It’s Groundhog Day. Will Spring finally come for Bing marketing while Google is taking serious slings and arrows for favoring Google+ content in its new “Search Plus Your World” search engine results? Or will there be six more weeks of winter’s chill? “The Power of Shyness” may have been this week’s TIME magazine cover story, but what has [...]
If you use Facebook, the world’s top social networking site, you may have “liked” an Internet scheme without even knowing it – and unwittingly helped spread the scam to your Facebook friends. Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna and Facebook have announced the latest step in an ongoing fight against spammers and scammers: a lawsuit [...]
After merely splitting U.S. market share with its Yahoo! search engine partner, Microsoft’s Bing came to its own decision. It’s “splitsville” for “Bing, The Decision Engine,“ and full-speed ahead with a more active, verb-oriented approach (an interesting Facebook paralell) that Microsoft launched with a different kind of television spot during the NFC championship football game on Sunday. [...]
Cashing in on online poker may still be illegal in the state of Washington but free-to-play Video Poker, Blackjack, Slots, Roulette and other online casino games have hit the virtual jackpot for Seattle-based Double Down Interactive (DDI). The Seattle startup has been acquired by International Game Technology for $500 million. Counting up the chips, the deal includes $250 [...]
Recently named one of the best places to work in the Puget Sound, perking employees talents with such amenities as a free on-site gym, staff lunches, chili cook-offs, a virtual bowling competition, and the less visible rewards of 100% medical, tuition reimbursement and stock options, Metia Seattle, (the ‘geo-marker’ is “officially” planted in Kirkland), has [...]
Might as well admit it — you are drowning in a sea of information, a tidal wave of tweets and status updates, a pipeline gone Banzai with breaking news feeds and posts that would wipe out even the Laird Hamiltons of surfdom. What’s more, if you’re like most humans, you’re also running out of time to find [...]
If the Internet is a community of communities, Seattle is the hub of the wheel! The many spokes, the A-Z of industry leaders, from Amazon to Zillow, are well-known. Lesser known are the associations and networking groups that weave their threads throughout the social fabric: the Northwest Internet Advertising Group, TechStars, Gnomedex, BizNik, and Seattle [...]
by Larry Sivitz The Seattle Social Media Club closed out its summer season by closing the generation gap. The Gen-Z gap in fact! The teachable moment and the marketing momentum even featured a “Champion” for social change. She is Lockerz’ CEO Kathy Savvit. “I’m a little bit of an odd story to be a [...]
By Larry Sivitz If knowledge is power, including the power to heal what ails us, data is its lifeblood. But when the knowledge being pursued involves the body of information buried in the massive health care industry, the Web searcher is in need of a lifeblood transfusion. Surf among the current crop of health care [...]
by Larry Sivitz Could WHERE you play your favorite mobile game in the future, and the way it responds to your surroundings, create a more engaging and enjoyable experience than HOW you play? One Seattle company is finding it pays to know the score. Where real world and virtual world connect, friendly, local competition can [...]
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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]