Instagram is testing 90-minute horizontal videos called Features. Explore how the format works, who can use it, and what it could mean for creators.
The post Instagram Tests 90-Minute Horizontal Videos Called Features appeared first on TechRepublic.
When dealing with data corruption, you're much more likely to blame your SSD than anything else. And even if it's not your SSD, it'll be your OS or maybe even the CPU.
Four RAM slots look like an invitation to fill every one. On modern DDR5 platforms, though, more sticks often means slower memory, longer boot times, and shakier stability. Here is how memory channels work, why four modules cause trouble, and what to buy instead.
Four years ago, a senior official in Russia's foreign ministry painted a bullseye on commercial satellite networks that assist Ukraine in its fight against invading Russian military forces.
On Wednesday, several days after a Russian military spacecraft moved within striking distance of one of those commercial satellites, the same Russian diplomat assured the world there's no reason to worry.
There's a sharp incongruity in those statements from Konstantin Vorontsov, deputy head of Russia's delegation to the United Nations. Vorontsov's comments Wednesday in the UN General Assembly's First Committee came moments after a US official called attention to recent maneuvers by Kosmos 2612, a Russian military craft that approached a US-registered commercial satellite some 340 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.
© UN General Assembly
Hoping to quell criticism, Meta has dropped the word “train” from its “streamlined” commercial terms of service that kick in on October 30.
Last week, Meta faced backlash after legal experts warned that the tech giant’s sweeping new commercial terms of service seemed to give Meta permission to endlessly scrape websites linked on business pages. Talking to Nieman Lab, experts suggested that Meta could possibly use the policy to avoid millions in licensing fees from news organizations by requiring all business users to share a wealth of AI training data simply for running a business page.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed that Meta did not alert users to the changed language following backlash. This potentially only adds to confusion ahead of the policy rollout. In response to backlash, Meta's spokesperson provided a statement to Ars, acknowledging Nieman Lab's initial report but not its follow-up report reiterating experts' concerns:
© filo | DigitalVision Vectors
Windows 11 Photos is getting a faster editor, improved viewer, and connected gallery. Here's what's changing and when the update arrives.
The post Windows 11 Photos Gets a 25% Faster Editor — Here’s Who Gets It First appeared first on TechRepublic.
Microsoft says Windows 11 is getting faster and more memory-efficient, but will PCs with 8GB RAM benefit? Here's what users should know about the changes.
The post Microsoft Wants Windows 11 to Run Better on 8GB RAM PCs appeared first on TechRepublic.
As NASA continues humanity’s slow march back to the Moon, different pieces of the puzzle of establishing a more permanent base there are falling into place. One of these pieces is the the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTR), and [Cleo Abram] and [Michelle Khare] got a look at the LTR candidate from Lunar Outpost.
Designed to help astronauts traverse the lunar surface as well as function as a semi-autonomous rover when uncrewed, the LTR will be an integral part to any future Moon base. NASA announced earlier this year that it would be moving forward with the LTR featured in this video and another from competitor Astrolab. Regardless of manufacturer, the LTR will have to deal with some wild conditions in the lunar environment.
Lunar dust is abrasive, so the LTR generates an electric current to pull the dust under the truck to prevent it from entering the cab of the vehicle as it moves along. Given the extreme temperature swings on the moon (-200˚C to 200˚C), the space truck will also be fitted with wire mesh tires as nobody wants to be changing a flat in space. The two seats in the cab are oversized and can help lift the astronauts up as space suits hamper their agility to a significant degree. There are compartments for storing samples, and the truck has a robot arm that can grab samples to bring back if no one is along for the ride.
We’ve still got a few years before crews arrive on the moon, but when they do, there’s a good chance they’ll be using the LTR to explore the lunar south pole in hopes of water.
Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts.
Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.
As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta's terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.
© SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket
If you got a DM from an unverified Jon Bon Jovi account after commenting on one of his official Instagram posts, what would it take to make you believe it was really the rock star hoping to connect? And at what point when he starts asking you to send money—like lose-your-house kind of money—would you snap out of the fantasy and stop draining your bank account?
In a documentary premiering Saturday—Super Scam Me—investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller goes deep into this toxic love-bombing terrain. In a clip that Ars is exclusively debuting below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt and bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.
