TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

We're concluding our look back at the top stories of the year today with a fun category. As loyal readers of TechFlash know, we like to cover breaking news, feature cool products and profile the leading minds in technology. But some of our absolute favorite stories are the offbeat pieces which tell the quirky and unusual side of the Pacific Northwest technology community. So, we decided to highlight our top 10 post -- nah, make that top 11 posts -- which can best be described as odd news.

Windows Phone parade: Thriller, and pallbearers carrying iPhone

What Microsoft learned from Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates

Microsoft apologizes for banning gamer from Fort Gay, West Virginia

Top five worst Google Fiber pitches

Read Ballmer's lips? Guess not

How to fix the Gulf oil spill: Bob Woodward says 'Call in Google'

Rapping monkey puppet says Amazon is buying Woot.com

Microsoft guys get girls; other Millionaire Matchmaker musings

Paul Allen's Brangelina moment

Microsoft: 1 in 5 young adults has dropped a phone in a toilet

Don't Kindle and drive

Previously on TechFlash: Top 10 Startup Stories of 2010. Top 10 Amazon stories of 2010. Top 10 Microsoft stories of 2010.

Amazon.com has been on a roll in 2010, with the stock surging more than 34 percent and the Seattle company making a series of high-profile acquisitions and investments. We've been tracking the developments along the way, so here's a look back at the top 10 most read Amazon.com-related stories on TechFlash. Stay tuned later this week for a look at the most read Microsoft stories of the year.

Amazon: You can read Kindle books on the iPad too

Amazon.com's 1-Click patent confirmed following re-exam

Texas slaps Amazon with $269M bill for uncollected sales taxes

Kindle's future? E Ink shows off color and flexible displays

Amazon patents bad gift defense system: "gift conversions"

Former Amazon exec's 5 reasons why the iPad is not a Kindle killer

Facebook envy? Amazon.com patents social networking system

Colorado law sets new rules for Amazon, other online retailers

Amazon starts moving into new Seattle headquarters campus

Report: Amazon to unveil new, thinner Kindle in August

Previously on TechFlash: Top 10 Startup Stories of 2010.

The Kindle has cast a deathly spell on Harry Potter. Amazon.com announced this morning that the third-generation Kindle has become the best selling product in the company's history, surpassing the book "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

Visitors to Amazon.com's home page this holiday season have been greeted with a massive ad for the Kindle, the company's electronic book reading device. The ad, which is hard to miss, declares that the Kindle is the "#1 bestselling, #1 Most-Wished for, #1 Most Gifted Product on Amazon." That placement alone is probably driving huge sales volumes.

Historically, Amazon has kept Kindle sales as a closely guarded secret. But Bloomberg News reports today -- citing people familiar with Amazon's sales projections -- that the company will sell eight million Kindles this year. Analysts had predicted that Amazon would sell about five million Kindles in 2010, more than double last year's figure of 2.4 million, according to Bloomberg.

Amazon's Tom Nissley

Tom Nissley is a book nerd. And that knowledge is paying big dividends. Nissley, the editor of Amazon.com's book blog Omnivoracious, is on one heck of a hot streak on the game show Jeopardy. The Ballard resident won again tonight, making it six straight and bringing his total tally to $184,203, according to MyBallard.com.

Groupon has tapped former Amazon.com executive Jason Child as its chief financial officer, a hire which comes just a few weeks after the fast-growing daily deal site turned down a buyout offer from Google.

“Groupon is one of the most amazing businesses I have ever seen,” said Child in a press release announcing the move. “I am thrilled to join a great team that is attacking one of the biggest opportunities in e-commerce today.”

Who are the biggest wealth creators and wealth destroyers in American business? That's the goal of an annual analysis from Chief Executive magazine and Applied Financial Group, which attempts to rank those CEOs based on how much economic value they've created.

Two Northwest high-tech leaders appeared on the list, but at different ends of the spectrum. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos -- who has driven the online retailer's stock price up more than 33 percent so far this year -- finished fifth just behind Apple's Steve Jobs. That was down one slot from last year's ranking.

