Week in Geek Podcast: Seattle’s Hail Mary for Amazon HQ2, and why it doesn’t include Seattle

Seattle, home to Amazon’s headquarters, is officially in the running to be the home for its second HQ. Well, kind of.

Executives from King and Snohomish County unveiled the Seattle area’s response to Amazon’s HQ2 RFP this week, and while it included plenty of cities around the region that they believe would work for the tech giant, none of them were in Seattle proper.

GeekWire editor Todd Bishop is not impressed. “I think this is completely lame,” he says on this week’s GeekWire podcast. “It feels like you need to have something more cohesive, more comprehensive. You’ve got to do better. If you want this innovative company to stay here, you’ve got step up, and this is not it.

While the proposal is far from the elaborate stunts that some cities have pulled — like sending the company a 21-foot-tall cactus or creating “The City of Amazon” — it’s largely symbolic.

There’s little chance that Amazon would choose to put its second headquarters in Seattle or nearby metro areas, but the proposal at least says that Seattle can still be a welcoming place for the company and its tens of thousands of employees.

And even though the company is seeing other cities, it’s still expanding in Seattle — it leased a giant new skyscraper in downtown Seattle this week.

We also looked at one city that has an unexpected edge in the HQ2 race: Pittsburgh.

Plus, Microsoft finally released its Edge web browser for iOS and Android devices and a Seattle game developer is putting players in charge of Fake News.

On the Random Channel this week: The Space Needle’s glassy new makeover; Alexa’s take on the NBA; and how ProPublica forced the HHS secretary to resign.

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