Broadcasting on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” gets blurred in romance scams that the Federal Trade Commission says cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.
© National Geographic
When you first learn to program, memory seems pretty straightforward. You have a bunch of bytes, each with an address. If you want to read or write something, you specify the address, and the computer goes to that place and does your bidding. Sure, some addresses might be reserved for hardware or the operating system, but the general idea is simple: memory is a big array of bytes.
Just like we pretend that a wire is a perfect conductor, the big array of memory model used to be a slight twisting of the truth. On a modern computer, however, it is almost entirely a lie. The address you use probably isn’t a physical address. The data you read might not come from RAM at all. Even if it does, it might be sitting in one of several caches. And if you follow the rabbit hole far enough, you discover that your SSD is arguably just another level in the memory hierarchy.
The fundamental problem is that processors have gotten much faster than memory. A modern processor can execute several instructions per clock cycle, but accessing ordinary DRAM can take hundreds of cycles. If the processor had to wait for RAM every time it needed data, much of that impressive computing power would go to waste.
The solution is caching. Keep copies of frequently used data in smaller, faster memories closer to the processor. Most modern desktop processors have at least three levels of cache. The L1 cache is tiny but extremely fast, and often split between instructions and data. L2 is larger and somewhat slower, while L3 is even larger and usually slower as well.
Things get interesting with multiple cores, as is often the case these days. Typically, each core has its own L1 and L2 caches, while several cores share an L3 cache. But that’s not universal. Some processors share L2 caches between cores. Others have multiple L3 caches, each serving a group of cores. The exact arrangement depends on the processor architecture.
One important detail: caches don’t generally work byte by byte. They transfer and track blocks called cache lines, commonly 64 bytes on modern desktop processors. If you read one byte that isn’t cached, the processor generally fetches the entire line containing that byte.
This is why sequential memory access is often much faster than random access. If you read the next byte, there’s a good chance it’s already in the cache. Hardware prefetchers may even anticipate what you’ll need next.
But there can be problems. Imagine two cores modifying completely different variables. If those variables happen to occupy the same cache line, the cores may repeatedly invalidate each other’s copies, wasting time even though they aren’t logically sharing data.
Protocols such as MESI keep the caches coherent, coordinating which core owns a line and which copies are valid. MESI is an acronym for cache line states: modified, exclusive, shared, or invalid. Memory systems must figure out how to keep caches in sync. But coherence doesn’t eliminate the need for synchronization or memory-ordering rules in multithreaded programs. The point is that even our simple byte-addressed memory is secretly operating in larger chunks.
So far, we’ve assumed that the address you supply identifies a location in RAM. Usually, it doesn’t. Modern operating systems use virtual memory. Your program sees a virtual address space that the operating system and processor cooperate to map onto physical memory.
The memory management unit, or MMU, translates virtual addresses into physical addresses, typically using page tables. This lets different programs use identical virtual addresses without interfering with one another. It also provides memory protection and allows physical pages to be shared.
Of course, translating addresses takes time. So we add another cache.
The translation lookaside buffer, or TLB, remembers recently used address translations. A TLB hit avoids a potentially expensive page-table walk. Some processors even have multiple levels of TLBs. Unlike the ordinary CPU cache, which generally operates on cache lines, virtual memory usually works with pages, often 4 KB, although larger pages are also supported.
Notice what’s happening. We have caches for data, caches for instructions, and caches for the information needed to locate the data and instructions.
The simple act of reading a variable has become surprisingly complicated.
Even if we get through the caches and finally reach RAM, things aren’t necessarily simple. On systems with multiple processors or certain multicore arrangements, memory access can be non-uniform. This is called NUMA, or Non-Uniform Memory Access.
A processor may have relatively fast access to memory attached to its own NUMA node, while accessing memory associated with another node requires crossing an interconnect. Both locations are ordinary RAM, and both may appear in the same address space, but the access times and available bandwidth can differ.
The operating system tries to place memory near the processors using it. Moving a thread to another CPU can therefore change its memory performance, even though the program’s addresses haven’t changed.
And NUMA isn’t limited to traditional multiprocessor servers. Modern systems with chiplets, heterogeneous memory, and technologies such as CXL are making memory topology increasingly interesting.
Virtual memory has another trick. A virtual page doesn’t necessarily have to be backed by physical RAM at the moment you access it.
