TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

It’s been a while since we blogged about Limeade, the startup with the online program that helps companies improve the health and well being of their workers.

But now we hear that the Bellevue startup led by former Bocada executive Henry Albrecht has landed three new executives with prior experience at Microsoft and ShapeUp.

And the company has doubled its workforce since the beginning of 2011 and is seeking more talent.

Mercy Corps photos

A young woman presents a new business idea at the first Startup Weekend in Gaza, part of the new Mercy Corps Arab Developer Network Initiative.

Mercy Corps , Google and Seattle-based Startup Weekend are gathering in Seattle on Thursday to talk about how investors and philanthropists can contribute to global business development in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

The event is designed to create a sense of urgency about creating job growth for youth in the Middle East and North Africa; economic conditions were part of the motivation for the uprisings sparked in January 2011 in Tunisia.

Google engineers and business development experts have traveled to the region with Mercy Corps to offer technical and business training and mentorship opportunities.

Apple has named John Browett, CEO of European electronics retailer Dixons, to run its iconic retail chain.

If Microsoft is going to make any gains in its efforts to compete with Apple on the store front, this is the guy to beat.

Apple has gone outside the company to hire the head of a European electronics retailer to run its iconic retail stores.

John Browett, CEO of Dixons Retail PLC, was named senior vice president of retail operations and expansion on Tuesday by the Cupertino company.

He takes the vacancy made when replaces Ron Johnson left Apple in November to run J.C. Penney Co.

Browett, 46, had been CEO of Dixons since 2007. He begins at Apple in April.

Amazon chart

Amazon’s cloud service for developers has seen explosive growth, a sign analysts say that Seattle’s ecommerce giant is rapidly becoming the dominate cloud provider.

“As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times,” Amazon’s AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr blogged.

That was a year-over-year growth rate of 192 percent, Barr blogged.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a web service for developers that allows for the storage and retrieval of data.

ReadWrite Cloud said that the growth reflects the overall rapid adoption of cloud computing and Amazon’s “dominance of the market.”

The Nokia Lumia 800 has an 8 megapixel camera and tight integration with social media, but will it be enough to take on the iPhone?

Microsoft is paying Nokia $230 for each Windows phone in an effort to catch up with Apple and Google in the cell phone market.

That's the estimate made by Forbes. Microsoft paid venture partner Nokia $250 million, which shipped 1 million Windows phones. Microsoft receives a license from Nokia of about $20 per phone; or a $230 price that Forbes calls "desperation."

Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 under an agreement that has Nokia adopting Windows Phone 7 as Nokia’s primary smartphone platform.

EMC Isilon Storage Division president Sujal Patel (from left), EMC chairman and chief executive Joe Tucci and Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn at recent event where Isilon announced ambitious growth plans for Seattle. (PSBJ photo / Anthony Bolante)

The tech industry has become the new stable source of jobs, luring workers from other sectors who would have shied away from tech following the volatility of 1990s-era startups.

Tech giants including Amazon.com, Apple and Google increased their work forces by at least 50 percent over the past two years, according to Bloomberg News.

The competition for qualified workers has promoted these companies to look to people with non-technical backgrounds, and has drawn many from other sectors to pursue tech careers.

Anti-Phishing Working Group chart

Everybody’s gotten them, those emails that at first glance look like they are from your bank seeking your password and bank account numbers.

Often the emails are disguised with bank logos and official-sounding wording. But they are actually email “phishing” scams seeking to crack into our bank records and steal our money.

Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and other email providers are working with banks to try to stay one step ahead of the scammers.

Microsoft and the others are proposing a system called “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance,” according to The Associated Press.

According to its website, DMARC.org standardizes how email receivers perform email authentication:

Microsoft is offering startups $60,000 worth of Windows Azure cloud-computing and storage services under a program working with startup accelerator TechStars.

BizSpark Plus, an extension of the Microsoft BizSpark program, allows TechStars accelerators in Seattle, Boulder, Colo., Boston, New York and Texas to offer each of their startups up to $60,000 worth of Windows Azure cloud computing and storage over a two-year period.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wrote a letter to Steve Jobs that the Apple co-founder reportedly kept by his bed as he was dying in October.

