Seattle Scores Well in Forbes List of Best Places for Business

Puget Sound Business Journal | Rob Smith | July 29
http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2015/07/seattle-scores-well-in-forbes-list-of-best-places.html
“Seattle ranks No. 6 in Forbes magazine’s 2015 List of the Best Places for Business and Careers. Forbes wrote: ‘Seattle’s economy has been on a tear with only high business and living costs holding it back from ranking higher. The area is the base for Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks. Amazon is planning a new downtown hub that includes numerous skyscrapers.’”

Alibaba is Investing $1 Billion to Take on Amazon’s Cloud Computing Juggernaut

Business Insider | Jillian D’Onfro | July 29
http://www.businessinsider.com/alibaba-invests-1-billion-in-aliyun-cloud-computing-business-2015-7
“Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is upping its investment in cloud computing, with a new, $1 billion cash infusion, making it more of a competitor to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft than ever before. The funding will be used to expand Aliyun’s international presence, extend its alliance-based ecosystem, and to build new products that it can offer at lower costs, the company announced in a press release.”

Allen Lures Tech Billionaires to Seattle with Art Fair

Bloomberg | Katya Kazakina | July 28
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-29/allen-lures-tech-billionaires-to-seahawks-home-with-art-fair
“Billionaire Paul Allen wants to bring Venice and Miami art world prestige to Seattle — along with deep-pocketed technology entrepreneurs. Allen’s investment company Vulcan Inc. is co-producing the Seattle Art Fair, a four-day show with an estimated $250 million of contemporary art on offer that starts Thursday. It’s the only such fair in the Pacific Northwest, a region that has seen an explosion in private wealth as valuations of tech companies surged.”

Meet the 2015 Techstars Seattle Startups

The Seattle Times | Rachel Lerman | July 27
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/meet-the-2015-techstars-seattle-startups/
“Techstars, a leading startup-accelerator program, has selected 11 companies to go through its three-month accelerator beginning Monday in Seattle. Techstars is one of the many accelerators and incubators dotting the Puget Sound region that help foster and challenge startups, often at companies’ early stages.”

The World’s Leading Startup Cities

CityLab | Richard Florida | July 27
http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/07/the-worlds-leading-startup-cities/399623/
“Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area have long been the world leaders in high-tech startups, giving rise to cutting-edge companies from Apple and Intel to Google, Facebook, and Twitter. But recent years have seen the rise of an increasingly potent group of cities around the world that are generating new startups in creative and unique ways. The 2015 edition of the Startup Genome Project from Compass…provides a new ranking for the world’s leading startup cities…. All in all, U.S cities took the top four spots, and seven crack the top 20, with Chicago seventh, Seattle eighth, and Austin 14th.”