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Engineers work on the New Shepard suborbital spaceship’s crew capsule at Blue Origin’s production facility in Kent, Wash. (Credit: Blue Origin) Three employees at Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture have tested positive for coronavirus and are now in quarantine, a spokeswoman for the company says. One case ...

New York City’s Department of Education is banning the use of Zoom for online learning classes and is recommending Microsoft Teams instead, according to The Washington Post. The department, which runs the country’s largest school district, cited security concerns with Zoom. The video conferencing app is seeing huge demand amid ...

Here’s what we’re talking about this week on the GeekWire Podcast. Amazon is under pressure as workers in dozens of its warehouses test positive for the coronavirus, and an Amazon exec makes a major blunder in employee relations. Amid the gloomy COVID-19 news, there are some stories that fill us ...

Kevin Scott is Microsoft’s chief technology officer, its executive vice president of AI and Research, and the author, with Greg Shaw, of the new book, “Reprogramming the American Dream: From Rural America to Silicon Valley, Making AI Serve Us All.” Scott, who joined Microsoft with its acquisition of LinkedIn, goes ...

Coding Dojo CEO Richard Wang. (Coding Dojo Photo) Bellevue, Wash.-based engineering bootcamp operator Coding Dojo is laying off staff and moving its education content online in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. The company let go of seven employees and put another 14 people on temporary furlough. There are 74 employees ...

Lisa Nelson practices some social distancing pre-coronavirus in the Maldives. (Photo courtesy of Lisa Nelson) In her 14 years in leadership at Microsoft, Lisa Nelson held five different positions. But it was perhaps her favorite job, and one where she marked one of her proudest achievements, that inspired her to ...

Inside Rover’s new Seattle headquarters. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Seattle-based startup Rover laid off 41% of its workforce today due to the economic impact and uncertainty from the COVID-19 outbreak. Rover CEO Aaron Easterly. (Rover Photo) Rover put an additional 9% of staff on standby. There were 194 employees ...

Amazon’s banana stand in Seattle’s South Lake Union district was an early victim of social distancing policies enacted to counter the coronavirus outbreak. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) Citing fresh statistics, public health officials today confirmed that social distancing measures “appear to be making a difference in slowing the spread ...

(Bigstock Photo) Microsoft’s cloud services are seeing huge spike in usage due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The company reported Saturday a 775% usage increase for services such as Microsoft Teams, Windows Virtual Desktop, and Power BI in regions that have social distancing or shelter-in-place mandates. Much like fellow Seattle tech ...

(GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota) A worker at Amazon’s Seattle-area warehouse in Kent, Wash. tested positive for COVID-19. This is the first known COVID-19 case at an Amazon warehouse in Washington state. The news was first reported by The Seattle Times. We’ve reached out to Amazon for more details, and will ...