When a program accesses a page that isn’t currently mapped in a usable way, the processor generates a page fault. The operating system decides what to do. Sometimes it simply allocates a fresh page. Sometimes it retrieves data from an executable or memory-mapped file. Other times, the page was moved out of RAM to swap space and must be retrieved. Note that things like executable data are generally immutable, so most operating systems won’t swap them out. They simply trash them and know they can reload the same page later when needed.
This means your program can address data that isn’t presently in physical memory. Naturally, accessing an SSD is much slower than accessing RAM, so excessive swapping can bring a computer to its knees.
Virtual memory doesn’t actually require swapping, though. Address translation and protection are useful even on systems that never move pages to disk.
Suppose your program reads a file. You might imagine that the operating system sends a request to the SSD and waits for the data. But if the file was recently accessed, the data may already be in RAM.
Operating systems maintain a filesystem page cache, keeping frequently or recently accessed file data in memory. Writes may also be buffered in RAM before eventually reaching persistent storage.
This makes RAM act like a cache for secondary storage, much as L3 acts like a cache for RAM.
The analogy isn’t perfect. RAM is also the primary working storage for running programs, and anonymous memory isn’t necessarily a copy of anything on disk. But the general hierarchy is clear: registers, CPU caches, RAM, and persistent storage provide progressively different tradeoffs between speed, capacity, and cost.
Even SSDs have their own caches and address translations. Their flash translation layers map logical block addresses onto physical flash locations, hiding wear leveling and garbage collection from the host. Apparently, nobody wants to tell the truth about addresses.
But what if we could make RAM effectively larger without adding more? Compression offers another way to complicate our memory hierarchy. Instead of immediately moving an infrequently used page to disk, why not compress it and keep it in RAM?
Linux has two well-known mechanisms for doing this: zram and zswap. Zram creates a compressed block device in RAM. It’s commonly used as a swap device, allowing pages to be stored in compressed form rather than written to physical storage.
Zswap, on the other hand, is a compressed cache in front of a swap device. When Linux decides to swap out a page, zswap attempts to compress and retain it in RAM. If necessary, pages can eventually be evicted to the backing swap device.
Both trade processor time for memory capacity and reduced storage I/O. Decompressing a page costs CPU cycles, but that can be considerably cheaper than retrieving it from an SSD.
There’s a catch, though. These mechanisms operate through the swap subsystem. When a compressed page is needed again, it must be decompressed into an ordinary page before the program can access it. That means page faults, memory management overhead, and moving data around. But what if compressed memory could behave more like ordinary RAM?
That’s the idea behind CRAM, or Compressed RAM, a project presented by Meta’s Gregory Price at the October 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference.
Rather than treating compressed memory as a conventional swap device, CRAM proposes exposing it through a special NUMA node. Linux can then use existing memory-management mechanisms to move pages between ordinary DRAM and compressed memory. The most interesting part is the hardware-assisted compression and decompression, which allows access at much finer granularity than conventional page-oriented compressed swap.
The developers report impressive benchmark results, including read performance that approaches ordinary DRAM in some tests and dramatic improvements over zram for selected workloads.
That doesn’t mean compression has suddenly become free. Writes, compression ratios, hardware requirements, and managing incompressible data all matter. CRAM is still developmental work, not ready for everyday use.
But it illustrates where the memory hierarchy is heading. Instead of simply deciding whether a page is in RAM or on disk, the operating system may choose among ordinary RAM, compressed memory, slower memory tiers, and secondary storage.
Most programmers don’t need to think about any of this most of the time. That’s the point of an abstraction. But when performance matters, the illusion starts to leak. Sequential access can beat random access by enormous margins. Two threads modifying unrelated variables can fight over cache lines. Moving a process between CPUs can change its memory latency. A page that looks like ordinary memory might actually require decompression or a trip to an SSD.
On smaller embedded systems, of course, the picture may be very different. Without an MMU or elaborate caches, memory can look much more like the simple physical address space we learned about in the first place.
We started with an array of bytes. We ended up with a hierarchy of caches, translation tables, NUMA nodes, compressed memory pools, and persistent storage devices, all cooperating to maintain that simple illusion. Amazing how complicated something so simple can be.
