are reacting, with much of the focus on Microsoft’s weaker Windows revenues.

ZZP co-founder and CEO Curt Bererton is eaten by Couchy the Dragon. We are not sure if he survived. (ZipZapPlay photos)

Casual games company PopCap Games is acquiring ZipZapPlay, a social games company in San Francisco.

Seattle’s PopCap -- maker of the blockbuster games Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies -- says with ZipZapPlay, PopCap is adding to its lineup of Facebook games. The deal also gives PopCap an established social studio in Silicon Valley.

Amazon has finally broken its silence. The company has formally apologized for -- and, more importantly, explained -- the cloud failure that downed numerous websites relying on Amazon's cloud-based web services last week.

In a lengthy and technical post-mortem posted to Amazon Web Services(AWS), the company explains the root causes of the problem, why the problems lasted for so long and how they will change their infrastructure going forward to better protect customers. It also addressed the communication issues that frustrated many of its customers and offered compensation for those affected.

Amazon said the issues affecting its Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2) customers last week, primarily involved a portion of the Amazon Elastic Block Store(EBS) volumes -- used to store data -- in a single Availability Zone within the U.S. East Region that became unable to service read and write operations.

Microsoft says it is delaying its Bing/Yahoo rollout overseas until it can fix the kinks. Meanwhile, Microsoft says there are about 50 patent infringement cases pending against the software giant.

Here some details broken out of Microsoft’s regulatory filings related to the company’s quarterly earnings report released Thursday:

Bing/Yahoo: Microsoft’s online advertising revenue grew $84 million-- or 17 percent -- to $586 during the last quarter, thanks to growth in search and display revenue. But the growth would have been more if there hadn’t been “challenges” with optimizing the adCenter platform for the new mix and volume of traffic from both Yahoo and Bing.

In 2009 Microsoft and Yahoo struck an online search and advertising deal that allowed Microsoft’s underlying Bing search technology to be used on both sites. Yahoo agreed to take care of search-advertising sales, using Microsoft’s advertising technology. Microsoft said the deal would help it compete with Google.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz recently blamed technical problems with the Microsoft ad platform for preventing Yahoo from reaping the revenue results it expected from the partnership.

Microsoft said it was going to delay the international rollout of the Bing/Yahoo to focus on fixing problems in the U.S. and Canada. But in a conference call with analysts Thursday, company officials did not say how long the delay mght be.

“We are going to work on North America and the U.S. When we fell like we have that straightened out, we are going to move on to the other international markets,” said Microsoft CFO Peter Klein.

Coinstar Inc. said its Redbox DVD rental performance aided its strong first quarter performance: The company reported that revenues grew to $424 million from $323 million a year earlier and net income rose to $8.5 million, or 26 cents per diluted share, from $6.4 million, or 21 cents a diluted share a year earlier.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters First Call expected first-quarter revenues of $409.4 million and earnings of 22 cents per share.

In after-hours Thursday trading, shares in Bellevue-based Coinstar (NASDAQ: CSTR) had risen more than 9 percent, up $4.83 to $56.24.

Online travel agency Expedia Inc. reported first-quarter revenues increased to $822 million from $717.9 million a year earlier, but net income fell.

The Bellevue company reported net income fell to $52 million, or 19 cents per share, from $59.4 million, or 20 cents a share a year earlier. After adjustments, Expedia reported adjusted earnings per share of 25 cents, down from adjusted earnings of 26 cents a share in 2010.

Microsoft says its fiscal third-quarter revenue grew by 13 percent, with the company’s entertainment and devices division seeing $1.94 billion in revenue -- a 60 percent increase year over year -- thanks in large part to Kinect and Xbox 360 sales.

The Redmond company said it had revenue of $16.43 billion for the quarter that ended March 31. That beat what analysts had expected: $16.19 billion in revenue, a 12 percent increase.

Net income for the quarter was $5.23 billion -- or 61 cents per share. Net income was up 31 percent from last year. Analysts had expected 56 cents per share.

Microsoft shares were down nearly 2 percent in after hours trading Thursday.

Microsoft Business Division revenue grew 21 percent over the same quarter in 2010, to $5.25 billion.

Server & Tools revenue grew 11 percent, the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Microsoft said strong business adoption of Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and System Center were the reasons for the growth.

Windows 7 is the fastest selling operating system in history with 350 million licenses sold. But revenue from the segment was down 4 percent in the third quarter. Microsoft said that was in line with the PC trends. The Windows Division saw revenue of $4.45 billion in the last quarter. Microsoft noted that PC sales were down 8 percent, and netbooks down 40 percent.

The royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is just hours away, and a local company will play a big role in providing coverage of the event. Metia, a digital marketing agency with North American headquarters in Kirkland, developed a video player to stream the event for MSN, starting Friday at 3 a.m. PDT.

The MSN video player will stream the event online to create a large social gathering, featuring live commentary and real time conversations through Twitter and Facebook.

"The concept we tried to focus on there is, in the UK there are a lot of people who will be having street parties and general kind of festivities (to celebrate the wedding), so we tried to create that kind of global online street party online," said Andrew Martin, vice president of the the North American division of Metia.

Martin said the site has directly integrated Facebook Connect and Twitter into the site.