Photo: Elise Bakketun

Anita Rachvelishvili in the title role of Seattle Opera's "Carmen."

A 13-year-old Seattle boy gets named one of the top high-school inventors in the country.

Steve Jobs is quoted posthumously as saying Bill Gates should have dropped acid.

The Seattle Opera blogs “If Carmen and her friends were on Facebook,” featuring a mock Facebook page filled with clever, fictional posts by characters in the show playing through Saturday (Oct. 29) at McCaw Hall.

And a local rising-star of a company, Isilon, shows off its new Pioneer Square headquarters with Mayor Mike McGinn, announcing it will hire 200 people by the end of the year, despite recently selling to giant EMC.

These seemingly disparate events have a common thread: They help illustrate both the breadth and depth of ways in which technology touches the lives of those in Seattle and around Puget Sound.

Of course, this isn’t a surprise to most of you. You’re living it.

My point in tying these pieces of string together is to help illustrate the goal of TechFlash – and my personal goal as the new assistant managing editor for digital media at Puget Sound Business Journal. In this role, I’ll oversee TechFlash as well as the website of the PSBJ.

Our goal with TechFlash is to help you make sense of technology: what it means to your business, this region and the world.

Not just the tick-tock of industry news, but the ways our lives are enriched by technology — or sometimes overwhelmed by it. Not just the press-release-of-the-day but analysis and a questioning approach. Not just pithy sound bytes but deeper profiles of the people behind the stories. Not just a tunnel-vision view of local developments, but the full panorama of news from around the country as it relates to this area.

TechFlash has been doing these things already, but we’re now entering a new era of sorts -- not unlike that 13-year-old boy or the Pioneer Square tech crowd.

We’re growing on multiple fronts. We're hiring. We’re adding more national coverage. We’re searching for content partners and insightful guest columns.

And, most immediately, we’re gearing up for the Second Annual Flashies Awards. More on the awards in a forthcoming post, but suffice to say that last year’s event drew a crowd of more than 275 to the Experience Music Project for an entertaining night featuring awards in 15 categories such as Innovation of the Year and Newsmaker of the Year.

Our aim is to connect with smart people craving smart information. We aren’t targeting just geeks or venture-capitalists. We inform them, of course. But we want to reach beyond them -- to business people who use technology, and to regular folks leading regular lives.

Because in Seattle, that’s techie, too.

Michele Matassa Flores joined TechFlash and the Puget Sound Business Journal in October as Assistant Managing Editor for Digital Media. She previously worked 20 years at The Seattle Times, serving as technology reporter and business editor, among other roles. For the past two years, she helped edit the regional news website Crosscut.com. Phone: 206-876-5421 | Email: mflores@bizjournals.com | Twitter: michelemf