By Jim Brosseau Lewis Carroll captured this dialog between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in 1865: `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ `That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat. `I don’t much care where–’ said Alice. `Then it doesn’t matter [...]
by F. Joseph LePla Like few before it, this current downturn has taken a toll on brand and marketing budgets. Business magazines, once fat with advertisements, are much thinner these days as brand campaigns are replaced by activities that will generate instant revenues such as direct sales. Does this mean that your brand and, by [...]
by Dave Chase, MSN Industry Relations Director Internet publishers work hard to persuade advertisers that we’re not too different from other media. We offer the rich media formats that today’s consumers expect. Audiences that can be segmented and targeted. And an ad buying process soon to be on par with TV and print. At the [...]
by Dan Japhet Some folks are not going to like this. It requires change. New learning. These folks are going to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future by golly. The rest will embrace the future because it’s just darn exciting. I’m hoping most of you are the “can do” industry professionals who live [...]
By Curt Rosengren There was a time when it seemed all you had to do was sneeze and another job would fall in your lap. Unfortunately, that time is past, and in its wake is a trail of people, pink slip in hand, wondering, “What do I do now?” To find the answer, I surveyed [...]
By Muriel Guilbert, Account Director, Parker LePla In these times of economic hardships,where marketing budgets are being slashed and air travel is an issue for many, the question “To tour or not to tour?” arises for a lot of companies who want media exposure. Are there reasonable alternatives that save time and money? Visiting press [...]
By Ian Lurie, Portent Interactive Remember when having the word ‘E-Business’ in your mission statement meant Aeron chairs for everyone? Now, people say ‘E-Business is dead.’ Try this on for size: E-Business never existed. There’s only business. You know, where you provide a service, or a product, and try to make more money than you [...]
By Marilyn J. Holt, Holt Capital Money is the lifeblood of any company, but early-stage companies are too immature to generate their own, so they need infusions of capital from outside sources to survive. The ability to secure this quickly is vital. You know that if people had invested in your company instead of Enron, [...]
By John Jerome What? You want to grow your business? You want to sell more of your product or services? You really aren’t so attached to your inventory that you actually want to get it out of the warehouse? But you’ve already force-fed all of your current clients, friends, family and anyone else walking by [...]
By Jerrold Prothero, Ph.D. 4.24.2001 In the gold-rush days of the web, it was truly remarkable how little money was spent by start-ups on usability testing. What was even more surprising is how few investors insisted that usability be built into the development process. Had investors demanded a vigorous usability feedback loop and monitored the [...]
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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]