By Mike Apgar, CEO, Ookla The FCC recently announced that it is looking for 10,000 volunteers to help conduct an expensive home broadband performance study for its SamKnows program. Yet very similar data is already freely available to the FCC. If you’re familiar with Ookla’s Speedtest.net or Pingtest.net, you know that more than a billion [...]
By Larry Sivitz “You can’t hang on without a handle,” a hall-of-fame, “Mad Men” era marketing pundit once said to me. Nowhere is that axiom truer than on the global Internet. Search engines are the handle that open the door to the Internet’s vast corridors of knowledge and stores of digital content. The SERP or [...]
By Dave Chase In my “lightning round” talk at the New Business Models for News, I spoke about some of the successes and lessons learned that we are having with the local sites (NewWest.Net & SunValleyOnline.com) in our new venture (NextNewsNet). Since a core purpose of NextNewsNet is to help other publishers succeed, it has [...]
By Barry MacKechnie In today’s economy it is more critical than ever for you to take the pulse of your organization. The critical question you need to answer is this: Are 100% of your company’s efforts and expenses strategically aligned to deliver your goals for 2009? Strategic Alignment In a strategically aligned company every employee [...]
By Tom Metz Myth: The value of a company is intrinsic. Reality: The value of intangible companies is extrinsic, not intrinsic. This myth is based on the assumption that a firm?s value is intrinsic, that it is a function of the selling company?s technology and other assets. The reality is that an intangible company does [...]
By Glenn Pingul A little known fact, according to Comscore, there were more than 10 billion video views online, by more than 141 million unique viewers, in December of 2007 alone! Reports show that more than half of the US population now has broadband access, with penetration continuing to grow rapidly, making speed to viewing [...]
By Nancy S. Juetten The most important thing to keep in mind about media relations is that business periodicals, newspapers, and broadcast media are in business to inform and serve their readers and viewers. Your task is to share timely, newsworthy, relevant, trend-worthy, and local story ideas for editorial consideration that do exactly that. In [...]
Advice: For small companies looking to maximize phone productivity, manage remote locations, and route phone calls like email, gotvmail simply works! When entrepreneur Stephen Schramke founded Bainbridge Island, Wa., data mining firm, Logic361, he knew the algorithm he had developed for saving companies up to 40% of their Google Adwords advertising costs would spread as wildly as [...]
By Dave Chase, Altus Alliance Fred Wilson once commented on whether technical innovation or business model innovation was more powerful for a startup. He cites examples of both being drivers. I’d argue that business model innovation is more durable. Mark Leslie (a rare CEO who took a tech company from $0 to over $1B in [...]
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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]
A Meeting of Minds
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