By Dave Chase, Altus Alliance “When you are finished changing, you’re finished.” – Ben Franklin Judging by my unscientific sampling of a range of email I receive, there are some companies that run the risk of being “finished” by their customers. From retailers, financial service providers and travel companies to consumer publishers, B2B publishers and [...]
By Shannon Zastrow Generations One thru Four: A brief history of Web site evolution Since the infancy of the Web back in the mid-nineties, Web sites have evolved in appearance, technology and purpose. David Siegel, author of the famous book Creating Killer Web Sites, defines First Generation sites as linear, plain-HTML pages with limited layout [...]
By: Vivek Bhaskaran, Co-Founder, QuestionPro So, you’ve decided to conduct an online survey. There are a few questions on your mind that you would like to have answered and you are on the lookout for a fast and inexpensive way to find out more about your customers. The first and foremost thing you need to [...]
by Peter Christothoulou, Chief Strategy Officer, Marchex, Inc. One of the major factors driving the ‘comeback’ of Internet advertising is the accelerating interest by companies and the broader advertising industry in search engine marketing services, such as paid inclusion. Recent statistics from the Internet Advertising Bureau bear this out, indicating that search engine marketing, as [...]
by Karen Howe Approximately 50 million Americans have used Internet audio or video in the last month . This and other findings from a new study – Internet and Multimedia 101: New Media Enters the Mainstream- by Arbitron Inc./ Edison Media Research was revealed late last month. The study examined how the explosive growth in [...]
By Carl Robinson, PhD, Advanced Leadership Consulting in conjunction with Susan Jameson Harker, Paladin Partners I recently was asked to give a presentation to a group of CEOs about how to select top management talent. Given the expense associated with recruiting executives and the high cost of making poor choices, you would think executives would [...]
by Tracy A. Corley During the dot-com boom, there was some confusion about the word “brand.” No one knew what it really meant. To some, a brand was nothing more than a logo with many vivid colors and expensive advertising. To others, brand represented the big secret that never left the walls of the marketing [...]
by Cris Hagen, MS Strategic Team Building: Using “Hard” and “Soft” Tools to Improve Team and Business Performance Do you know your MBTI personality type? Do you know your FIRO-B profile? Has your team clarified its values? Does your team know its Emotional IQ? Do you care? You should. And here’s why. Research by the [...]
by Charlie Gillette ————————– “We’ve moved to wireless PDAs, phones enabled with web browsers, and PDA/phone combinations. Unfortunately most handhelds are vastly underused — leveraged only as digital copies of calendars and address lists that are synchronized with heftier computers or network systems.” ————————– Surprisingly, the majority of the United States’ work force does not [...]
By Marilyn J. Holt, CMC, Holt Capital If you thought starting the company was hard, wait until you try to raise money. The rules of engagement have changed for every company seeking investors. For all pre-IPO companies, especially early-stage companies, the screws are tightening; the bar is high; and money is scarce. This means early-stage [...]
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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]