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Technology

Boeing’s Starliner space taxi begins second test flight to the space station (with a dummy on board)

Two and a half years after an initial orbital flight test fell short, Boeing is trying once again to put its CST-100 Starliner space capsule through an uncrewed trip to the International Space Station and back. United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket sent Starliner spaceward from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:54 p.m. ET (3:54 p.m. PT) today. Boeing and NASA are hoping that this second orbital flight test, known as OFT-2, will pave the way for Starliner’s first crewed flight later this year. Within OFT-2’s first hour, Starliner separated from the Atlas 5 rocket’s Centaur upper… Read More

How a ‘Wonder Women’ party and an Amazon vet helped this e-commerce startup raise fresh funds

New funding: TheWMarketplace, an e-commerce platform promoting women’s businesses, has raised $1.4 million. The round was led by Erika McKitterick, who worked at Amazon for seven years, most recently as the head of U.S. Third Party Account Services. The role included helping companies grow their sales in the Amazon store, making McKitterick’s insights valuable to a startup that says it’s eager to take on the e-commerce behemoth. “Erika brings deep knowledge of the growth opportunities and pain points for a marketplace like ours and will help us to grow more quickly and with fewer speed bumps,” said Susan Gates, TheWMarketplace… Read More

Redfin prevails over co-founder in patent trial

A federal jury in Texas this week sided with Redfin in a patent lawsuit brought two years ago by Surefield, a Seattle startup that was launched by Redfin co-founder David Eraker several years after his departure from the company. The lawsuit involved technology for 3D online home tours, a feature that has taken on added importance over the past two years as the pandemic has made in-person tours more difficult in some cases. The jury, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, found unanimously that Surefield did not prove by a preponderance of the evidence that… Read More

In latest Reddit ‘AMA,’ Bill Gates talks COVID, farming, Bitcoin, what phone he uses and more

Bill Gates returned to Reddit for his 10th “Ask Me Anything” session on Thursday, answering questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, his ownership of U.S. farmland, what type of phone he uses, and more. The Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was last in front of the Reddit firing squad in March 2021, where he faced a lot of questions about meat and misinformation. Promoting his new book “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic,” Gates gravitated toward COVID-related questions this time, although it appears no one asked him how he’s feeling, eight days after he… Read More

This Seattle startup backed by American Express wants to be the ‘LinkedIn of accounting’

Seattle-area giants including Concur, Avalara, and DocuSign changed the way companies automate their essential business processes. Lockstep wants to be the next huge enterprise software company out of Seattle to join that group. The 3-year-old startup is seeing demand grow for its software used to automate the accounting of B2B purchases and payments. The idea is to use automation to help eliminate the cash traps and cash leaks that occur through the human handling of company books. “Paper and envelopes have been replaced by PDF and email, but the core activities of customer onboarding, vendor onboarding, credit decisioning, invoicing, dispute… Read More

Seattle smart shopping cart startup Veeve, led by ex-Amazon engineers, rolling into Albertsons

Veeve, a Seattle-based startup launched by two ex-Amazon managers, is partnering with Albertsons to bring its smart shopping cart technology to the grocery chain. Veeve Smart Carts will be available at a few dozen stores across the country later this year, allowing shoppers to skip checkout lines thanks to the tech-enhanced devices. Veeve was founded in 2018 and unveiled a year later by Shariq Siddiqui and Umer Sadiq, engineers who spent nearly 20 years combined at Amazon. The carts feature a touch screen that provides a running total for in-cart items and a built-in scale for easy produce purchase, according… Read More

How Jeff Wilke’s industrial roots guided him at Amazon, and inspired him to help revive U.S. manufacturing

PITTSBURGH — In his 22 years at Amazon, including his role as the first CEO of the company’s Worldwide Consumer business, Jeff Wilke always kept the place he was raised, and the people he grew up with, in the back of his mind. “I always wanted to lead in a way that if I went back, and people from high school could ask me anything about what I was encountering, the decisions I made, how I made them, that they’d be proud of me,” Wilke said. Born at Allegheny General Hospital in 1966, Wilke grew up in the community of… Read More

Starbucks’ app is down and coffee drinkers are freaking out

It was a rough Thursday morning for Starbucks customers who rely on the company’s app to order their Frappuccinos and egg bites. Customers reported issues with the coffee giant’s mobile app, and the reactions were pretty entertaining. A Starbucks spokesperson confirmed that there is an ongoing outage. “We are currently experiencing a temporary outage of the order ahead and pay feature in our app. We continue to welcome and serve customers in our drive-thrus and stores,” the spokesperson said in a statement to GeekWire. Starbucks’ app is one of the most popular mobile payment apps. Millions of Starbucks customers, including… Read More