Technology
Hulu Employees Applaud Company’s Teamwork, Transparency and Fun
Hulu's Seattle Office is recognized again as one of WA's 100 Best Companies to Work For
sponsored by Hulu This article is part of a series focusing on select companies who placed among WA’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2017, as determined by employee surveys that measure their perceptions and satisfaction across 61 individual attributes within 10 employment categories. Online streaming service provider Hulu sets the bar high for…
Employees of Mobile Marketing Company TUNE Sing Its Praises
Why TUNE makes the list of WA's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2017
Sponsored by TUNE This article is part of a series focusing on select companies who placed among WA’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2017, as determined by employee surveys that measure their perceptions and satisfaction across 61 individual attributes within 10 employment categories. You could say Seattle-based company TUNE is in tune with…
Paccar Considers Using Drones
Maker of big rigs might ship small parts to stranded truckers.
A truck breaks down by the side of the highway. The mobile-repair mechanic has been dispatched to the scene, but he needs one crucial part to get the truck running again, one he didnt bring with him. No problem. Just send an aerial drone with the part to the scene. No long delays waiting for…
Bright Idea: Taking Center Stage
An intelligent credit card links an employees spending directly to the company budget.
Buy dinner or supplies and put it on the company card. This employee convenience can also be a vexation for company budgets as casual expenses mount. A Bellevue startup, Center (centercard.com), thinks it has the right solution, and the track record of its founders suggests it might. The CenterCard puts the computing power and interactivity…
A People-Focused Business: Why AIM Consulting Employees Love Their Work
AIM makes the list of WA's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2017
sponsored by AIM Consulting This article is part of a series focusing on select companies who placed among WA’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2017, as determined by employee surveys that measure their perceptions and satisfaction across 61 individual attributes within 10 employment categories. When working in technology consulting, its difficult to say…
Bright Idea: Take That, Alexa
Kitt.Ai adds voice control to other residential or business devices.
Xuchen Yao and Guoguo Chen were interns at Google working on language-processing technology when Amazon introduced Echo, the media-streaming device equipped with a voice-activated intelligent assistant, which is triggered when the user says the hotword Alexa. When Alexa came out, we saw a real opening, says Yao, who cofounded Kitt.ai to capitalize on the opportunity….
The Graphene Gambit
Mark Andersons Carbon Trifecta has a simple goal: saving the planet.
When it comes to taking on global warming, few ideas are as audacious as the one put forward by Mark Anderson, the Friday Harbor-based CEO of Strategic News Service who has a knack for identifying technology trends. The idea sounds simple: Take the tons of carbon dioxide spewing from our industrial plants and transform it…
AxonVR Brings Lifelike Touch to Virtual Reality
Jake Rubin has dreamed of recreating the "Star Trek" holodeck.
Ever since his school days on Mercer Island, Jake Rubin has dreamed of creating a holodeck like the one on the Star Trek television series a virtual reality experience so immersive that it is perceived as real. Four and half years ago, Rubin dropped out of Washington University in St. Louis so he could put…
Bright Idea: What’s the Good Word?
Textio helps businesses choose language that produces results.
In 2014, linguistics Ph.D. Kieran Snyder, who had spent much of her career on quantitative approaches to language, was talking to Jensen Harris, a former user-experience exec at Microsoft, when the two arrived at the same conclusion. We had this idea that maybe predictive technologies natural language processing, machine learning, things I had been doing…
Remote Control Arrives
The smart home of 'The Jetsons' still isnt ubiquitous, but the door is opening wider (after being unlocked by a smartphone from miles away).
When Bill Gates visited the Seattle Worlds Fair as a 6-year-old in 1962, he claims to have visited every pavilion. At the General Electric Living pavilion, he would have seen a vision of a digitized residence, with home computers, electronic libraries and television programming projected on the interior walls. Fifty-four years later, most of us…
Smart Glasses Improving Workflow for HVAC Projects
Wearable technology increases productivity for HVAC technicians
Sponsored by MacDonald-Miller XOEye technologies created a smart glasses tool, built specifically for field technicians to capture real-time documentation. When MacDonald-Miller heard about the new wearable technology platform, they saw it as an opportunity to be the first mechanical contractor in the Pacific Northwest to implement these smart glasses into their services. We interviewed MacDonald-Millers…
Tech Firms Continue to Establish and Expand Engineering Centers
Seattle area has become a veritable satellite office launchpad.
When Derek Orr left Microsoft last fall to join Uber in its new Seattle office, he was one of a handful of Uber employees who ate lunch at a makeshift picnic table in a small Pioneer Square office. Earlier this year, Uber moved into a 40,000-square-foot office downtown that includes expansive murals of Northwest-style landscapes…
Bright Idea: Learning Made Easy
Skilljar defies the status quo in the training systems market.
When San Jose-based MapR Technologies launched a free on-demand training and certification program in 2015 to teach developers, analysts and administrators how to use Hadoop software technology, tens of thousands of trainees signed up, crashing the companys learning management system. By transferring its users to Skilljar, a cloud-based learning platform, MapR relaunched the training program…