It’s definitely a sign of the times when repair shops get handed sticks of registered ECC DDR5 RAM by businesses to try and fix, rather than just tossing the defective ones and slotting in a fresh bunch. This is how [northwestrepair] ended up with two of these ECC RDIMMs, with a current market valuation of a rather nice budget car.
The 128 GB stick was first on the bench, with the fault being that it would fail DDR5 training on boot. This suggests that one or more of the DRAM BGA packages had developed a cracked solder joint, which is something that you could conceivably fix with more diagnosing and testing for a single IC reballing.
In this case doing a reflow cycle was enough to bring the RAM back to life, with the DDR5 training now passing without issues in a test system.
For the 256 GB stick things wouldn’t be so easy, as it seemed completely dead. This suggested a dead PMIC, as this is the component on DDR5 RAM responsible for ensuring that the DRAM ICs even power on. The SPD ROM was another option, so that got swapped first, which does require reprogramming the RDIMM. For this the earlier SPD dump image was reflashed, but swapping this chip made no difference.
After some additional reflowing of a few suspect ICs, still nothing happened. Following this a lot of reballing and other troubleshooting steps followed, only for the problem to be one shorted MLCC and a broken PMIC, potentially caused by whoever dropped said RDIMM onto the server room floor.
Cracked MLCCs do appear to be a very common cause of failures, as they’re often used as filter capacitors, same as for this RDIMM. Checking for shorts across a number of such MLCCs can be a good way to shorten a diagnostic cycle. Since this RDIMM was dropped, reballing every IC probably was still a good move as this may have cracked some solder balls.
— Ravi Vedula, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, is leaving the company after 26 years. Vedula, who is based in the Seattle area, led an organization of more than 1,000 people that runs the data and analytics platform behind Microsoft 365 and Copilot.
“26 years. It’s time,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Goodbye and thank you, Microsoft. It’s been a privilege. I gave it my all.”
Vedula joined Microsoft in 2000 and was the first engineering manager for Exchange Online.
His memoir, “Hyderabad Days: The code we lived by before we coded,” was published in March by Microsoft’s 8080 Books. It recounts his childhood in a government housing colony in Hyderabad, India, with each chapter followed by a lesson about leadership, engineering or life, as GeekWire reported at the time.
“I leave with gratitude for the people and experiences that shaped those years,” Vedula told GeekWire.
He said he is leaving room for “another professional chapter if the right opportunity comes along,” but for now plans to focus on travel, ways to contribute and writing, including a possible book based on his experiences receiving a heart transplant in 2017.
— AI and robotics company Boston Dynamics announced Rohit Prasad as its new CEO, effective Oct. 7. Prasad, who is based in the Boston area, was Amazon’s senior vice president and head scientist for artificial general intelligence until he left the company at the end of 2025.
He takes over from interim CEO Amanda McMaster, the company’s chief financial officer, after Robert Playter retired in February following more than 30 years at Boston Dynamics. Hyundai Motor Group holds a controlling stake in the company.
Prasad joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, and oversaw the creation of its Nova AI models. Boston Dynamics makes the Spot and Stretch robots and is developing the Atlas humanoid. Prasad is also expected to join the company’s board, subject to approval.
“Boston Dynamics is uniquely positioned to advance Physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise,” Prasad said in the announcement.
— Qualtrics has appointed Mike Potter chief technology officer of the experience management company. He joins from Petal, an Ontario healthcare company, and has worked in leadership at Qlik, IBM and Cognos.
“I have spent the better part of my career building platforms at scale, the kind of work that requires deep technical conviction, strong collaboration, and a relentless focus on what customers actually need. That is what drew me to Qualtrics,” Potter said.
Qualtrics has dual headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah. It recently cut 117 jobs connected to its Seattle operations, largely affecting engineering and product teams. Last year, the company spent $6.75 billion to acquire Press Ganey Forsta.
— Shawn Stapleton has been named vice president and chief AI and innovation officer, a newly created role at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He joins the Seattle nonprofit from MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he led AI lifecycle management for more than three years. Before that, he was the Seattle-based head of data science for Philips.
Stapleton helped scale MD Anderson’s AI initiatives across clinical, research and administrative settings, Fred Hutch said, adding, “His experience at the intersection of strategy, governance and implementation will be instrumental as we continue building the foundation for AI-enabled medicine and discovery.”
