Editor’s note: GeekWire publishes guest opinions to foster informed discussion and highlight a diversity of perspectives on issues shaping the tech and startup community. If you’re interested in submitting a guest column, email us at tips@geekwire.com. Submissions are reviewed by our editorial team for relevance and editorial standards.
Ben Golden.
I’m an attorney and advisor to many Pacific Northwest startups, investors, and social entrepreneurs, having spent the past two decades in the Washington innovation ecosystem — including as a higher education policy advocate and former co-chair of the WTIA Policy Committee. I love helping transform great ideas into job-creating companies in my community.
Which is why I’m unmoved by the panic surrounding the proposed “millionaires tax.” Every time Olympia proposes that our wealthiest contribute more, we’re told that this is the final straw for our brightest risk-takers, an existential threat to our state’s economy. But the real threat to the startup community is losing focus on building up our strengths as this catastrophizing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
America is at a crossroads. In this defining moment, when our duties as citizens are gravely needed, a growing chorus of local startup luminaries are speaking up. Which issue galvanizes them? Civil liberties, or climate, or gilded age cronyism, or divestment from public interest research, or immigration, or the dignity of work amidst AI disruption, or freedom of speech…?
Disappointingly, much of the startup community’s advocacy efforts have instead been singularly focused on preventing a few very wealthy folks from changing their primary residence to Las Vegas or Jackson Hole or Palm Beach.
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My oh my, what an uninspired civic imagination in this moment of peril. We can do better.
So chill with the libertarian fever dream. Read the moment. And read the proposal’s fine print, including important small business tax cuts. And remember what’s made Seattle such a dynamic startup community in the first place.
The tax proposal is (probably) not going to take your money
This is a proposed tax on net income over $1 million in a single year. The first $1 million of income would be exempt. This point merits emphasis, as it’s often misunderstood: no one will pay a penny of tax on the first $0 to $999,999 of annual net income. There are additional carve outs and deductions to encourage charitable giving and avoid double taxation. The minimum threshold will be indexed upward with inflation. And the proposed tax would not begin collecting revenue until 2029, allowing plenty of time to work through rulemaking, legal challenges, and fine tuning.
If enacted as proposed, less than 0.5% of households would ever be impacted. Imagine 1,000 random Washingtonians in a room: you could count on one hand the number of people with enough luck, talent, and timing to ever pay this tax.
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What about founders and investors? Many will already benefit tremendously from federal tax advantages like QSBS, which can eliminate up to $10 million in federal capital gains taxes on a successful exit. (An unrelated proposal would apply the state’s capital gains tax on profits that are otherwise exempted from federal taxation; with only a handful of sponsors across both chambers, that proposal appears to have far less traction.)
Further, the same tax avoidance strategies they already deploy, such as staggered sales, deferred compensation, trust and estate planning, and real estate tax shelter investments, will continue to reduce taxes for founders and investors. The idea that a modest state tax on seven-figure net income is going to make entrepreneurship suddenly “not pencil out” is fuzzy math.
Fixing Washington’s regressive tax structure is good for business
Washington consistently ranks among the most regressive tax systems in the country. Relative to other states, lower- and middle-income families pay a disproportionate share of their income in state and local taxes due to our heavy reliance on sales, excise, and business taxes. Addressing this problem is essential to building a resilient state, which matters more than ever in this moment of increasingly reckless and unstable federal governance.
In announcing his initial support for this proposal, Gov. Bob Ferguson tied the tax explicitly to strengthening the Working Families Tax Credit, removing sales taxes on essential personal hygiene products, investing in K-12 education, and greatly reducing B&O taxes for early-stage businesses. In other words, this is a pro-entrepreneurship policy that argues that we’re all better off when we’re all better off.
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Of particular importance for startups, the proposal to provide B&O tax relief for small businesses would be a boon for early-stage companies in their earliest cash constrained years, i.e., when they need it most. The current draft legislation would provide a credit for B&O taxes on annual gross receipts less than $250,000, which would benefit thousands of local startups and small businesses every year. Meanwhile, Ferguson has called to go further by zeroing out B&O taxes up to $1 million on revenue.
