TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

Amazon.com announced this morning announced that the 2008 holiday shopping season "finished as its best ever." The result is notable in light of the economic downturn.

But such announcements have become a tradition for the Seattle-based online retailer. What was unusual this year was its peak sales date: Dec. 15. That's noticeably later than in years past.

InformationWeek has a detailed profile of Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels, naming him Chief of the Year for his efforts promoting Amazon Web Services to the world. The story explores the 6'-5" Dutchman's background and his role in developing and evangelizing Amazon's cloud-computing architecture. The piece says of Vogels: "As Amazon reaches out to customers, his ability to articulate the benefits of cloud computing will have a lot do with whether they return the embrace."

Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon.com and founder of online ad firm aQuantive, is boosting his stake in local search and advertising company Marchex, where he's a board member. An SEC filing today shows Hanauer purchased more than 2.1 million shares of Marchex Class B common stock between Nov. 13, 2007 and Dec. 9, 2008, for more than $23 million. He now holds more than 8.7 percent of the company's Class B common stock.

Does the world really need another online recipe Web site, especially one based in Seattle? That was on my mind as I sat down with Foodista co-founders Barnaby Dorfman and Sheri Wetherell over coffee this week. After all, Seattle is already home to some of the country's leading food sites, from AllRecipes.com to BigOven to RecipeZaar.

But Dorfman, a food lover who previously served as vice president of Amazon.com's A9 search group, thinks there is better way to discover foods, recipes and cooking techniques online. The idea is to create what amounts to a community-operated online encyclopedia of food and recipes, one that is most closely aligned in spirit with Wikipedia.

Officially launching today, Foodista allows members of the community to edit 2,000 recipes, add comments to those recipes, upload photos of foods and discover various cooking techniques and tools. This all happens on a wiki where content -- including specific ingredients -- can be added or removed. (Who needs eggplant in eggplant Parmesan anyway?)

VentureBeat does a reality check on the meltdown at Ambric, the Beaverton, Oregon chip startup backed by OVP Venture Partners and others. VentureBeat says previous reports that venture investors "turned their backs on the company" due to the credit crunch are simply not true.

Airbiquity, the Seattle telematics company that does work with GM's OnStar security system, is expanding to China.

James Hamilton

James Hamilton, one of the big brains behind Microsoft's data center strategy, has left the company, according to a note on his Microsoft home page. And we just confirmed that he's headed across town to Amazon.com, one of Microsoft's key rivals in the market for Web services and cloud computing.

Is there a shakeup going on in the cloud-computing space? Sun Microsystems is apparently shelving its Network.com business, which let users buy computing power from Sun on a pay-per-use basis. Sun's setback could be good news for Amazon.com's EC2 cloud-computing service (which just today expanded to Europe).

Amazon.com is taking one of its core web services across the Atlantic.

The online retailer announced that its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service is now available to European developers and businesses with European customers.

It's the latest in a string of moves by Amazon to expand its cloud-computing business, which allows developers to tap the company's vast server network for web-based storage and computing. Amazon recently put large public data sets (including census and genome data) for free in the cloud to attract scientists, researchers and others.

Amazon.com's electronic book reader, the Kindle, may be sold out this holiday season.

But if you're planning to stay in a fancy boutique hotel in New York City, you may be in luck. The Algonquin -- meeting place of the famous Round Table of writers and artists in the early 1900s (think Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Harpo Marx) -- is offering current guests a Kindle loaded with their favorite book.

Online pranksters appear to be having a bit of fun with today's news about the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on charges of conspiring to trade or sell the Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama.

First came the effort to sell Obama's Senate seat on eBay (asking price: $127.50 with free shipping).

Now someone has helpfully set up an Amazon.com Wish List for Blagojevich with the DVD of "Prison Break" Season One and books about tattoos, among other things.

With online shopping taking a hit this holiday season, Amazon.com is making a big push to get people buying.

So how will the giant retailer fare in the economic downturn?

With features like the new iPhone shopping application -- which lets people snap photos of items in a store, get pricing and buy later on Amazon.com -- the online retailer is "armed to beat the recession," argues a story today in BusinessWeek.

Yet another tech executive with ties to the Seattle tech community is being discussed for the top post at embattled Yahoo. The Wall Street Journal reports that Arun Sarin -- who served as CEO of Bellevue-based InfoSpace for a short stint in 2000 before moving on to Vodafone -- is among the candidates being considered. Seattle venture capitalist and Yahoo board member John Chapple also has been mentioned as a possibility.

Amazon.com veterans have launched a bunch of startups over the years, including the latest Twilio, a company I profiled a couple weeks ago.

Now I'm hearing about another startup founded by an ex-Amazon employee, Brent Poole. It's called MindBloom. The company's website describes MindBloom as "a life game experience that inspires you to grow a little bit each day."

Apple, Amazon and Wal-Mart were the only top retail sites to see an increase in unique visitors in the U.S. during the period of Dec. 1 through Dec. 5, compared to the similar period last year.

But online auction giant eBay remains the top draw for online holiday shopping, according to numbers released over the weekend by the comScore Networks market research firm. Here are two charts illustrating the trends.

iFloor, a Tukwila online flooring retailer which had peak annual revenue of nearly $60 million, has filed for bankruptcy protection and laid off about 90 of its 150 employees. The Seattle Times quotes a bankruptcy attorney for iFloor's parent, Smooth Corp., who notes that after Thanksgiving the company "concluded that it was unable to secure adequate operating funding to go forward in this economy." The company was backed by Maveron, the Seattle venture capital firm led by Howard Schultz and Dan Levitan.

Bellevue's OneHub today introduced a new Web application -- which like Google Docs and other file sharing programs -- allows people to share documents with co-workers over the Internet. The company is led by Charles Mount, Laurel Moudy and Brian Moran. Moudy and Moran previously worked in executive roles at Ignition-backed Centeris. [More after the jump]