But the big drop came at Microsoft. Steve Ballmer's ranking plummeted a whopping 65 spots as the CEO of the software giant finished in 73rd place. That was enough for the company and Ballmer to earn an "F" in terms of economic margin change. [Update: As a reader pointed out, Microsoft did receive an "A" rating in three of the categories, including management quality score]. Only Campbell Soup, and its CEO Douglas Conant, saw a bigger drop among the top 100 companies.

The economy may be stuck in a rut. But there are still some red-hot areas in the tech industry where highly-skilled workers are in demand. (There's a reason why all of those Silicon Valley tech companies are setting up development centers in Seattle).

But where are the best places to work? Glassdoor.com, a jobs and career site, recently unveiled their list of the top 50 employers, a list led by Facebook, Southwest Airlines, Bain & Company, General Mills and Edelman. Just one Seattle-based company, the IT consulting shop Slalom Consulting, cracked the top 25 of the national list. (It ranked 8th).

But the folks at Glassdoor took it a step further, offering a more detailed look at the top employers in the Seattle area (at least judged by the people who work at those companies). Glassdoor also compiled its annual ratings of the best and worst CEOs.

Rubinstein

Is Amazon.com looking to bolster its position in mobile? That's one way you could read the news today that the Seattle online retailer has appointed Jonathan Rubinstein to its board.

Rubinstein is the former CEO of Palm and currently serves as a senior vice president and general manager at H-P, which bought the maker of mobile operating systems earlier this year for $1.2 billion. Before Palm, Rubinstein was senior executive at Apple in charge of the company's iPod unit. Gizmodo once described him as "the hardware engineering guru who helped bring Apple back on track."

Arson is suspected in a warehouse fire that broke out early Thursday morning at a warehouse facility in eastern Pennsylvania. No one was hurt and the suspect remains at large, according to a report from WFMZ-TV in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

It is unclear what led the arsonist to set the blaze. But Amazon.com has taken some PR hits this holiday season, finding itself in the middle of the WikiLeaks scandal and taking heat for selling a controversial book about pedophilia.

Perhaps it is a sign of the times, a symbolic changing of the guard in technology. But Google is on the defensive this morning, explaining its growing power in the technology world and why it must be permitted to continue its aggressive acquisition plans. The chatter started today after Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein suggested that it might be time to loosen the search giant's grip.

Shop.com, a Monterey, California-based comparison shopping service backed by Bill Gates and Amazon.com, has been sold to Market America in a deal of undisclosed size. The combined company will have more than 650 employees.

Gates' involvement with Shop.com goes way back, with the billionaire listed as one of the company's founding investors in 1997. It is unclear exactly when Amazon invested in the company. Other investors include Yahoo and Oak Investment Partners.

Interestingly, Market America -- which describes itself as an Internet marketing and product brokerage company -- developed an offering called MA Cashback in which it offers rebates to people who shop through the service. You may recall that Microsoft pulled the plug on a similar service, Bing Cashback, earlier this year.

Zuckerberg [Image via Time]

Mark Zuckerberg, who built Facebook into an online powerhouse with nearly 600 million users and was the subject of this year's hit film "The Social Network," has been named Time magazine's Person of the Year. The Facebook CEO beat out The Tea Party, The Chilean miners and WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange. He joins an elite list of high-tech entrepreneurs and business leaders who have been selected by Time. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was named Person of the Year at the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999, while Bill and Melinda Gates received the honor (along with Bono) for their philanthropic work in 2005. Intel's Andy Grove was selected in 1997.

Migrant workers are often associated with agricultural. But reporter Jere Downs takes a fascinating look at the "Amazon.com gypsies" who live in RVs outside the company's Campbellsville, Kentucky warehouse during the holiday season.

This is an impressive piece of journalism, though the accompanying video is a bit depressing as it showcases the tough times that many American families are encountering.

Disruptions to a number of Amazon.com's European websites over the weekend prompted speculation that computer hackers seeking payback for WikiLeaks were to blame. But Amazon says that's not the case. In a statement to Reuters, the ecommerce giant said the outages were due to a "hardware failure" in its European data center network.