Just a quick roundup of Seattle-area tech leaders making the national news this weekend:
—The New Yorker has a very interesting feature by Ken Auletta about the competition between the Amazon Kindle and Apple’s iPad, and what it means for the future of books. I haven’t had time for it to sink in yet, but a couple quotes in the story stand out. One is an unnamed Apple insider saying, “[Steve Jobs] thinks Amazon is stupid, and made a terrible mistake insisting that books should be priced at $9.99.” The other is an unnamed book publisher, who says, “Amazon sees itself as much as a competitor as a retailer. They have aspirations to be a publisher.” (Does anyone have the guts to speak on the record anymore, even when they are just stating the obvious?)
—Speaking of Seattle vs. Silicon Valley, TechCrunch reported that Seattle-based Redfin, the online real estate firm, is on pace to make $30 million a year in revenue and is poised to “rip apart” the real estate industry. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman sat down with Michael Arrington for a revealing video interview over beers (always a dangerous proposition).
—Tech industry leader Jeremy Jaech, the co-founder of Aldus, Visio, and Trumba, and currently CEO of Seattle-based Verdiem, got some nice exposure in the New York Times Sunday business column called “The Boss.” Among other things, Jaech talks about trying to retire a couple of times when his companies have been acquired, but always going back to work for “the joy of collaborating with a bright team of people to move an idea forward and watch it grow.”