Gates told the British newspaper The Telegraph, "I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know." The letter followed a long visit by Gates some months earlier. "We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future," he told the paper. Gates said the meeting and the letter came long after the two tech rivals had become less combative, publicly and privately.

PSBJ photo / Anthony Bolante

Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna is putting the resources and expertise of his office behind a problem that is plaguing social media giant Facebook: spam that is targeting Facebook members.

Feisty fights over online spam, rising tech salaries, Apple earnings and a few major deals dominated the news this week.

Washington state Attorney General Rob McKenna has teamed up with Facebook to fight spam that targets Facebook uses -- a.k.a. clickjacking -- by lobbing suits against Adscend Media LLC, a Delaware-based online ad network.

Adscend responded to the lawsuits on Friday, saying it complies with state and federal laws and is being falsely accused of clickjacking and "friending" users on Facebook as a deceptive means of spreading spam.

Good news for local techies: The average tech salary in Seattle is now $90,362 -- up 5 percent from one year ago -- and one out of three reported receiving a bonus in 2011. Another sign of a (potentially) healing economy: tech job postings have grown every month over the past two years.

The Nokia Lumia 800 has an 8 megapixel camera and tight integration with social media, but will it be enough to take on the iPhone?

Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 under an agreement that has Nokia adopting Windows Phone 7 as Nokia’s primary smartphone platform.

The payment was spelled out in Nokia’s earnings statement, which says Microsoft will spend billions more on the Nokia partnership:

In the fourth quarter 2011, we received the first quarterly platform support payment of USD 250 million (EUR 180 million). We have a competitive software royalty structure, which includes minimum software royalty commitments. Over the life of the agreement, both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments are expected to measure in the billions of US Dollars.

The payment was reported by ComputerWorld.

BUSINESS JOURNAL PHOTOS | Marcus R. Donner

Chef Jason Wilson, in the kitchen of his Seattle restaurant Crush, is also designing menus for Google’s Bothell and Kirkland offices.

Celebrated chef Jason Wilson was enjoying tacos at Bimbo’s in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle in February of last year when a friend let him know about a rare opportunity at Google .

His friend, Brian Petoletti, is the general manager at the Kirkland Google campus. Petoletti suggested Wilson’s cooking style and priorities — supporting locally grown produce and naturally raised meat — would be a good fit for a company known for employee amenities and free food.

Wilson, the owner and chef of Capitol Hill’s Crush restaurant, was instantly intrigued.

“We spoke primarily about the food philosophy and the commitment to organic and sustainable cuisine,” Wilson said, “and it was really in line with my cooking.”

Microsoft photo

Captains from the Microsoft Imagine Cup Grants winning teams, Dominik Tomicevic from Croatia, Gerardo Francisco Pérez Layedra from Ecuador, Jason Wakizaka from the United States and Mohammad Azzam from Jordan meet with Bill Gates (right) and Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad Smith (left) at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

A group of college students who developed a smartphone app that uses a snapshot of a blood sample to determine if it’s affected with malaria is one of the recipients of $75,000 from Microsoft's Imagine Cup Grants program.

Team LifeLens from the U.S. was one of four teams that won the grants. The team is comprised of students from University of California, Davis; Harvard Business School; University of Central Florida; and UCLA.

The LifeLens application runs on Windows Phone 7 software, It uses a high-resolution imaging sensor and a micro ball lens attachment, according to Microsoft.

The chief financial officer of Yahoo Japan said that his company is in talks with Yahoo about a complex deal to reduce the American company’s $6 billion stake in his business.

“Yahoo is still trying to finalize the mechanism [for selling its stake] and we are cooperating with them,” The Wall Street Journal quoted Akira Kajikawa as saying at a news conference.

The app described in Microsoft’s patent application would give pedestrians options to avoid walking through an unsafe neighborhood, or an area of intense heat or streets with steep hills.

But the pedestrian route app that uses GPS and government data on crime and weather has sparked a fire storm of controversy from groups who say its elitist and even racist, branding certain neighborhoods in cities as undesirable.

The app does not include the name ‘ghetto.” But the app has been given the name from critics, who say the app reenforces stereotypes of certain neighborhoods.