TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

IP Street Co-founder and CEO Lewis Lee

In the tech world, 2011 might be remembered as the year of intellectual property. Numerous cases have shown how valuable patents can be, but one Spokane-based startup is looking to bring clarity to IP.

IP Street was launched in August by three co-founders: Spokane attorney Lewis Lee, former Red Lion Hotels CEO Art Coffey and former U.S. Rep. Rick White.

“We saw this large asset class that nobody was talking about and we all had different ideas,” Lee said. “We came at it from three different angles, started talking about it and formed the company.”

John SanGiovanni

Zumobi has built apps for numerous established brands, such as NBC’s “Meet the Press,” MSNBC, Motor Trend magazine, REI and The Sporting News.

But Zumobi is different from the competition — apps are built for established brands, and both parties split the ad revenue earned from Zumobi’s ad network.

Recently I chatted with John SanGiovanni, Zumobi’s co-founder and vice president of product design, about Zumobi’s unique strategy and the future of mobile.

When was Zumobi founded? We were founded in 2006. I was a mobile technical evangelist at Microsoft Research. I was doing a bunch of research on user interfaces and mobile advertising. Around 2005, we had come up with a really innovative way to integrate advertising and content. They packaged up my patent portfolio and we spun off to Zumobi (then called ZenZui).

University of Washington researchers teamed up this year with gamers to make a breakthrough in AIDS research that could unlock new drug treatments.

The game at the center of the breakthrough is FoldIt, an online game that lets players collaborate and compete in predicting the structure of protein molecules. Playing FoldIt, gamers helped researchers solve a problem that has stumped them for more than a decade: How to configurate the structure of a retrovirus enzyme related to AIDS.

FoldIt was voted innovation of the year by readers of TechFlash as part of our 2011 TechFlash Newsmaker Awards, or Flashies.

Jeff Bezos launched the Kindle Fire to compete with iPad (Portfolio/J.D. Harrison)

After seeing its sales soar but profits erode, Amazon faces challenges in 2012 that include the potential disappearance of the sales tax loophole it enjoys in most of the country and the need to reassure skeptical investors that it has a handle on its costs.

Amazon posted record revenue in 2011, and the Seattle e-commerce juggernaut made major moves to expand its empire — from launching its Kindle Fire tablet to expanding its publishing division. The company also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to open more warehouses across the U.S.

The growth has been felt widely, in Seattle and beyond, from its appetite for commercial real estate to its impact on competitors.

Amazon was also at the center of debate this year in Congress, which has been grappling with federal legislation to address an online sales tax collection issue that has flared up in several states where Amazon does online retail business. The Seattle company supports a proposed national law that would force online retailers to collect local taxes on more of their sales.

Team W.A.S.A.B.I 2 at the Vex Robotics World Championship in Orlando, Fla.

A group of industrious Bellevue high school students snagged a top spot in an annual competition that pits robot against robot.

Team W.A.S.A.B.I. 2 was part of the winning high school alliance – comprised of three teams from around the world – in the Vex Robotics World Championships, held in April at Walt Disney World in Orlando.

Related TechFlash coverage: Sen. Cantwell seeks online piracy law seen as less harsh by tech firms

Amazon, Google and Facebook are so up-in-arms over federal anti-piracy legislation that the tech companies are considering boycotting the internet. It would be an attention-grabbing ‘nuclear option’ protest that could block traffic to some of the biggest online sites.

The tech companies are angry about the Protect IP Act in the Senate and a house version called the Stop Online Piracy Act. The legislation, aimed at stopping online piracy of music and video, has the backing of the music, film and television industries. Opponents include tech companies such as Google, Yahoo and eBay. The companies worry the law will allow the government to overreach and harm free speech and free commerce.

Many small businesses plan on buying tablets in 2012, primarily Apple's iPad.

About three-quarters of small businesses plan to buy a tablet computer in the next 12 months, with most saying that they are likely to choose Apple's iPad.

That is the finding of a new report from NPD Group released on Thursday. NPD said that the number of businesses that plan to buy tablets increased to 73 percent, up from 68 percent in a second-quarter survey.

It found that 90 percent of the firms surveyed expect to spend the same amount or more on tablets over the next 12 months.

Millions of Kindle Fires were opened on Dec. 25.

It turns out a lot of Kindle Fires ended up under the Christmas tree this year.

TechCrunch is reporting that mobile ad network Millennial Media has found that ad impressions on the Kindle Fire grew at an impressive rate of 261 percent on Christmas Day over the day before. From Dec. 23 to Dec. 26, there was an average daily impression growth rate of 113 percent. In comparison, iPad daily ad impressions grew a paltry 6 percent over those four days.

Amazon's Kindle Fire has been in hot demand during the holidays

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took center stage in New York in September to announce the Seattle e-commerce giant’s long-awaited tablet to provide some serious competition to Apple’s iPad, which has enjoyed free run of the tablet market.

The new Kindle Fire was voted the story of the year by readers of TechFlash as part of our 2011 TechFlash Newsmaker Awards, or Flashies.

To compete with Apple’s iPad, Amazon has aggressively priced the red hot Kindle Fire. The $199 price tag is less than half of the $499 iPad price -- and $50 less than it costs to develop each tablet, according to analysts.

Analysts have raised questions about the strategy.

Google has added to its dominance of smartphone platforms, with the Android operating system supporting 47 percent of smartphones in the U.S., according to comScore. That was a 3 percent increase in market share for Android.

Apple’s iOS platform was No. 2, with 29 percent of the smartphone market, up 1.4 percent in November. That means that Android and iOS platforms are in 76 percent of smartphones in the U.S., a dominance that highlights Microsoft’s steep challenge to catch up with its rivals.

Microsoft had 5.2 percent of the smartphone platform market in November, down 0.5 percent.

The comScore report looked at a three-month average in September, October and November.

BUSINESS JOURNAL PHOTO | Anthony Bolante

Amazon.com employees are flooding Seattle’s transformed South Lake Union neighborhood. Among the new urban amenities is this sidewalk art on Terry Avenue. Developers, anticipating demand, continue to plan new office buildings for the district.

South Lake Union will remain a hot spot for commercial development in 2012, while Pioneer Square may emerge as Seattle’s next emerging neighborhood.

Amazon.com continues to drive much of the development in the city’s South Lake Union area, which has changed dramatically in recent years because of new construction.

Pioneer Square, the city’s original business district, is seeing an influx of start-up companies, with some residential and commercial developments in the wings that could bring more residents and workers to the district.

Washington State Department of Transportation image

Tolling on the 520 bridge began today. A roundtrip during peak hours may run up to $10. But for Microsoft employees, the free Connector service is an option.

To help make the now-tolled drive over the State Route 520 bridge a bit easier, Microsoft has stepped up its Connector bus service.

The extra runs and routes aren’t new – they were added back in April when the Washington State Department of Transportation was supposed to begin tolling. Issues with contractors and technology pushed the start of tolling back to this morning.

But with the cost of a round trip over the 520 bridge as high as $10, more Microsofties might look to hitch a ride.

The Microsoft Connector is one of several ways the tech giant is helping its employees get to work. It’s also one additional perk for recruiting in the extremely competitive tech personnel landscape.

Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos said the company runs about two dozen routes to the Redmond campus and in anticipation of tolling, added one or two runs a day on each route. Most routes now have five or six runs per day.

The Seattle Foundation

The Seattle Foundation earlier this year organized GiveBIG, a daylong online giving campaign that generated more than 18,000 donations totaling $3.6 million.

When it came to online giving, Seattle was the country's fourth most generous city in 2010, according to a report by Convio, an online software fundraising vendor.

The next few days may have the biggest impact on Seattle's ranking for 2011. Local nonprofits count on last-minute giving at this time of year, because 22 percent of all online charitable gifts are made on Dec. 30 and 31, according to a seven-year study of online giving by Network for Good.

For donors, it’s the last chance to get donations in for 2011’s charitable-giving tax deduction, and many nonprofits are making it increasingly easy to give with a few clicks online.

"King County is one of the nation's leading technology hubs so it's natural we'd be at the forefront of this increasingly popular channel for philanthropy," said Norman Rice, former mayor of Seattle and president and CEO of The Seattle Foundation, in a statement.

Are smaller, Kindle Fire-sized iPads next?

The latest report from Apple’s Asian suppliers is that the company will introduce two new versions of its iPad late in January and will cut the price of its current iPad 2 in an effort to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Taiwan-based Digitimes cited unnamed Apple suppliers in its report that said the new iPads will have higher-resolution screens, brighter panels, faster processors and better cameras.

It also said that Apple will take on Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire with a price cut on its iPad 2 that now starts at $499.

The University of California, Berkeley has picked an email system powered by Google over an offering from Microsoft.

According to a message from Vice Chancellor John Wilton, U.C. Berkeley will make the switch to Gmail and Google calendar systems next year and drop its homegrown “CalMail” system, which has failed several times recently. The package Cal chose, called Google Apps for Education, was picked over a rival Microsoft offering after “an extensive analysis,” the school said.

The university already has a Microsoft site license in place -- students can download the company’s Office software starting Jan. 9. That agreement is not affected by this decision.

Cal evaluated the Google system against Microsoft’s Office 365 to make its choice.

In terms of the “migration” to the new system, U.C. Berkeley found Google to be superior -- “Google offers a 6-10 week migration plan … A UC Berkeley migration to Google can start faster and with less infrastructure investment.”

That’s an important consideration -- less investment -- for a university struggling to save money. As consumer sale of tech products remains soft, big tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft have looked to government and education sales to boost the bottom line.