Summer arrives in earnest this week with warm weather and Independence Day. Before we get lost in a haze of barbecue and fireworks smoke, let’s take a look back at notable Seattle-area Xconomy stories from the second quarter.
—Tableau Software’s successful May IPO underscored continued investor interest in big data companies, and Seattle’s leadership in the hot technology category. The Seattle data visualization software company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, in one of the best tech IPOs of the year so far. Other Seattle-area big data companies raising money in the last three months include: Socrata, SpaceCurve, GraphLab, VoloMetrix, Indix, and Decide.com. At Xconomy, we also looked at whether consumers can expect to be compensated for their data, and how the big data trend is shaping up—or not—in health care.
—The city of Seattle took a couple of big steps in support of tech and cleantech innovation. It began the Startup Seattle initiative, competing with other local governments to bolster technology entrepreneurship. Seattle City Light, meanwhile, announced a pilot project with the Bullitt Center to develop an innovative financing model for major energy efficiency improvements.
—To adapt a line from Dr. Seuss, from there to here and here to there, interesting people are everywhere. We met a couple with great nicknames this quarter: The Wizard of Moz, and NASA’s mohawk guy, though the latter’s real name—Bobak Ferdowsi—is already so cool, we’re not sure he needs a nickname, even if it did come from the President.
—We had Curt Woodward’s great take on the link between Amazon’s grocery delivery expansion to L.A. and its “long-running dance with state and federal regulators over sales tax collections.”
—This in-depth profile of GeoFlow, a geospatial visualization tool in Microsoft Excel, by Wade Roush, was also a top story in the quarter.
