Week in Geek: We finally get to try AmazonFresh Pickup, and your driver’s license might be coming to your smartphone

Thursday morning, we awoke to a surprise: AmazonFresh Pickup, the company’s previously secretive grocery pickup service, was finally opening to the public — or to anyone who has an Amazon Prime account, at least.

If you’re not familiar with the AmazonFresh Pickup saga, catch up on the whole story here. The short version is that Amazon has been developing the project with intense secrecy, finally revealing it when it opened for Amazon employees to use in late March, but not opening it to the broader world until this week.

GeekWire has been reporting on the project for almost a year, so it was a fun moment for editor Todd Bishop and other GeekWire staffers to be the first outsiders to test the service Thursday morning. They talk all about the experience, and the pros and cons compared to other pickup services, on this episode of the Week in Geek.

We also give listeners a glimpse inside Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting, where the company’s cultural quirks and rising prominence were on full display. Things got a bit bananas — and we’re not just talking about the free fruit Amazon gives away at its community banana stand.

Plus, we go inside the place you might least expect to see high-tech innovation: The Department of Motor Vehicles. DMVs are starting to look at the capabilities of smartphones and new smart and autonomous cars to help modernize their policies, and you might be surprised with what they’re brewing up.

On the Random Channel this week: Get geeky with book recommendations from Bill Gates and the 40th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope.

Listen to the episode above or download it as an MP3, and don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts.