Technology
IT Awards: Startup of the Year
Apptio, BellevueEmployees in Washington: 120 Apptios mission is practically biblical, as in, Physician, heal thyself. While IT systems help the rest of the company control costs and performance, few tools let IT departments analyze their own operations. Apptios cloud-based services track all information technology costs to aid chief information officers in maximizing return on investment….
IT Awards: Geek of the Year
Alan Ramaley, thePlatform, SeattleEmployees in Washington: 130 While you can watch almost any TV program on the internet today, Alan Ramaley of thePlatform thinks about how to get them there. The CTO of the online video management and publishing company oversees all product offerings that help customers like The Associated Press, CNBC, PBS and Fox…
IT Awards: Innovation of the Year, Small Company
ExtraHop Networks, SeattleEmployees in Washington: 30+ When two engineers from F5 Networks, Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, founded their own company in 2007, they understood how costly outages and problems could be to business-critical networks, with some estimates of downtime reaching more than $10,000 per hour. For the growing number of companies offering cloud-based services,…
IT Awards: Special Recognition
Group Health Cooperative, SeattleEmployees in Washington: 9,558 Group Health Cooperative believes that better informed members will be healthier members, and its MyGroupHealth web portal helps make them so. An early pioneer of electronic medical records, Group Health is a national leader among health care providers for efficiency, cost control and improved care. Nine years ago,…
IT Awards: Project Team
Swedish Medical Center, SeattleEmployees in Washington: 7,000 The Information Services Team of Swedish Medical Center hit a home run with a triple in the past year, successfully deploying services to three new facilities. As more people live in the communities surrounding Seattle, the 101-year-old health care provider has expanded to serve them. Swedish opened a…
IT Leader of the Year
Kirsten Simonitsch, Premera Blue Cross, Mountlake TerraceEmployees in Washington: 2,800 For any health insurance provider that serves 1.6 million people, making even modest changes can be a struggle. Yet senior vice president and CIO Kirsten Simonitsch has transformed not only the IT systems at Premera Blue Cross, but also the culture of the organization. Since…
The First IT Awards
They usually toil behind the scenes, and many people in information technology prefer it that way. But there is no denying the staggering importance of IT in todays tech-driven world. So join us in congratulating the developers, engineers, executives, innovators and backroom geeks who make sure your business stays in business. From dozen of nominations,…
Spotlight: Viableware’s pay-at-the-table technology takes off
When restaurants use Viablewares Rail system, patrons paying their bills will be greeted by a sleek folder that opens to reveal a screen displaying the bill. A slot on the side will accommodate a credit or debit card. The Rail allows diners to split the bill with companions, calculate the tip and even redeem a…
Bright Idea: Point Inside helps you navigate the great indoors
In February 2009, having worked to solve outdoor location problems for mobile phone customers calling 911, Seattleites Josh Marti, Jon Croy and Brian Wilson decided to conquer the unmapped indoors. Their company, Point Inside, provides an indoor geolocation platform that has been applied to shopping malls, big-box stores, airports and even hospitals. Used in a…
Under today’s immigration policies, Steve Jobs might never have been born.
An underreported but intriguing part of the Steve Jobs story is that Jobs’ birth father, Abdulfattah Jandalie, was a graduate student who came to the United States from Syria to pursue his studies. This little-known fact was included in a fabulous profile of Jobs by John Markoff of the New York Times. What Markoff does…
First Social Innovation Fast Pitch shares the wealth
Photo above by Karen Ducey / All other photos by Amanda Wilson Viva Farms, a nonprofit dedicated to recruiting, training andcapitalizing the next generation of sustainable farmers, was the one of the big winners Monday as more than 600 attendees and participants helped to make Seattle’s first Social Innovation Fast Pitch a memorable event. Food…
Seattle is in a startup state of mind
The time for startups is now. Right now. Friday (Sept. 30) marks thebeginning of Startup Weekend Seattle, part of a worldwide series of 54-hourentrepreneurial marathons. The day also saw an announcement from Microsoft thatits full-length feature film about entrepreneurship, Ctrl-Alt-Compete, willbe premiering at the Napa Valley Film Festival in November. Everyones gotteninto the startup state…
Amazon sets the tablet world on Fire
Aftermonths of feverish speculation, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos unveiledthe Kindle Firea 7-inch tablet computing system that many consider the firstlegitimate threat to Apple‘s iPad at a pressconference in Manhattan Wednesday. TheFire is a touchscreen color tablet weighing 14.6ounces with a 1024-by-600-pixel display. Perhaps even more importantly: Thetablet starts at $199 and uses Amazons cloud-based technology…