Technology
There’s Good News and Bad News for Seattle Rankings
This month, Kiplingers Personal Finance magazine ranked Seattle at number two in its list of the Best Cities for the Next Decade, citing aerospace, life sciences and green technology as the flagship industries of our local economy. The article quoted University of Washington president Mark Emmert: “We only have two products here: smart people and…
Where Storage Gets Top Billing
Isilon Systems co-founder and CEOSujal Patel has led the digital storage company to a strong position, servingcustomers such as Hollywood director James Cameron, whose blockbuster Avatarrequired immense amounts of storage for its 3-D data. The moment of truth for SujalPatel came in 2007 when he had to tell his wife, then pregnant with twins, thathe…
What Happens When Ideas Have Sex
Dense cities and new tools like social networking help to make ideas promiscuous. Like the growth of trade in an earlier era such exchanges generate progress and prosperity. Those are some of the concepts spelled out in today’s Wall Street Journal by Matt Ridley in his fascinating essay, Why Humans Triumphed, about the evolution of…
Dendreon Wins Approval for Provenge
Finally, might be the word of the day for the nearly 500 employees of Seattle biotechnology powerhouse Dendreon, which won approval Thursday from the FDA for its therapeutic vaccine Provenge. The treatment is for men with prostate cancer that has not responded to other therapy. The company has spent 15 years working towards this goal….
Talking Points: William Morrow
Bill Morrow is a veteran of the mobile world. He ledVodaphones European operations and was only the second foreigner to be CEO ofa listed Japanese company when he took over Japan Telecom. Now, as CEO ofKirkland-based Clearwire, a company 51 percent owned by Sprint, he is racing tobuild a national fourth-generation wireless broadband network to…
Tableau Software Wins Digital Disruptor Award
Tableau Software, a developer of interactive graphics software, won recognition at the TEDx Seattle conference today when UW’s Master of Communications’ digital media program awarded the company its Digital Disruptor award. Seattle Business Magazine has a feature story here on the company with an example of how the company’s interactive graphics can be used to…
Making Data Sing, Play and Dance
Tableau Software hopes its free Reader product, whichrenders user-friendly graphics from data, such as the Mariners offensivelineup, will spur sales of its professional-grade products. (Click on the image to activate an interactive version of the graphic). Deep in the heart of Fremont, just steps from the averagefolks in the beloved Waiting for the Interurban statue,…
The Clash of Titans Intensifies
Google is targeting Microsoft’s most lucrative business, the enterprise division that serves corporations large and small. With their enterprise version of a program for creating documents, Google is targeting Microsoft Office, Microsoft’s most important profit center. Read Tom Krazit’s report on the Google announcement here. The enterprise battle is one of multiple fronts in a…
New Repository for Biotech Tools Could Boost Industry
Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit research organization, has received a $5m grant from the Washington Life Science Discovery Fund ( LSDF) to build and deploy a data management system that would give smaller companies access to some of the same tools and resources accessible to big drug companies. The new program will both benefit from, and…
Bing Makes a Bang
A former search whiz atYahoo!, Qi Liu is now spearheading Microsofts Bing, which is already garneringgood reviews. Microsoft Corp., a perennial disappointment in the searchworld, may have finally come up with something worthwhile. Bing, its new searchsite launched in June, gained enough share during its first week in use tobriefly unseat Yahoo! as the second…
Going From How to What
Rethink: A BusinessManifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation By Ric Merrifield ( Financial Times Press, 2009 ) In Rethink,Microsoft Corp. strategist Ric Merrifield discusses the common trap thatcompanies fall into when they focus on how to accomplish a certain businesstask rather than on what they are trying to accomplish. In this excerpt, hecites Amazon.com…