GeekWire's Most-Read Stories of the Week

Catch up on the top tech stories from this past week. Here are the headlines that people have been reading on GeekWire. ADVERTISEMENT [GeekWire]( SPONSOR MESSAGE: Seattle's coolest holiday party returns Wednesday, Dec. 6th: [Get your tickets today for the 2023 GeekWire Gala!]( THIS WEEK'S TOP STORIES [Inside Amazon’s new Bellevue office tower, where the company is testing evolving workplace designs]( Nobody dropped the tech industry’s tried and true “fail fast” mantra, but during a tour Wednesday of Amazon’s newly opened Sonic office tower in Bellevue, Wash., the theme was definitely about experimenting, learning and evolving. [Sphere of influence? Google’s big Vegas ad buy clouds the landscape at Amazon re:Invent]( Reporting from Las Vegas … Brilliant marketing move or big waste of money? [Amazon puts Fire TV Cube to work, repurposes streaming device for desktop computing]( At a company famous for turning doors into desks, it only made sense for Amazon’s cloud division to find its first desktop productivity device in one of its consumer division’s existing streaming media products. SPONSOR MESSAGE [PULL TOGETHER]( When the UW student-athletes pursue greatness, we rally behind them. We always have, and we always will. Help the UW build from their shared legacy – and create the next chapter. [Join in. uw.edu/pulltogether]( [Inside the AI chip race: How a pivotal happy hour changed Amazon’s strategy in the cloud]( The foundation of Amazon's AI strategy is its custom chips, part of a silicon lineage that goes back to a fateful happy hour a decade ago. [Seattle preps for new rules requiring more than 4,000 buildings to cut fossil fuel use by 2050]( The Seattle City Council is closing in on new rules requiring roughly 4,100 existing buildings of more than 20,000 square feet to cut their greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. [AWS unveils ‘Amazon Q’ AI assistant, jabs at Microsoft and OpenAI at re:Invent]( Reporting from Las Vegas … Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky doubled down on the new era of artificial intelligence with a series of product announcements and thinly veiled but repeated criticism of Microsoft and OpenAI. [Rover to be acquired by asset manager Blackstone in $2.3B deal]( Seattle pet-sitting marketplace Rover announced Wednesday that it has agreed to be acquired by asset manager Blackstone in a deal worth approximately $2.3 billion. [Sustainable chicken sandwich startup lands $1.5M and opens first brick-and-mortar spot in Seattle]( Three months after rolling out a food truck to launch his sustainable, fast-casual, chicken sandwich joint Mt. [Could AI become conscious? Physicists and neuroscientists search for answers]( Can artificial intelligence help humans unravel the mysteries of consciousness? It's a question that's relevant to the OpenAI controversy. [Broadcom laying off workers in Washington state following acquisition of VMware]( Broadcom, the San Jose, Calif.-based semiconductor and software tech multinational, is laying off 158 workers in Bellevue, Wash., according to a new filing with the Washington state Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system. [Holiday ‘Bliss’: Microsoft’s latest ugly sweater features iconic Windows XP desktop image]( The hills are alive on this year’s ugly holiday sweater from Microsoft. [How do you capture the ocean’s energy? Peek under the hood of a startup’s ‘anti-boat’ power device]( Oscilla Power, a startup developing devices that capture wave energy to produce electricity, has ocean-sized ambitions. [Tech Moves: Leafly board member departs; Uber Freight hires ex-Convoy comms lead]( — Following the implosion of freight logistics startup Convoy last month, former employees from the heavily-funded Seattle startup are finding landing pads. [Even as WeWork goes bankrupt, co-working is poised to survive and thrive in other spaces]( Donna Moodie has a home office. But the chief impact officer at the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle prefers to surround herself with other co-working members, just two blocks away at The Cloud Room in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. [Longtime Tableau exec Francois Ajenstat joins analytics company Amplitude as product chief]( After a 13-year journey with Seattle-based Tableau Software — which grew from a small startup into a public company that was eventually acquired by Salesforce — Francois Ajenstat is setting off on a new adventure. GEEKWORK: TODAY'S TECH JOBS - [INRIX: Lead Software Engineer, Big Data]( - [INRIX: Finance Pricing Manager]( - [INRIX: Lead Software Engineer]( - [Seattle Sounders FC: Director of Lifecycle Marketing]( - [City of Redlands: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analyst]( - [City of Newport: Systems Administrator I or II]( [FIND MORE JOBS ON GEEKWORK]( [HIRING? BUY A FEATURED LISTING TO APPEAR HERE]( [About GeekWire]( [Contact Us]( [Advertise]( Copyright © 2023 GeekWire LLC, All rights reserved. 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