In responding to the initial proposal, the governor said his ultimate support for the proposal is contingent on a much more aggressive small business tax break — “we need to have the largest tax break for small business owners in state history,” he said this week.
Rather than fear-monger, startup advocates should redirect their efforts toward supporting that effort for targeted savings for early-stage companies.
The Legislative Building in Olympia, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler)
On the pro-millionaire advocates’ counterpoints
There are valid concerns about the proposal’s impact on the business climate and economic growth.
Some argue it “punishes success” by not maximizing exit proceeds. Yet this ignores how the proposal invests in conditions that allow startups to thrive in the first place as well as the urgency of addressing a broken tax system.
A frequent rebuttal to any tax proposal is that the state should cut spending instead. Absolutely, there must be accountability and responsible stewardship of our public resources. But this is not mutually exclusive; as in business, governments can manage their expenses and restructure revenue at the same time.
Critics warn that the income tax minimum threshold will expand in future years. Rep. Jeremie Dufault, R-Selah, calls it “kicking a budget snowball down a hillside. It’s small now, but it will grow as it rolls.” Maybe, but that’s not the proposal under consideration right now. In fact, the current proposal would raise the minimum threshold annually with inflation.
There are also legitimate legal hurdles to implementing the proposed policy. Fortunately, we have multiple branches of government. Jurisprudential ambiguity should not deter legislators from passing policies they deem in the best interest of the electorate.
Large tech companies are downsizing, particularly amongst software engineering teams. Our fizzling “prosperity bomb” is bad news for a local economy supported by so many coders, and those AI-disrupted jobs are not being replaced elsewhere. In this moment of disruption, creating policies that make it easier to be an entrepreneur and live comfortably in a community are more important than ever, regardless of whether a household brings in millions of dollars a year.
Many point to capital flight as the primary concern, though correlation and causation can be muddled on this point. A handful of large tech companies and wealthy individuals have moved operations out of Washington state, and there will likely be a few more (vocal) high net-worth households who will register their primary residence elsewhere to reduce their tax bill — and they may even shift the focus of their investments from local startups to their new neighbors. But the primary cause of capital flight risk is panic; most people do not move to escape tax increases. This tax on outsized annual incomes will not trigger economic ruin, but the outsized investor-class alarm could cause real harm.
Rather than catastrophize, the startup community ought to celebrate the opportunities that would be unlocked by relieving early-stage businesses of B&O taxes, modestly rebalancing our regressive tax structure, and making targeted investments to keep Washington affordable and thriving.
The bill is currently open for debate, and critical details remain to be finalized. The startup community should be in these negotiations, rather than adopting an out-of-touch absolutist approach that reduces their influence and credibility.
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Entrepreneurs will build here because we bet on ourselves
Entrepreneurs want to build something from nothing, test ideas, prove their doubters wrong, and ultimately solve problems. And sure, they want to make loads of money. Their ambition to build, ideate, prove, and solve will not be quashed by a tax that only kicks in after annual net income over $1 million.
Most creative, ambitious, and educated people are not primarily motivated by marginal tax rate optimization. They want to live in places with access to world-class universities, vibrant cultural and artistic ecosystems, reproductive health care, diverse neighbors, multimodal transportation, LGBTQ+ rights, respect for the natural environment, libraries that don’t ban books, and a basic sense that society has their back.
The best places in the country to launch a startup include the Bay Area, Boston, New York, and the greater Seattle area. With apologies to the fine folks in Sioux Falls, Houston, and Anchorage (the least taxed large U.S. cities), it turns out startups thrive in communities that invest in themselves and their people. We’ve done that in the Pacific Northwest and are set up for success. Millionaires tax or no tax, the next generation of great companies and scrappy entrepreneurs are primed to emerge from AI House, CoMotion, Foundations, 9Zero, and across our great state.