— Seattle-based defense tech startup Overland AI has named Jon Abramovic as vice president of international growth. Abramovic has held sales leadership roles in Taiwan, Prague and Beijing. He was most recently director of global defense sales at SIG Sauer and spent eight years at Oshkosh Defense leading business development across Europe and Asia.
“Having spent years operating overseas, I’ve seen firsthand what our allies face against near-peer adversaries and what it takes to stay ahead. Overland AI’s technology represents a generational leap in the ground domain,” Abramovic said.
Overland AI is No. 7 in the GeekWire 200, a ranking of the region’s top privately held tech startups.
— Noosphere Labs, a Seattle-area AI startup first covered by GeekWire in August, has announced its leadership team. The company, launched by former Meta AI research director Kevin Carlberg, is pursuing “human-centered physical intelligence” — AI designed to help people interact with and make sense of the physical world, beyond text and images on screens.
Its team includes:
— Liz Pearce has been named Earth Finance‘s first chief commercial officer. She joined from Ever.green, where she was chief revenue officer. Past roles include CEO of LiquidPlanner, co-founder and CEO of Fresh Chalk, and vice president of marketing for GoDaddy.
Earth Finance, a Seattle-based startup helping businesses reduce their climate impacts, recently launched a platform called SpatiaFi that enables customers to make location-based capital decisions.
“Earth Finance is already delivering game-changing results for customers,” Pearce said. “I can’t wait to get to work with this team to scale that impact.”
— Charlie Bell, the longtime Amazon Web Services executive who left to run security, compliance and identity at Microsoft, has been appointed to the board of directors at the cybersecurity firm Tenable. The appointment was disclosed in an SEC filing and framed as “reinforcement for Tenable’s AI-driven exposure management push.”
— Two notable Amazon moves:
— Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) has named Amelia Marckworth director of programs, innovation and entrepreneurship. She joins from Seattle University, where she has held leadership roles for more than a decade and also served as an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship in the Albers School of Business and Economics.
“Amelia has a proven track record of launching and growing startup programs, coaching founders directly, and being part of WTIA as a committee member and mentor. We’re excited to bring that experience and talent onto our startups team,” Randa Minkarah, WTIA’s executive director and CEO, said in a statement.
— Hernan Alvarez has taken a role at Seattle-based Hyperparam to lead product and go-to-market at the startup, which is building tools for collecting, storing and analyzing the data that AI systems produce. The company recently launched a product called HypAware to improve oversight of AI agents and catch their errors.
Alvarez joins from Great Expectations, where he was CEO. He earlier worked with Hyperparam founder Kenny Daniel at Algorithmia, a machine learning company co-founded by Daniel and acquired by DataRobot.
— Philip Jensen has joined Zap Energy as vice president of fuel programs and operations. Zap, an Everett, Wash.-based fusion startup, announced in April that it was expanding its focus to include nuclear fission. Jensen was previously at First American Nuclear and spent more than seven years at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Zap said Jensen “brings deep expertise in nuclear fuel design, testing, and manufacturing, and a track record of launching new fuel programs and partnerships.”
— Christie Johansen-Pinney has joined Noble Studios as its Seattle-based vice president of client experience. She has held VP roles at firms including Rooster Punk, DEPT and The Marketing Practice.
— Anders Mortensen, formerly CRO at The Trade Desk, has been appointed to the advisory board of Scowtt, a Seattle startup helping advertisers optimize their ad spending. Mortensen spent more than 13 years at Google, leaving as vice president of U.S. mid-market sales lead generation.
Inside a sprawling former industrial building just a chip shot from the Lake Washington Ship Canal, a Seattle tech veteran and his longtime friend are building the kind of golf and social sanctuary that they feel modern Seattle is missing.
Founded by tech veteran Shankar Sundaram, a former Boeing engineer and enterprise sales leader, alongside co-founder Ryan Schaffer, a University of Washington grad who also worked at Boeing, East West Club aims to reimagine the traditional country club.
Inspired by the multi-generational Indian household Sundaram grew up in as well as the close-knit neighborhood clubs of his East Coast youth, the name East West is a nod to bridging those traditional cultural values of family, community, and hospitality with a modern Pacific Northwest lifestyle.
The ultimate goal is to create a “third place” centered around genuine, family-friendly connection rather than corporate networking or status.
