As Internet Websites were being blacked-out on Wednesday, January 19th, in protest of the controversial SOPA legislation more reminiscent of the days of governmental blacklisting, Seattle was being blanketed in a coat of frosty white. Mayor Mike McGinn activated the Seattle city government’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) after the National Weather Service forecasted several feet of snow and icy road [...]
After a 14 year tenure as the opening act in the tech world’s largest new product extravaganza, it seemed only fitting that American Idol host, Ryan Seacrest, would be on hand to send Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s back home after in his final star turn as a CES keynoter. While the Redmond brigade says its marketing [...]
How would you interact with an Online Voter’s Guide that lets you register your approval by degree (with a slider) and add your opinion to others on an election issue? CityClub of Seattle and the University of Washington’s Center for Communication & Civic Engagement and its Department of Computer Science and Engineering have collaborated to [...]
Group Health Cooperative, Seattle’s consumer-governed, nonprofit healthcare system that coordinates care and coverage, has launched a new customer-care strategy, highlighted by the development of an iPhone application, Group Health Mobile. The mobile application provides Group Health’s 650,000 members with unhindered access to their personal health information, as well as Group Health’s network of information. Group [...]
Lockerz, the Seattle-based social commerce company with more than 45 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, has acquired AddToAny, one of the Web’s largest social sharing platforms. AddToAny enables users to share and bookmark online content with the most popular social networks, news aggregators, email services, and instant messengers. With the acquisition, Lockerz expands its online [...]
Skytap Inc., a leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, has introduced Brian White as vice president of products. Building on experience from Amazon Web Services (AWS), HP, Opsware, Microsoft and IBM, Brian will be responsible for Skytap’s overall product strategy and product management. In his role, Brian will oversee the design and implementation of [...]
The first inaugural Seattle Interactive Conference (www.seattleinteractive.com), a two-day event expected to bring up to 3,500 attendees from throughout the US and beyond to the Emerald City, has been announced for Nov 2-3, 2011. The event will celebrate the convergence of online technology, creativity, and emerging interactive trends in one of the world’s most innovative [...]
When Jelena Krzeszowski, (pronounced “Kra-ZOW-ski”), a rising young star on the Seattle wedding scene with a world-class portfolio, sought to update her Seattle wedding website for this summer’s prime-time Wedding season, she noticed that the landscape had changed since she and Google first got engaged. Like a wedding procession itself, all the elements still needed to work [...]
Seattle personal injury attorney Betsylew Miale-Gix (in photo, Betsylew is on right) is one of the world’s most admired women when it comes to the sport of boomerang throwing in national and international competition. A women’s world champion in the sport for ten years, the long time U.S. team member is perhaps most admired by her [...]
In religious parlance, Justin Briggs might be described as a crusader who is committed to spreading the “gospel” about SEO best practices. His mission? To help others ascend to a higher place in the universal order of search engine marketing. Yes, there is a path of righteousness in SEO. If you are so inclined, Mr. Briggs can help [...]
Enter your email address below to receive updates each time we publish new content.
Feb 6 2012
Techspresso Shots: PS Top Tech Talent Changing Posts, Places and Partners, Avg. Salary $90,000+
Like the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley, the “Emerald Triangle” of Seattle, Redmond and Kirkland has become a many faceted jewel of a marketplace for elite technical and management talent, and strong software design and programming professionals throughout the ranks.
As the NW tech world turns, management turnover churns with it. Watching the direction of “HR talent flow” from one company to another, is a fair predictor of who is up and who is down in any given industry category at a particular time.
Take “third-party apps” for example, and the shifting momentum in that market space between Microsoft and Amazon. Last year, Charlie Kindel (no Kindle “name-pun” intended), who was a Microsoft general manager leading third-party app initiatives, left the company to launch a start-up as yet unrealized. At the time Kindel called Windows Phone “the best product Microsoft has ever built.”
Now, his replacement, Brandon Watson is leaving Microsoft to join Amazon.com’s Kindle team also in third-part app development. Watson’s Twitter account confirmed the move. “The rumors are true. The team is in great hands,” he wrote on Friday. “I’ll miss working on #wpdev.”
Mary Jo Foley notes at ZDNet that the Amazon group Watson is joining makes Kindle apps for a variety of platforms, including Windows Phone. Watson leaves Windows Phone with a legacy of accomplishment According to AllAboutWindowsPhone.com, more than 60,000 items have now been published in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Still it seems a bit surprising that the degree of overlap in the mobile app field is not restricted by a non-compete or non-disclosure agrement that would make it difficult to make such a switch “on the fly.”
Our talented cadre of Seattle workers are earning an average of $90,000 per year, up 5 percent from last year, plus an annual bonus of close to $10,000 according to a survey conducted by TechFlash. This compares favorably with the average annual wage of $81,327 for tech professionals nationwide.
Like the Microsoft and Amazon parallelism, the Bay Area has two opposing tech poles in Google and Apple. In an HR switch last week, Google purportedly pulled off a coup by hiring Apple’s senior director of product integrity for a secret project, according to VentureBeat. The hiring is interesting because the Department of Justice is investigating Google and Apple for allegedly working out a “no poach” agreement where the companies — along with Pixar, Lucasfilm, Intel and Intuit — allegedly conspired to suppress employee compensation by not poaching each other’s employees.
According to this Linkedin page, Simon Prakash worked at Apple for more than eight years where he was most recently the senior director of product integrity responsible for product quality across all of Apple’s products, from iPhones to Macs.
Now he’ll be working for Google on a secret project, presumably run by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is in charge of a variety of secret research and development projects at Google. The company recently acquired Motorola Mobility, and it has a wide variety of hardware projects under way that Prakash might be working on. [24x7]