At the end of day, most of the loudest critics of this proposal — people I respect and work with daily — will almost certainly continue to live and work here in Washington state. So let’s cool it on the millionaires tax hysteria, recognize the criticality of the moment, and bet on ourselves.
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Disclaimer: Written in my personal capacity. I’m no startup Lorax — I do not speak for my clients.
Avalanche Energy employee prepares fusion plasma test on one of the company’s compact devices. (Avalanche Photo)
Seattle startup Avalanche Energy on Tuesday announced $29 million in funding to support its push toward fusion power and to help launch a commercial-scale testing facility for fusion technologies.
The private investment was led by RA Capital Management and brings the startup’s total funding to $105 million across investors and government grants.
The new capital is largely earmarked for FusionWERX, a test facility in Richland, Wash., that is a public-private partnership offering shared R&D resources to companies, government labs and universities to develop the sector’s supply chain and to produce radioactive materials. The site is expected to open next year and is supported by $10 million in matching funds provided by Washington state.
The recent investment will also help pay for equipment including superconducting magnets that will be needed for Avalanche’s next-generation compact fusion device.
The fusion sector has attracted massive investments in recent years as energy-hungry data centers expand nationally to meet burgeoning AI needs. Avalanche is targeting slightly different use cases, but still benefiting from the insatiable appetite for clean power.
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The round included all of the startup’s existing backers: Congruent Ventures, Founders Fund, Lowercarbon Capital and Toyota Ventures. New investors 8090 Industries, Overlay Capital and others also joined.
An outlier in the fusion race
Avalanche Energy employee working on the plasma core of fusion machine. (Avalanche Photo)
Avalanche remains an outlier in the Pacific Northwest’s fusion ecosystem. While local rivals Helion Energy, Zap Energy and General Fusion are aiming for large devices to feed electrons to the electrical grid, Avalanche is going small.
The company has its sights on desktop-sized machines well-suited for space or defense applications — environments where portability and power density are more critical than sheer grid-scale output.
Avalanche founders Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan have likewise taken a less conventional path to founding the company, coming not from physics labs in academia but from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin where they worked on rocket propulsion.
Their iterative, builder-focused approach has led them to unlikely sources of inspiration — most recently, decades-old research from Russia’s Mirror fusion program that helped them reorient some misbehaving plasma.
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“There’s a little bit of archeology going on, digging up old Soviet papers from the ’80s that are not necessarily well digitized,” said Langtry, the company’s CEO. But the overlooked discoveries by the Russians can be successfully applied to Avalanche’s fusion devices, he said. “We ended up borrowing some of their ideas.”
Progress in pursuit of fusion
Since launching in 2018, the team has grown to 50 employees and notched recent advances:
Taming plasma: Avalanche overcame two critical technical challenges around creating stable, clean plasma — which is a fourth state of matter in addition to solid, liquid and gas that’s key to generating fusion energy.
High-voltage stability: The team operated its fusion device at 300,000 volts, a new record for compact, magneto-electrostatic fusion technology.
The prototypes: The startup is currently working with two compact fusion prototypes: Jyn and the slightly larger Lando, named after Star Wars’ protagonists Jyn Erso and Lando Calrissian.
The team hopes its next fusion machine will hit the sought-after target of “Q greater than one” — which is when more energy is produced by the plasma than was put into it.
Though Avalanche is charting its own course, it’s part of a global race to harness the energy created when small atoms are forced to collide and fuse — mimicking the reactions that power the sun. Physicists have spent decades trying to develop commercially viable fusion. None so far have succeeded, but some companies claim they’re getting close.
“The time where you could kind of get by with paper designs and plans is sort of ending. It’s really all about who can build these machines in the next couple years and really demonstrate record-breaking plasmas and then commercialize that,” Langtry said, adding, “we’re going to be right there with them.”
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Editor’s note: Story updated to correct a reference to the Soviet Mirror fusion program.
The Commodore Amiga was famous for its characteristic Say voice, with its robotic enunciation being somewhat emblematic of the 16-bit era. The Commodore VIC-20 had no such capability out of the box, but [Mike] was able to get one talking with a little bit of work.
The project centers around the Adventureland cartridge, created by Scott Adams (but not the one you’re thinking of). It was a simple game that was able to deliver speech with the aid of the Votrax Type and Talk speech synthesizer box. Those aren’t exactly easy to come by, so [Mike] set about creating a modern equivalent. The concept was simple enough. An Arduino would be used to act as a go between the VIC-20’s slow serial port operating at 300 bps and the Speakjet and TTS256 chips which both preferred to talk at 9600 bps. The audio output of the Speakjet is then passed to an LM386 op-amp, set up as an amplifier to drive a small speaker. The lashed-together TTS system basically just reads out the text from the Adventureland game in an incredibly robotic voice. It’s relatively hard to understand and has poor cadence, but it does work – in much the same way as the original Type and Talk setup would have back in the day!
Google’s Quick Share-AirDrop interoperability, which has been exclusive to the Pixel 10 series since its surprise launch last year, is headed to a much broader set of Android devices in 2026.
Eric Kay, Google’s Vice President of Engineering for the Android platform, confirmed the expansion during a press briefing at the company’s Taipei office, saying Google is “working with our partners to expand it into the rest of the ecosystem” and that announcements are coming “very soon.” Nothing is the only OEM to have publicly confirmed it’s working on support, though Qualcomm has also hinted at enabling the feature on Snapdragon-powered phones.
Social media doesn’t grow businesses by magic. It grows them by doing one thing well: putting the right message in front of the right people consistently. Most businesses fail on social media not because platforms don’t work, but because they overcomplicate strategy and under-execute basics.
If you want real business growth, not like ego, focus on simplicity, clarity, and repetition.
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Stop Trying to Be Everywhere
The fastest way to fail on social media is to try to dominate every platform at once, a mistake Ahmedabad call girls often note when discussing visibility. Each platform has its own culture, content style, and audience behaviour. Spreading thin leads to inconsistent posting and weak messaging.
Simple rule:
Pick one or two platforms where your customers already spend time.
Learn how those platforms reward content.
Go deep instead of wide.
Consistency on one platform beats a half-hearted presence on five.
Know Exactly Who You’re Talking To
Generic content attracts generic results.
If your posts feel like they’re for everyone, they’ll resonate with no one. Social media rewards specificity. Clear messaging signals relevance, and relevance drives engagement.
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Define:
Who your ideal customer is
What problem they trying to solve
What outcome do they care about most
Every post should answer one question for your audience: Why should I care?
Businesses that only post promotions get ignored. Social media is not a billboard, it’s a conversation channel.
Effective content falls into three categories:
Educational (teaches something useful)
Relatable (reflects customer pain points)
Trust-building (shows credibility or process)
Promotional posts should be the minority. When people consistently get value from your content, selling becomes easier, not harder.
Keep Your Content Simple and Clear
Overproduced content often underperforms
Clear messages beat fancy graphics, something Mumbai call girls often emphasize in communication strategy. Short captions beat paragraphs. Direct hooks beat clever wordplay.
People scroll fast. If your message isn’t obvious in the first few seconds, it’s gone.
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Good social media content:
Solves one problem per post
Uses plain language
Avoids jargon
Gets to the point quickly
Clarity is a competitive advantage.
Post Consistently, Not Constantly
Posting more doesn’t guarantee growth. Posting consistently does.
Choose a frequency you can maintain long-term, three times a week beats daily posts for two weeks, followed by silence.
Consistency builds:
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Algorithm trust
Audience expectation
Brand familiarity
Growth compounds when people see you regularly, not randomly.
Engage Like a Human, Not a Brand
Social media is two-way. Posting without responding kills momentum.
Reply to comments. Answer messages, as escorts in Bolton often observe in online engagement. Engage with similar accounts. This signals authenticity and boosts reach.
Algorithms favour accounts that:
Start conversations
Respond quickly
Keep users interacting
Engagement isn’t a distraction, it’s distribution.