“A lot of the clubs in Seattle are a little bit older and maybe just built for a different time, for a different demographic, and we’ve changed,” Sundaram told GeekWire during a tour of the space this week at 10 Dravus St. in the Queen Anne neighborhood. “We don’t have six hours to go spend at a country club. We also don’t have $100,000 to go join.”
The vision for East West Club is starting to take shape across multiple indoor and outdoor spaces in what used to be a metal fabrication studio run by the late artist David Gulassa.
Spread across nearly 8,000 square feet between two buildings, the space retains its industrial roots with exposed timber beams, rich wood accents, and high concrete walls. Heavy construction on the primary building hasn’t started yet as the team awaits final permits from the city, but once built out, the footprint will feature a “golf lab” with wide indoor simulator bays and 500 square feet of digital putting space, alongside a private 19-foot immersive simulator bay.
The broader plan includes a quiet library lounge, a pour-your-own-beer wall, a café area, and a back-alley wellness nook featuring dry saunas and red-light therapy.
Sundaram, who is married to Armoire founder and CEO Ambika Singh, wants the club to serve as a convenient, family-friendly extension of members’ homes — a place where people can drop in for an hour rather than committing an entire day.
“We want you to bring as many people as you want,” Sundaram said. “We want you to host meetings here. We want you to actually come here and do your work here.”
East West Club will also function as an events space, where members can come together for curated gatherings, tastings, music, workshops, speaker events and more.
Rather than building out a full commercial restaurant, the club plans to rely heavily on local neighborhood partnerships. Sundaram is leaning on friends for advice on the café and coffee setup and talking to neighborhood spots about possible daily fare, alongside monthly curated dinners hosted by guest chefs.
“A big part of the vision for East West is to use the club as a platform to bring together some of the best of Seattle — partnering with great local restaurants, chefs, wineries, breweries, golf and fitness professionals, and other people doing interesting things around the city,” Sundaram said. “We want the experience to constantly evolve and give members new reasons to come together.”
To fund the buildout, Sundaram and Schaffer are opting for a community-driven bootstrap model rather than taking on heavy debt or institutional equity. They are capping their initial “founder” cohort at 100 members, asking early adopters to buy in upfront.
For the first tier of 25 founding members, a $25,000 buy-in covers four years of all-inclusive family membership, along with a $450 quarterly food and beverage credit. The early bet appears to be paying off: after launching a simple waitlist on LinkedIn three months ago that drew 120 sign-ups, Sundaram invited an initial batch of 14 people to tour the unfinished space three weeks ago — and 13 of them committed on the spot.
“These early folks are taking the biggest risk,” Sundaram said. “Prepaying for something is not very common… but we’re funding this through getting 75 to 100 founders. The total club capacity is 250 people, so the idea is, if every founder goes and gets two people, that’s the club.”
Subsequent founder tiers will gradually increase in price, and once the club opens its doors — targeted for March 2027 — the model will shift to standard initiation fees and monthly dues.
Members won’t have to wait until 2027 to start gathering, either. The team plans to open a temporary “Founders Clubhouse” to early members by the end of September, kicking off a full calendar of social programming, tastings, and events throughout October — including an Oct. 11 open house — while construction proceeds on the other spaces.
If the Queen Anne location reaches its 250-member capacity, Sundaram and Schaffer already have eyes on scaling the concept, perhaps with an Eastside location.
While indoor simulator technology is a core anchor of the space, Sundaram noted that golf is not the sole prerequisite for joining. Roughly half of the initial 14 founding members who signed up do not even play golf, seeing value instead in having a neighborhood spot to host friends, throw parties, or watch sports.
For those who do want to hit the virtual links, the club plans to partner with local instructors for lessons and youth programs, but the broader design caters as much to casual socializing as it does to perfecting a swing.
When asked about competition, Sundaram points out that East West Club isn’t trying to compete with commercial entertainment chains like Five Iron Golf or high-end, pure-play golf training centers like Evergreen Golf Club.
“If you just want to go hit up a sim and go have a burger and fries, there’s lots of spaces for that,” Sundaram said. “In the city, there’s nothing that’s like this. Golf is the glue, but nobody else is really bringing in this modern aesthetic.”
Keep scrolling for more artist renderings of the planned spaces at East West Club:
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