TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

Online travel site Expedia's shares jumped after the company beat revenue estimates for the first quarter. Bellevue-based Expedia reported revenue of $635.7 million, down 8 percent a year ago. Net income was $39.7 million, down from $49.8 million the same quarter a year ago.

Amazon.com says its Amazon Payments service is gaining traction. The Seattle online retail giant said more than 25 shopping cart and ecommerce platform providers -- including CardinalCommerce,Miva Merchant, Magento, ShopVisible, Mercantec, and Zoovy -- have included Amazon Payments in their offerings.

The National Venture Capital Association is calling on the Securities and Exchange Commission to help spur the slumping IPO market by easing corporate governance laws for startups and providing tax relief to IPO investors.

Peter Wilson, Google's Kirkland engineering and site director, was named today to the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum board of directors.

Seattle-based supercomputer company Cray narrowed its net loss in the first quarter to $4.9 million, from $12 million the same quarter a year ago. Revenues rose to $74.5 million from $26.1 million the same quarter in 2008.

Drugstore.com says its Q1 revenue set a record at $98.3 million, helped by a one-time $1.2 million benefit from settlement of a sales tax case in New Jersey. The online pharmacy company reported first quarter net income of $1.3 million, up from a net loss of 2.7 million in 2008.

RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser acknowledged in a preliminary court hearing that the company's RealDVD technology could let consumers copy rental DVDs, but he said the company wants to "steer people away from that," reports CNet News.com.

RealNetworks is fighting with movie studios over whether consumers can legally copy DVDs to their computer hard drives. Wired reports computer scientist Robert Schumann testified that RealDVD software circumvents encryption technology designed to prevent copying.

Microsoft last night released Windows Vista Service Pack 2, a big bundle of fixes and updates for the PC operating system. Details in this official Windows blog post.

Amazon Web Services today announced a new program called AWS in Education, extending its cloud-computing offering to teachers, researchers and others in education.

On a related note, Carlsbad, Calif.-based Applied Biosystems and Seattle-based Geospiza announced what they are calling the life-science industry's frst "genomic analysis cloud-computing solution." It uses Amazon Web Services.

PathGuide Technologies, a Seattle maker of warehouse management software, is celebrating its 20th year in business this week.

Cozi's family scheduling and calendar service is embedded on the Dell Studio One 19 PC, a touch-enabled computer.

Job interviews are more difficult at Microsoft than at Apple. But interviews at Amazon are the toughest of all. And job candidates feel a lot better about the interview experience at IBM than at Google.

Those are some of the unscientific nuggets gleaned from a new Interviews section launched tonight by Glassdoor, a site that offers inside details such as employee salaries and executive approval ratings at major companies. The new section uses information from job seekers to rate companies on such factors as the difficulty of their interviews and how people felt about the process afterward.

Amazon.com may have the Kindle. But the giant online retailer doesn't think that's the only portable device where people will read books. Looking to bolster its position in e-books, Amazon.com today purchased the maker of the free iPhone application Stanza. The company behind Stanza -- Lexcycle -- announced the news in a blog post today.

Earlier today, I noted how venture capitalists are struggling to find positive returns in this tough economy. But it's not just the VCs that are hurting.

Twitter's audience grew by 95 percent in March to 19.1 million visitors. TechCrunch says the company is now on track to top 50 million visitors some time this summer.

The state's Life Sciences Discovery Fund will receive $38 million in funding over the next two year budget cycle, a 41 percent cut. Xconomy reports that the compromise budget saves the fund from a previously proposed "death sentence."

Wells Fargo has raised objections over the pre-packaged bankruptcy plan of Charter Communications, the St. Louis cable company owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

First Jon Stewart. Now Oprah. Bacon Salt, founded by two former Jobster employees, got a major boost this week after their bacon flavored seasoning was featured on Oprah. That followed a humorous appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart where the comedian nearly barfed after guzzling some of the company's other product: Baconnaise. You can watch some of the prep work for the show on the Bacon Salt YouTube channel.

Robert Guth of The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating read on the relationship between Bill Gates Jr. and his father, Bill Gates Sr. The story leads with the so-called "water incident" when the elder Gates tossed a glass of water into the face of his argumentative 12-year-old son.

Seattle international health non-profit PATH, which has received considerable support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over the years, has received a contract and grant for as much as $52 million to continue work on helping people with HIV/AIDS.

Headline of the day comes via The New York Times: "With Kindle, can you tell its Proust?"

Bill Gossman

MySpace and hi5 this week tapped new CEOs, both of whom have connections to the Seattle technology industry. Perhaps the more interesting of the two was the appointment of Bill Gossman as CEO of hi5, a San Francisco social networking company with more than 63 million unique visitors each month.

A new Seattle startup called Opscode has raised $2.5 million in funding and is developing a service to automate the management of so-called “cloud computing” services. Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, led the funding. Bill Bryant, Draper’s Seattle-based venture partner, also made a personal investment in Opscode, as did the company’s law firm, Perkins Coie LLP.

Amazon.com posted strong first quarter gains in profit and revenue, beating analyst expectations. The online retail giant said Q1 sales increased 18 percent to $4.89 billion from the same quarter 2008. Net income jumped 24 percent to $177 million, or 41 cents per diluted share.

Analysts had expected revenue of $4.75 billion and expected earnings to decline to 31 cents per diluted share -- citing Amazon's aggressive pricing and shipping deals to hold onto cost-conscious customers in the tough economy. But Amazon appears to be gaining ground in the recession.

[Updated with Bezos comments from earnings conference call]

Amazon.com sells cookbooks, gourmet foods and -- at least in the Seattle area -- groceries. Now the online retailer is investing in Foodista, a tiny Seattle online recipe site that launched last December. Amazon.com recently led the startup company's $550,000 financing round, a sign that the online retailing powerhouse may be getting serious about the distribution of recipes.

Since launching its Kindle electronic reader, Amazon.com has kept sales figures and other details of the device a closely guarded secret. Now research firm iSuppli is taking a stab at estimating the production costs of the Kindle 2. The conclusion? Amazon spends $185.49 on materials and manufacturing of the second-generation reader -- about half the device's $359 price tag.

Amazon.com said today it will make 500 streaming TV shows and movies available in high-definition. The long-anticipated move puts Amazon's Video on Demand business on a more even footing with Apple's iTunes, which started offering HD movies for rent or purchase in March. But some critics weren't impressed with Amazon's offering.

Some of Washington state's biggest political names, including Gov. Chris Gregoire and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, stuck some spades in a ceremonial sandbox today to mark the latest construction phase of Amazon.com's new office campus in South Lake Union. They were practically falling over each other to praise Amazon and its giant campus project, which represents a rare bright spot in the local economy. Noticeably absent from the event, however, was Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, or any other top Amazon executive for that matter.

Amazon.com released CEO Jeff Bezos' 2008 annual letter to shareholders today. Among the highlights: Bezos says sales of the electronic Kindle reader "have exceeded our most optimistic expectations." He also says Amazon is "investing heavily in Amazon Web Services, in tools for third-party sellers, in digital media, in China, and in new product categories." Bezos also makes a reference to the iconic '80s movie "The Karate Kid" -- in the footnotes, no less.

Read on for the full text.

Pat Soden

The University of Washington Press is gearing up to sell books on Kindle — the first time it has made content available on Amazon.com's electronic reader — and plans to shift publishing of 100 books to Amazon’s print-on-demand service, BookSurge. The UW Press joins a number of academic publishers who are working with Amazon to spur sales and expand digital distribution. Amazon, for its part, appears to be showing a growing interest in the academic market.