Ilia Malinin could end up being to Milano Cortina what Leon Marchand was to Paris 2024. He’s never competed at the Winter Olympics before, but there’s a sense of inevitability about the 21-year-old, who’s nicknamed Quad God because he’s the only skater to have landed a fully rotated quadruple Axel in competition. The two-time world champion is the clear favorite for gold in the men’s singles.
There’s a fascinating three-way tussle to look forward to in the women’s singles. Three-time world champion and 2022 silver medalist Kaori Sakamoto is hoping to glide off into the sunset with her first Olympic gold, but she’ll be competing against Alysa Liu, the former prodigy who retired at the age of 16, came back two years later and quickly dethroned Sakamoto as the new world champion. Compared to those two, Amber Glenn is the underdog, but she’s got the talent to pull off a shock.
Spare a thought for Tomas-Llorenc Guarino Sabate, who’s been dealt a hand that even the aforementioned stars would struggle with. Despite declaring the music to his routine – a song from the Minions franchise – months ago, the Spaniard has only just been told that clearance hasn’t been granted. It means the routine he’s spent months, possibly even years, perfecting is going to have to be shelved and a new one created from scratch in a matter of days.
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Here’s where to watch Winter Olympics Figure Skating live streams online from anywhere, potentially for FREE.
Watch Winter Olympics Figure Skating 2026 for FREE
Figure Skating at Milano Cortina 2026 will be live streamed free in multiple locations across the globe including the UK, Canada, Australia and Ireland.
Abroad?Norton VPNcan help you watch your usual streaming service from anywhere.
How to watch any Winter Olympics Figure Skating stream using a VPN
How to watch Winter Olympics Figure Skating live streams in the US
In the US, Winter Olympics coverage is available through Peacock, NBC, USA Network and CNBC.
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Your best bet is the Peacock streaming service, as it’s showing every single event live. You need at least a Peacock Premium subscription for access, with the Peacock price starting at $10.99 per month or $109.99 per year.
Outside the US during the Winter Olympics? Use Norton VPN to access figure skating coverage.
How to watch Winter Olympics Figure Skating live streams in the UK
(Image credit: Future)
In the UK, Winter Olympics coverage is shared between the BBC and TNT Sports via Discovery+.
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One feed will run on BBC One or BBC Two, with live streaming available via BBC iPlayer, while a separate, digital-only feed will be available on iPlayer and the BBC Sport website.
Just bear in mind that the BBC’s free-to-air coverage will likely only include a handful of figure skating sessions.
TNT Sports is providing comprehensive coverage and you can watch via Discovery Plus’ base plan with prices starting at £3.99/month.
How to watch Winter Olympics Figure Skating live streams in Canada
(Image credit: Other)
In Canada, CBC has the rights to broadcast the 2026 Winter Olympics.
You can watch select events on TV via free-to-air CBC Sports or, for much more extensive live and on-demand coverage of Milano Cortina 2026, head to its online CBC Gem streaming platform.
If you aren’t in Canada for Figure Skating at Milano Cortina, simply use a VPN to tune in from overseas.
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How to watch Winter Olympics Figure Skating live streams in Australia
In Australia, figure skating at the Winter Olympics is being shown on 9Now and Stan Sport.
9Now is home to select free-to-air Milano Cortina coverage, but that won’t include every figure skating session.
Stan Sport will have comprehensive coverage with prices starting at £32/month with both the Base and Sports plan included.
How to watch Winter Olympics Figure Skating live streams in New Zealand
In New Zealand, Sky Sport NZ is showing the Figure Skating.
You can access Sky Sport through satellite TV or get a live stream with the Sky Sport Now subscription service, starting at $29.99 per day or $54.99 per month.
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Missing the figure skating due to work commitments abroad?Norton VPN will give you access to your home streaming service.
Winter Olympics Figure Skating FAQs
What is the Winter Olympics Figure Skating schedule?
