As we dive into a new week in Seattle, Amazon Web Services‘ big cloud computing crash is still reverberating. The server-farm failure took out countless small sites and apps that rely on Amazon’s (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AMZN]]) market-leading service, and the company got low marks for its communication while attempting to fix the problem over several days. I talked to a cloud-computing expert and an entrepreneur about one interesting element of the outage: Why some big-name companies, with enough resources to protect themselves, were still taken down by Amazon’s problems. It was also fun to see Seattle startup BigDoor quoted in a New York Times story on the Amazon outage.
Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech and innovation news:
—Zillow had been making public overtures toward an initial public stock offering in the past few months, and made good on those hints by filing paperwork for an IPO—the first by a Seattle-area tech company since mid-2010. I talked to investors and entrepreneurs in the region to see what they made of the move and of some of the idiosyncracies in Zillow’s preliminary pitch. There’s a long way to go before any Zillow stock actually hits Wall Street, but early stage tech folks were feeling pretty bullish about what the filing means for the near future and a warming investment market. Just a few days later, RFID maker Impinj filed its own papers for an IPO—at up to $100 million, it’s nearly twice the size of Zillow’s target. PopCap Games also has targeted this fall as its preferred time to go public.
—I took a closer look at some of the inventions being cooked up over at Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based invention and patent company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Plenty of people already know about IV’s TerraPower nuclear reactor, Photonic Fence mosquito-killing lasers, and of course the cookbook on steroids, Modernist Cuisine. But in this tour of Intellectual Ventures Lab, we got up close with some under-the-radar projects—ones that haven’t generated big headlines (yet), but are still showing huge potential. Two of the projects are in the arena of global health, a topic that Intellectual Ventures investor Bill Gates knows well—lab head honcho Geoff Deane says Gates’ ideas on major problems inform some of the projects.
—Microsoft (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MSFT]]) made sweeping changes to its pay system, including a bigger bonus budget and shifting more money into cash rather than stock. This was a clear response to all the Silicon Valley companies moving into the Seattle area with the express intent of hiring engineers and other tech talent— Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Zynga, Twitter, and others have branch offices or
