GeekWire

What's the impact of the words we use? Augmented writing platform Textio uses machine learning and natural language processing to take the guesswork out of business communication, offering predictive analytics designed to help companies recruit a diverse workforce and build an inclusive culture.  The 120-person Seattle-based tech company, led by CEO Kieran Snyder, has been going through a transformation of its own during the past two years, expanding its product lineup while taking its own workforce fully remote, and recruiting more people outside the Seattle area. In the process, the company built its own in-house online tool for participatory time-boxed conversations, for team-building and collaboration among its employees. Dubbed "Umeo," it's not a product ... at least not yet.  Snyder, who was named the CEO of the Year in the 2021 GeekWire Awards, joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast for a conversation about the importance of language, Textio's evolution, the future of workplace technology, regional differences in business language, and her formative experience as a "Scrabble hustler" in college in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Most online publishers and advertisers are accustomed to real-time analytics, the ability to see how many people are viewing a website or app at any moment, where they're coming from, generally who they are, and what they're doing on the site. But that concept was a novelty in TV advertising before a startup called iSpot.tv came along in 2012. The company, based in Bellevue, Wash., took the turnaround time for data about television ads from weeks and days to hours and minutes. A decade later, iSpot is a key partner and resource for major media platforms and advertisers. With more than 300 employees, the company has been growing organically and through acquisitions, it's increasingly becoming an alternative to industry stalwart Nielsen as a standard for audience measurement. Meanwhile, Nielsen announced this week that it will be acquired by a private equity firm for $16 billion. In the most recent example of the shift, NBCUniversal announced a multi-year agreement with iSpot to provide real-time audience measurement across platforms, starting with the 2022 Olympic Winter Games and Super Bowl LVI, and most recently for NBCUniversal's "upfront" negotiations with advertisers for the 2022-23 television season. The upfront news was announced iSpot tech chief Anthony Skinner during an NBCUniversal developers conference on the Saturday Night Live stage in March. He joins us on the GeekWire Podcast to talk about the underlying changes in how we're all watching TV and consuming content, and how analytics have evolved along the way. The company is a finalist in the category of Next Tech Titan in the 2022 GeekWire Awards, and Skinner was featured in a 2019 GeekWire Geek of the Week profile.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast, we talk about what could be an enduring era of remote work — for some people, at least — as enabled by new technology and illuminated by new data about migration within the United States. First up, GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop reports on his experience testing the SpaceX Starlink satellite service in my hometown in rural Northern California, including efforts to use the service from multiple locations. Then GeekWire co-founder John Cook assesses a high-profile effort by his home state, Ohio, to attract workers from Seattle and other U.S. tech hubs. And to round things out, we discuss new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau that show the population of King County, Wash., home to the tech hubs of Seattle and Bellevue, declining by more than 20,000 people last year, as other counties in the state saw an influx. Finally, we give a sneak preview of the five finalists in one of the categories for the upcoming GeekWire Awards.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tony Hsieh was a legendary entrepreneur who built Zappos and sold the online shoe retailer to Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009. He was known for unusual experiments in management and business structure, and for pursuing long-term passions over short-term profits, as described in his 2010 book, Delivering Happiness. A new book, Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, tells the rest of the story of Hsieh's life, leading up to his tragic death from injuries sustained in a fire in New London, Conn., in November 2020. The book also goes behind-the-scenes of the company's relationship with Amazon. Wall Street Journal reporter Kirsten Grind, who wrote the book with her colleague Katherine Sayre, joins me on the GeekWire Podcast to talk about what they discovered in writing the book, and what we can learn from Hsieh's life. Kirsten Grind was previously based in the Seattle area as a reporter for the Puget Sound Business Journal. Her reporting on the collapse of Washington Mutual formed the basis for her first book, The Lost Bank. Resources: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255; Crisis Text Line: 741741 Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, by Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, is published by Simon and Schuster, and available wherever books are sold. Podcast edited by Curt Milton; Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week's blockbuster trade of Seattle Seahawks QB Russell Wilson could be the first in a series of moves that leads to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owning the team. That was the hypothesis offered by veteran Seattle sports columnist Art Thiel in a piece this week at PostAlley.org, blending smart sourcing with informed speculation. Rumors of Bezos' interest in buying the Seahawks have been around for years, but the team's deal with the Denver Broncos makes the possibility worth revisiting. Thiel, our former Seattle Post-Intelligencer