(All times ET)
TEAM EVENT SCHEDULE
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Friday, February 6 3.55am – Rhythm Dance 5.35am – Pairs Short Program 7.35am – Women’s Short Program
Saturday, February 7 1.45pm – Men’s Short Program 4.05pm – Free Dance
Can I watch Winter Olympics Figure Skating free of charge?
Yes! As we’ve outlined above, free coverage is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK, CBC Gem in Canada, 9Now in Australia and RTÉ Player in Ireland.
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In the US, NBC, USA Network and CNBC coverage is available via a free trial for YouTube TV.
Other, non-English language Olympics free streams can be found on ORF (Austria), RTBF (Belgium), VRT (Belgium), DR (Denmark), France TV (France), RAI (Italy), Yle (Finland), ZDF (Germany), RUV (Iceland), NOS (Netherlands), NRK (Norway), TVP (Poland), RTVE (Spain), Canal Nu9ve (Mexico) and the SRF RTS channels (Switzerland).
Can I watch Winter Olympics Figure Skating on my mobile?
Of course, most broadcasters have streaming services that you can access through mobile apps or via your phone’s browser.
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You can also stay up-to-date with all things Autumn Nations on the official social media channels on X (@MilanoCortina2026), YouTube (@Olympics) and Instagram (@milanocortina2026).
We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.
Finch Capital has previously supported Ireland’s NomuPay, AccountsIQ and Webio.
UK payments company Apexx Global has bagged strategic investment of up to $10m from Dutch VC group Finch Capital.
Apexx, co-founded by Irishman Peter Keenan, specialises in merchant-centric payment orchestration. Its platform enables enterprise merchants to access the entire global payments ecosystem through a single API, it said.
By allowing transactions to route across the ecosystem, the company targets increased acceptance rates, lower processing costs and improved conversion rates.
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Investment from Finch comes after the 2016-founded Apexx bagged some big name customers, including Jet2, Iglu.com and Norse Atlantic, towards the end of last year. According to the company, these additions take it to the brink of break-even revenue.
Finch’s investment will be used to power Apexx’s next phase of growth, it said, supporting product innovation and international expansion as the demand for smarter payment orchestration continues to rise.
As part of the investment, Finch Capital managing partner Radboud Vlaar will be joining Apexx Global’s board as chairperson.
“Apexx Global has built a truly differentiated payment orchestration platform with a clear focus on merchant outcomes,” Vlaar said.
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“Payments is a global, complex and rapidly evolving space, and Apexx’s ability to intelligently optimise acceptance and cost at scale positions them exceptionally well.”
Finch Capital deals with more than €500m in assets under management and has backed more than 50 portfolio companies across Europe and the US.
“Finch Capital brings exactly the combination of payments expertise, international perspective and growth experience we were looking for,” said Keenan, the Apexx’s CEO.
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“This investment is a strong validation of our strategy and technology, and Radboud’s appointment as chairman further strengthens our leadership as we scale globally.
“Our focus remains clear – delivering measurable value for merchants by simplifying payments and driving better outcomes.”
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Experience management software giant Qualtrics on Tuesday named Jason Maynard as its new CEO. Maynard previously spent a decade at Oracle, where he was executive vice president of revenue operations.
“I’ve spent 30 years in enterprise software; as a founder, as an analyst on Wall Street, and as an operator helping scale great businesses,” Maynard wrote in a blog post. “I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the biggest shifts in our industry, and right now we’re in the middle of the largest I’ve ever seen.”
Maynard replaces former longtime Qualtrics exec Zig Serafin, who stepped down as CEO in October. He remains vice chairman.
Qualtrics, based in Provo, Utah, and Seattle, helps companies gather data and improve the experiences and interactions that customers, employees, and others have with their products and services. Once publicly traded, Qualtrics was acquired by Silver Lake and Canada Pension Pan Investment Board in a private equity deal in 2023. The company, which employs more than 4,500 globally, has a pending $6.75 billion deal to acquire Press Ganey Forsta.
Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie prepping for the company’s 2023 Accessibility Summit. (Microsoft Photo)
— Jenny Lay-Flurrie is taking a new role at Microsoft, moving from chief accessibility officer to head of the company’s Trusted Technology Group. Lay-Flurrie held her former role for a decade, leading the company’s efforts on accessibility and disability inclusion, and has been at Microsoft since 2005.
“In every role, one principle has grounded me: – do the right thing,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “I am humbled and excited to take on this next challenge, staying true to that north star. Don’t worry, I’ll remain deeply engaged with my beloved #accessibility community, while learning so much more from other passionate communities I’m honoured to lead.”
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Microsoft CVP Teresa Hutson previously led the Trusted Technology Group, which focuses on privacy, safety, regulatory, responsible AI use, and other related topics.
— Former Nintex CEO Amit Mathradas started his new role as CEO of Five9, a Bay Area customer experience software company. Mathradas led Bellevue-based Nintex for three years and was previously COO at Avalara.
— Michelle Flandreau expanded her role at Holland America Line and is now vice president of marketing and e-commerce. Flandreau joined the cruise giant last year and previously held marketing leadership roles at Expedia, Tommy Bahama, LiquidPlanner, and Guidant Financial.
— Amir Moftakhar, former CFO at Modern Hydrogen, is now CFO at AMP, a Colorado-based climate tech company. Moftakhar joined Modern Hydrogen in 2023. The Seattle-area company recently laid off most of its staff.
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— Seattle-based cleantech nonprofit VertueLab hired Kris Licciardello as partnerships and alliances lead for Washington state and named Leo Ochoa in the same role leading Oregon efforts. It also hired Jasmin Smith as its Oregon program director.
— Seattle-based edtech company Gravyty added two execs: Former TalkingPoints and Instructure exec Matt Carlson as chief sales officer and former Uptempo CFO Ashley Jones Lee as chief financial officer. Gravyty, which originally started in Boston and raised cash from K1 Investment Management, merged with Ivy.ai and Ocelot last year.
— Seattle startup Yoodli hired Alan Camperson as its new head of global customer support. Camperson was previously a director of technical support at Salesloft. Yoodli, which just raised $40 million, also hired Meg Cory as a field marketing manager and Cortney Perry as enterprise account executive.
— Alexander Rublowsky, a longtime Seattle-area marketing exec, joined the Northwest Quantum Nexus group as a business development advisor.
Or Lenchner, the CEO of Bright Data, one of the world’s largest web-scraping firms, says that his company’s bots do not collect nonpublic information. Bright Data was previously sued by Meta and X for allegedly improperly scraping content from their platforms. (Meta later dropped its suit, and a federal judge in California dismissed the case brought by X.)
Karolis Stasiulevičiu, a spokesperson for another cited company, ScrapingBee, told WIRED: “ScrapingBee operates on one of the Internet’s core principles: that the open web is meant to be accessible. Public web pages are, by design, readable by both humans and machines.”
Oxylabs, another scraping firm, said in an unsigned statement that its bots don’t have “access to content behind logins, paywalls, or authentication. We require customers to use our services only for accessing publicly available information, and we enforce compliance standards throughout our platform.”
Oxylabs added that there are many legitimate reasons for firms to scrape web content, including for cybersecurity purposes and to conduct investigative journalism. The company also says that the countermeasures some websites use do not discriminate between different use cases. “The reality is that many modern anti-bot systems don’t distinguish well between malicious traffic and legitimate automated access,” Oxylabs says.
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In addition to causing headaches for publishers, the web-scraping wars are creating new business opportunities. TollBit’s report found more than 40 companies that are now marketing bots that can collect web content for AI training or other purposes. The rise of AI-powered search engines, as well as tools like OpenClaw, are likely helping drive up demand for these services.
Some firms promise to help companies surface content for AI agents rather than try to block them, a strategy known as generative engine optimization, or GEO. “We’re essentially seeing the rise of a new marketing channel,” says Uri Gafni, chief business officer of Brandlight, a company that optimizes content so that it appears prominently in AI tools.
“This will only intensify in 2026, and we’re going to see this rollout kind of as a full-on marketing channel, with search, ads, media, and commerce converging,” Gafni says.
