​There are many celebrations and events all across Seattle Metro Area.
In Seattle, the eclipse will be about 92% complete. It will still be amazing to watch. The eclipse should reach its peak at about 10:20 in the morning.
If you’re looking for more natural and spontaneous experience, and if the weather allows it, you can try to find a viewing point on your own: a southeast view will be preferable. The eastern edge of Lake Washington is highly recommended.
Make sure you’re watching the eclipse using certified eclipse glasses or any other method for safe viewing.
 
1- Northgate Library
Astronomy education and related activities will be organized before viewing the eclipse.
 
2- Greenwood Park
The Phinney Neighborhood Association is hosting a viewing party at 9 am in Greenwood Park.
 
3- Redmond Library
King County Library System’s Redmond is throwing a party at 9:45 in the morning. It will be located right between Redmond Library and City Hall.
 
4- Bryant Neighborhood Playground
The Seattle Public Library is putting on this shindig at Bryant Neighborhood Playground, which will combine astronomy education with a group eclipse viewing.
 
5- Pacific Science Center
Opening time is early, at 8:30 am which means that attendees will have enough time to arrive before the eclipse starts. If the weather is not clear, the event will be live stream ed from another place with better atmospheric conditions.
 
6- Seattle Central Library
This event focuses solely on showing NASA’s live stream of eclipse images. It starts at 10 am.
 
7- High Point Public Library
The event is very family-friendly and starts early at 8:30 am. It will include a “Make your own eclipse viewer” workshop.
 
8- South Park Community Center
The viewing party will start at 8:30 am and you will learn how to create a simple viewer in order to watch the eclipse in the best conditions possible. If the weather is not good enough, the party will be called off like a lot of similar events.
 
9- Des Moines Library
Depending on the weather, the library will host a viewing event in the green patch on the east side of the Des Moines Library. The event starts at 9:45 am.
 
10- Pierce College Science Dome
”The South Sound’s only planetarium!” will host its own party—you will be able to watch the eclipse outside but in any case, the total eclipse will be live-streamed inside the dome, regardless of weather conditions. There will also be a preliminary presentation in the Dome before the eclipse.

​Recently, the SDOT (the Seattle Department of Transportation) has awarded permits to two private bike-sharing businesses called respectively Spin and LimeBike.
In a matter of hours, a lot of orange Spin bikes were available in the streets of the city for all the wanna-be riders. On the contrary, LimeBike has taken its time to roll out its fleet of lime-green bikes. Sharing a bike is an excellent idea and the program is rather easy to use—the app, that you can download on both iOS and Android, looks for bikes that you can unlock and ride immediately—but not many bikes are available for now and most of them are far away.
“We want to be extra careful and follow a scientific process at the beginning before rolling out the program elsewhere,” they said.
This preliminary process is applied even when they work with smaller communities such as small town or universities where the risks taken are a lot less important than in bigger cities such as Seattle.
“Before taking the idea to the next level, we are looking to be 100% sure that we can manage the day-to-day operations in a smooth manner,” they told us. “Our goal is to apply the same idea to Seattle by applying what was learned in different cities and markets”.
The way it is done is pretty simple: if they can deploy 500 bicycles, they’ll put them mainly in the city center and see what people are doing with them and where they are taking them. It has to be a natural process where bikes flow from one place to the other.
No limits and no boundaries: that’s the way the founders of these bike-sharing companies see things. Just letting the bikes go from one neighborhood to the other and observing customer’s behavior is the best way to learn a lot in a short period of time. The bikes can be dropped off wherever you want to and the only plans made were made based on the available data and predicted usage.
Some people take their bikes to West Seattle or even to neighborhoods that were not even considered before by the initial deployment team. It is a great way to learn what works and what doesn’t work, and also a way to learn about what customers really want. The data collected will be extremely useful when they finally dump 500 bicycles or more in the streets of Seattle. By being responsible and studying carefully the market, they make sure that this upcoming experience will be a success.

​According to state Employment Security Department, the unemployment rate has been steadily decreasing for the past 5 months and reached a new low at 5.2% last December.
In a recent press release, Paul Turek, an economist for the department, said that Washington State’s economy is strong and job projections are overwhelmingly positive, at least in the short-term.
There are more and more companies hiring and the economy finished strong by adding 6,700 jobs in December compared to 4,000 jobs the month before.
Unemployment insurance benefits are paid to 70,238 people as of December. The preliminary job estimates have been released. The data comes from the federal bureau of labor statistics and its monthly employment report including seasonally adjusted figures.
 
Labor force in Washington is increasing
 
The labor force remains at the same level with 3.69 million people and only 800 less than in november.
The labor force includes all the people over 16, whether they are employed or not.
 
 4 sectors are contracting but 8 are expanding
 
Employment in private sectors has increased: 7,400 new jobs were created meanwhile government jobs decreased by 700 during the month of December.
 
Lesiure and Hospitality grew the most at the end of 2016: 3,400 new jobs were created in this sector alone in December.
 
On top of this, the information industry added 2,500 jobs, retail trade added 2,200 jobs, wholesale trade also grew and added 800 new jobs, while the financial industry added 300. Education, health services, transportation, warehousing and utilities, and manufacturing created 200 new jobs each.
 
Some other services lost jobs such as construction (-400), professional services and government too. Logging and mining remain at similar levels this year.
 
Yearly growth remains vigorous
 
Washington State has created around 82,300 new jobs from last December until now if you don’t take into account seasonal adjustment. The public sector is growing at a slower pace than the private sector: 2.5% (14,000 jobs) versus 2.6% (68,300 jobs).
There are 13 different industry sectors in Washington State and from December 2015 to December 2016, 11 of them created new jobs and along with them many opportunities. Traditional industry sectors such as manufacturing, mining, and logging unsurprisingly reported numerous job losses: respectively 5,900 and 100 jobs lost.
 
The 3 sectors that have seen the biggest employment growth compared to the years before are:
•      Education and health services with 20,800 new jobs;
•      Government and Local Administration with14,000 new jobs and
•      Hospitality-Leisure-Tourism with 11,300 new jobs

The company made an announcement today: their service, UberEATS, will be officially available now on the Eastside, hungry customers in Bellevue, Redmond, and Woodinville, among other cities east of Seattle across Lake Washington will be able to get food delivered at their doorstep or at their office.
There will be over 50 Eastside restaurants available, including Freshii, Kizuki Ramen & Izakaya, Lunchbox Laboratory, Monsoon, Racha Thai, and many more. Customers order using UberEats’s dedicated app and their food is delivered in less than an hour on average. No delivery fee will be charged this summer.
Uber is very active and has launched its restaurant delivery app in the area last March. They have served more than 25,000 people for the moment and are well on their way to serve a lot more as the service grows in popularity.
Uber used to offer lunch delivery in Seattle via UberEATS last october. Drivers would bring to their customers pre-cooked meals and deliver them to clients who ordered them using the existing Uber transportation app.
UberEats has been reviewed and tested by a prominent online blog recently and it seems to be a good experience even though it’s a bit expensive when you include the delivery fee.
UberEats, which is available in more than 20 cities in the world, is Uber’s venture trying to use the logistical framework built over the years for their taxi service and benefiting from the huge number of drivers already present in the city.

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Uber, worth $68 billion, is going head to head with its competition using the power of technology to help its clients get food, groceries, and any other products delivered to their customers quickly and efficiently.
Food delivery companies in Seattle are plenty: DoorDash, Peach, Lish, Munchery, Square-owned Caviar, Postmates, Bitesquad, Seamless, Gobble, GrubHub, Farmigo, Eat 24 (owned by Yelp), and many other similar businesses.
E-Commerce giants like Amazon — with AmazonFresh, competing with Instacart — are getting involved too.
Amazon also launched Daily Dish, a food delivery service targeting the workplace that is supposed to compete with Peach, a local startup.
The stakes are huge and there is competition, some of them experience failure. Food delivery companies backed by millions of dollars of venture capital such as SpoonRocket or Ola stopped their operations, and others just cannot raise more money.
But similar companies such as Postmates — now worth $450 million — is having a hard time to lower prices and is not telling the whole truth to their customers about this situation.