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If Amazon selects Dallas for its second headquarters, it will be adding to the region’s already rich retail DNA. While Dallas-Fort Worth is known for its business diversity, retailing represents a big slice — maybe one it’s not getting much credit for in the ongoing speculation about where the largest online retailer will decide to put its HQ2. When analysts size up the 20 cities that Amazon said it would pick from this year, they have looked at where each stands in regards to affordable housing, tech talent, quality of life and other measures Amazon says it’s looking for. That...

In Amazon’s remarkable second headquarters competition, talent is the name of the game. That’s why we want to find out which city in the running for Amazon HQ2 has the best chances of attracting people like our talented GeekWire readers. One of Amazon’s chief considerations in picking a location for its second headquarters is the ability to attract and retain the valuable tech workers who power the e-commerce giant’s business. Tech companies compete fiercely for a relatively small pool of skilled talent and Amazon wants to place HQ2 in a city that will help it gain a recruiting edge. Last...

RALEIGH – Amazon is still considering the Triangle for its huge HQ2 project, and downtown Raleigh is where the ecommerce giant is most likely to build what would be a massive complex if North Carolina’s capital is the winner, according to sources. Several of the same sources also note that an announcement of Apple’s selection for a new campus is “imminent.” North Carolina has been aggressively pursuing both economic development projects which promise billions of dollars in investments and as many as 60,000 jobs. Winning the Apple project does not preclude the Triangle from being selected by Amazon, sources say....

As cities vie to host second campus, local activists say the ‘Hunger Games’-style competition is a bad deal for everyone – except Amazon... “If you win this thing, God help you,” he said. “The backlash in that community is going to be horrific, and the person who thinks they’re going to ride that to the governor’s house or the White House is going to ride it to being unelected.”

Clicks on an Arlington, Virginia, website are originating from an internal Amazon site While the world waits with bated breath for Amazon to announce which of its 20 “finalist” cities will be awarded the pleasure of trading its tax base to Jeff Bezos in exchange for the company’s much-ballyhooed second headquarters, a small local news website may have found the answer in its Google Analytics data. ARLnow.com, which serves Arlington, Virginia, found an unusual amount of traffic to a December story about Arlington County winning an award for its environmentally friendly policies. After doing some digging, the site says the...

So from where is all this newfound interest in Arlington County’s sustainability bonafides coming? From Amazon.com, it seems. The vast majority of the traffic to the page over the past week that can be tracked came from what appears to be an internal Amazon.com page devoted to its HQ2 search. Arlington, of course, is in the running as one of the potential landing spots for the company’s second headquarters.No other page on ARLnow.com has a similar level of traffic coming from Amazon. Last week a noted NYU professor who has written about the company opined that New York City and...

Amazon has trimmed its list of potential cities for its second headquarters down to twenty. But one group of gay activists is pressuring the company to avoid some of the locations that made the cut. The tech behemoth, currently headquartered in Seattle, launched a public search for the site of its second headquarters, or HQ2, last year. It said it would spend $50 billion on constructing the new headquarters and is expecting to hire a workforce of 50,000 people. When the company requested proposals, more than 238 cities from across North America responded.

After fielding hundreds of pitches from cities across the U.S., Amazon has whittled the list of prospective homes for its second headquarters down to a relatively short 20. According to a statement this week by the online retail giant, the $5 billion project known as HQ2 will be located in one of the following regions: