TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News

A jury awarded ICO Global Communications, a firm controlled by local cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, $236 million in additional damages in a long-running court case against Boeing, according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

Seattle's Second Avenue Partners has participated in a $33 million funding round for Ice Energy, a Colorado energy storage company whose technology is used to shift air conditioning energy loads to off peak periods. ... [Plus more after the jump.]

The folks over at Seattle's Jackson Fish Market have cooked up a little Halloween treat called They're Ugly, a simple Web application where users can send virtual flowers to friends (or enemies). Names of the virtual bouquets include Grim Reaper, Spiky Stench and Meat Eater.

Google, of course, has changed its logo in celebration of the spooky holiday. (A trend that Yahoo and MSN also have jumped on). Have you seen any other fun Halloween-related applications or tech sites?

Last year, I remember a Seattle blogger who used Zillow.com's real estate valuations tools to help kids find the best neighborhoods for trick-or-treating. But I couldn't locate the site today.

Benjamin Black, who helped create Amazon.com's EC2 Web service and spent time at Microsoft as a director of engineering, has established a branch office in Seattle for Sausalito, Calif.-based cloud computing startup Joyent.

Black joined Joyent as vice president of research last month and plans to build a small staff here. In addition, he said that Joyent's CTO, Jason Hoffman, is moving to Seattle from San Francisco.

Yapta joins a growing list of Seattle area startups that are cutting staff as the economy takes a nosedive. The two-year-old company, which lets people track airfare prices, laid off 4 workers, leaving it with just a dozen staff.

Post updated with Allen's video message to guests.

An undisclosed medical procedure prevented Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen from accepting, in person, the Seattle King County Realtors' First Citizen award Thursday evening at a celebration honoring the billionaire philanthropist in Seattle.

Allen instead appeared in a short video message shown on the big screens at the event. Many of Allen's friends and former colleagues -- including Bill Gates -- spoke about Allen's contributions to the city, from the founding of Microsoft to the construction of the Experience Music Project to the purchase of the Seattle Seahawks.

Screen shot of Glympse showing location of founder Bryan Trussel this morning

Bryan Trussel, the former head of Microsoft's casual games division, has launched a new website that lets people track the movement of their friends and family online. It locates cell phone signals with GPS technology and plots their motion on Google Maps.

Frank Catalano

FRANK CATALANO: Now it’s clear to me the Web business boom of the past few years is completely different than the earlier, much maligned dot-com boom. Except where it’s exactly the same.

I have this gift of perspective because in October, four years ago, I disappeared. I gave up more than a decade of analyzing, commenting on, and consulting in the tech industry to take an executive-level position in a global publishing company. Then, recently, I left my corporate gig and started mingling again in local tech circles.

On the surface, it was invigorating, inspiring. Founders swore that their new companies had figured out markets and approaches that were completely different than what had gone before.

Yet what I saw made real the rumors that had made it to my corporate cocoon, a reality reinforced by the events of recent weeks. Turns out the differences for Internet companies from last decade’s boom mostly are not, and some companies not already in the toilet may be lapping at the water.

Martin Tobias

Whether at Loudeye or Imperium Renewables, Martin Tobias has always had an uncanny ability to raise capital. And while some of his past startups have not turned out as planned, the former Microsoftie has been at the forefront of two tectonic shifts in the business world, the rise of the Internet and clean tech. Now, word comes that he has raised $5 million for his new startup, Kashless. We pried as many details as we could from him on the phone early this morning from Hawaii.

Brian Goffman

Brian Goffman spent the past two years at Madrona Venture Group helping entrepreneurs build new Internet businesses. Now, the 41-year-old venture capitalist is striking out on his own, albeit with Madrona's financial support.

Goffman has raised $2.75 million for a new Seattle online marketing company called Optify, a stealthy startup that was conceived in Madrona's offices a few months ago.

It shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Avelle is trimming its work force.

After all, possibly the only thing worse than renting a designer handbag during these tough economic times is making an outright purchase of one. And that might be the saving grace for Avelle, the Seattle online handbag rental service formerly known as Bag Borrow or Steal.

The company -- often described as the "Netflix of Handbags" -- eliminated positions representing about 20 percent of payroll earlier this month.

Intrepid Learning Solutions survived the dot-com meltdown in part because it was able to reduce expenses through layoffs.

Now, the Seattle company is cutting back again, this time to adjust to the current economic troubles. Ten employees were recently laid off at the company, a small layoff that accounts for less than five percent of the staff. Intrepid now employs about 240 people, said spokeswoman Heather Muir.

--A new online recipe application from Seattle's BigOven is climbing up the charts in the iPhone application store, with founder Steve Murch writing to say that it is now in the 9th slot. As of yesterday afternoon, he said there had been more than 100,000 downloads in the first four days. More from his blog where he writes that the application is now more popular than "Google for the iPhone, NY Times for the iPhone and even the always-popular UrbanSpoon for the iPhone."  The instant popularity of the application, which allows people to search through 160,000 recipes, has caused some hiccups in the servers at BigOven, a problem that Murch writes is "good to have."

Zillow.com

Jorrit Van der Meulen

Jorrit Van der Meulen, who served as vice president of partner relations at Zillow.com, has left the company.

Even though Van der Meulen's bio remains on the Zillow Web site, a spokeswoman confirmed that he is gone. His position has been filled by Spencer Rascoff, who had served as chief financial officer and vice president of marketing. Rascoff now holds the new title of chief operating officer.

UPDATE: Van der Meulen is returning to Amazon.com to run IMDB.com and other content sites, according to an e-mail that he sent to colleagues. Text of the October 20th email, which was obtained by TechFlash, is included after the jump.

We got a great response from some very -- let's say resourceful -- entrepreneurs who jumped at the chance to get free tickets to next week's Entrepreneur University in Seattle.

In fact, we liked the responses so much that we were able to give away two additional tickets. Here are the winners with their brief e-mail submissions on why they should attend. Nice job guys.

Will the falling price of oil have a negative impact on investments in the alternative energy sector? Venture capitalists speaking today at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum in Seattle think it might.

"if we see oil in the $50, $60 or $70 range, a lot of these technologies don't make a lot of sense," said Raj Atluru, a director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The price of oil has been on a rapid descent in the past three months, losing more than half of its value.