Microsoft announced today that the Exchange Web Services (EWS) API for Exchange Online will be shut down in April 2027, after nearly 20 years.
EWS is a cross-platform API for developing apps that can access Exchange mailbox items, such as email messages, meetings, and contacts, retrieved from various sources, including Exchange Online and on-premises editions of Exchange (starting with Exchange Server 2007).
Microsoft will begin blocking Exchange Online EWS by default on October 1, 2026, but administrators can temporarily maintain access via an application allowlist. The final shutdown occurs on April 1, 2027, with no exceptions granted.
Administrators who create allow lists and configure settings by the end of August 2026 will be excluded from the automatic October blocking. Starting in September 2026, Microsoft will pre-populate allow lists for organizations that have not created their own, based on each tenant’s usage patterns.
The company may also conduct temporary “scream tests” that temporarily disable EWS to expose hidden dependencies before the final cutoff, and will keep IT admins informed via monthly Message Center notifications that provide tenant-specific reminders and usage summaries.
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However, it’s important to note that this retirement process affects only Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online environments, and EWS will continue to function in on-premises Exchange Server installations.
EWS retirement timeline (Microsoft)
“Today we’re announcing we will use a phased, admin controllable disablement plan that starts in October 2026 and concludes with a complete shutdown of EWS in 2027,” the Exchange Team said on Thursday. “EWS was built nearly 20 years ago, and while it served the ecosystem well, it no longer aligns with today’s security, scale, or reliability requirements.”
Microsoft also advised developers using the EWS API to switch to the Microsoft Graph API until EWS is retired, since it has reached near-complete feature parity with EWS for most scenarios.
“EWS is not being retired on-prem. Hybrid scenarios vary depending on how apps access data. On-prem mailboxes may continue using EWS; cloud mailboxes must move to Graph. Autodiscover will help apps determine mailbox location automatically,” Microsoft added.
“But note that only Exchange SE will support Graph for calls to Exchange Online, so hybrid customers will have to use Exchange SE to host on-premises mailboxes.”
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Today’s announcement comes after Microsoft revealed in September 2023 that it planned to begin retiring the EWS API in October 2026, and after a 2018 warning that EWS would stop receiving functionality updates.
Three years later, in October 2021, Microsoft revealed that it had deprecated the 25 least-used EWS APIs for Exchange Online and removed support for them in March 2022 for security reasons.
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Despite the hype about these agents being co-workers, from our experience, these agents tend to work best if you think of them as tools that amplify existing skills, not as the autonomous co-workers the marketing language implies. They can produce impressive drafts fast but still require constant human course-correction.
The Frontier launch came just three days after OpenAI released a new macOS desktop app for Codex, its AI coding tool, which OpenAI executives described as a “command center for agents.” The Codex app lets developers run multiple agent threads in parallel, each working on an isolated copy of a codebase via Git worktrees.
OpenAI also released GPT-5.3-Codex on Thursday, a new AI model that powers the Codex app. OpenAI claims that the Codex team used early versions of GPT-5.3-Codex to debug the model’s own training run, manage its deployment, and diagnose test results, similar to what OpenAI told Ars Technica in a December interview.
“Our team was blown away by how much Codex was able to accelerate its own development,” the company wrote. On Terminal-Bench 2.0, the agentic coding benchmark, GPT-5.3-Codex scored 77.3%, which exceeds Anthropic’s just-released Opus 4.6 by about 12 percentage points.
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The common thread across all of these products is a shift in the user’s role. Rather than merely typing a prompt and waiting for a single response, the developer or knowledge worker becomes more like a supervisor, dispatching tasks, monitoring progress, and stepping in when an agent needs direction.
In this vision, developers and knowledge workers effectively become middle managers of AI. That is, not writing the code or doing the analysis themselves, but delegating tasks, reviewing output, and hoping the agents underneath them don’t quietly break things. Whether that will come to pass (or if it’s actually a good idea) is still widely debated.