colleague and the founding editor of Sportspress Northwest, joins us on this episode to discuss this theory and what it could mean for Bezos, Amazon and the NFL. More from Art Thiel: A few musings about sports journalism as the unwinding begins Blockbuster Deal(s): Russell Wilson to Denver, Seahawks Sale Next Edited by Curt Milton; Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would happen to the divisions in our country if we set aside our phones, and our assumptions, and truly tried to understand people who are different from us? Mónica Guzmán did this in her own family, and she's convinced that the country could do it, too. The Seattle-based journalist, entrepreneur and self-described liberal starts her new book with the personal story of coming to terms with her own parents, Mexican immigrants who voted twice for Donald Trump for president. The rest of the book is a guide for the rest of us: I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. Longtime readers will remember Guzmán as a technology columnist who wrote regularly for GeekWire in the early years of the site. We also worked together previously at the Seattle P-I newspaper, where she started the Big Blog for SeattlePI.com. She wrote for the Seattle Times and went on to co-found The Evergrey newsletter in Seattle. She's currently digital director of the non-profit Braver Angels, whose mission of bringing together people of different political beliefs matches the premise of her recent work. She's also the host of Crosscut's Northwest Newsmakers. We talk about her new book, and the role of technology in all of this, on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast. Hosted by GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Best Book Club Ever,” read one sign inside Amazon Books at Seattle’s University Village this weekend. On the bookshelves below it were products including an electric 1.5-liter ceramic kettle, a sugar dispenser, and a marble cheese slicer. Elsewhere in the store, shoppers browsed items as varied as a plush baby shark, a Lite Brite, Funko figurines, a USB mic, game consoles, a smart fitness scale, a WiFi router, and kitchen scissors. There was not, as far as I could tell, a kitchen sink. Yes, there were books in this bookstore. But they were surrounded by a cacophony of commerce. Looking around at the seemingly random array of products, it felt like a bookstore subsumed by a variety store — an experiment gone awry, or more likely, an approach influenced by two different executive regimes. No wonder Amazon is pulling the plug, I thought to myself. Listen to the full story on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, or read it here, as published on GeekWire on March 7, 2022: Amazon’s bizarre bazaar: Strange final chapter for tech giant’s first bricks-and-mortar bookstore  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Understanding any subject requires knowing the numbers, and that includes looking at the long-term trends. That was one of Steve Ballmer's guiding principles as Microsoft's CEO, and it remains his mantra as founder of USAFacts, a non-profit, non-partisan organization that compiles and reports U.S. government data. Ballmer, the chairman of the L.A. Clippers and former Microsoft CEO, joins us on the GeekWire Podcast to discuss the USAFacts State of the Union in Numbers report, including the data to watch as the country emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic and confronts the global economic impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We also discuss trends he's watching in tech, the future of the pro sports experience in Seattle and beyond, and his philanthropic initiatives with his wife Connie through the Ballmer Group in areas including homelessness and education. We last spent time with Ballmer when USAFacts partnered with GeekWire on the podcast Numbers Geek in 2018 and 2019, exploring the data behind many of the key issues facing the country. Of course, many of those issues have been upended in the time since. It was good to catch up with him and revisit some of these topics.  More: USAFacts founder and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the State of the Union in numbersSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a special episode in remembrance of Zain Nadella, the son of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and his wife, Anu Nadella, who died Monday at the age of 26.  Those who knew him are remembering Zain for his wide-ranging taste in music, his bright smile and for his profound impact on his dad's life. Zain suffered from asphyxia in utero and developed cerebral palsy. Satya Nadella wrote candidly about his experience as Zain's dad in his 2017 book, Hit Refresh, and he spoke with me about Zain's influence in an interview that year on stage at the GeekWire Summit.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week brought news of a big fundraising by e-commerce technology startup Fabric, a $140 million Series C round led by Softbank. With the deal, Fabric became the Seattle region’s newest unicorn startup, a privately held company valued at more than $1 billion, or about $1.5 billion in its case.  Our guest on this week’s GeekWire Podcast is Fabric’s CEO, Faisal Masud a former executive with companies including Amazon, Alphabet, Groupon, Staples and eBay. We talked about the state of physical and online retail as we emerge from the pandemic, business to business commerce, the Amazon heritage on Fabric’s executive team, competition with Shopify and Salesforce, and why Amazon itself hasn’t been able to get traction in the area Fabric is focusing on. The 300-person company offers software, APIs, and other behind-the-scenes technology used by retailers and business-to-business brands for many aspects of online commerce, including pricing/promotion, inventory management, digital storefronts, and payments/checkout.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.