In an era where the smartphone you carry in your pocket can perform an acrobatic variety of digital stunts (most a whole lot more impressive than the Stupid Human Tricks of late night TV), the most “native” functionality of the phone itself, namely the transmission and processing of your actual verbal conversation, has been, well, not [...]
For anyone who has ever looked at a restaurant menu with “TMI” (Too Much Information) and wondered “WTF?” “What’s THAT Food?” or “What Tastes Flavorful?” or “What are The Favorites?” on the menu as judged by the people who have dined there, a new mobile app will put your mobile where you mouth is! Chewsy, [...]
The diary of a publicly-owned American company, from its Annual Report to Stockholders, (AR), to its public statement of Corporate Social Responsibility,(CSR), is a living history that is formulated, documented, and published chapter and verse, bits and bytes, in a recurring annual ritual. The design arbiter of that publishing process for America’s leading companies, otherwise [...]
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced the Next Generation Learning Challenges, a collaborative, multi-year initiative, which aims to help dramatically improve college readiness and college completion in the United States through the use of technology. The program will provide grants to organizations and innovators to expand promising technology tools to more students, teachers, [...]
Jonathan Schwarz may long be remembered as the president of Sun Microsystems who resigned his post with a Twitter post in the form of a Haiku. Now Schwartz is a CEO again for Seattle and SFO-based Informed Biometry who aims to improve public health by developing Web-based software for consumers. The Website’s home page promotes [...]
With online comparison shopping, on-site conversion tracking, keyword-based advertising, organic optimization and social media conversations all occurring at the speed of the click, today’s digital marketers have nary a nanosecond to spare if they want to stay up to speed with their advertising and SEO agencies and stay out in front of their customers To [...]
AdReady’s expanded platform makes the scalable display advertising channel as easy, effective and accessible as search advertising. AdReady, the Seattle online advertising innovator and market leader for automated, cost-effective online display advertising solutions who won the 2009 WTIA Servcie Provider of the Year Award, has unveiled AdReady® for Advertisers – Premium, AdReady for Agencies, and [...]
By ALLISON LINN Amazon.com has one potentially big advantage over its rival online retailers: It knows things about you that you may not know yourself. Though plenty of companies have detailed systems for tracking customer habits, critics and boosters alike say Amazon is the trailblazer, having collected information longer and used it more proactively. It [...]
Daily Peak Shopping Visits Up 27% Versus Last Year Black Friday marks the beginning of the holiday shopping frenzy, as well as the period when retailers begin earning a profit on yearly sales. While this still holds true for offline retailing, online shopping visits reached a record high this year on Thanksgiving Day, with Black [...]
$106 Million According to HouseValues After Surveying Real Estate Agents Nationwide to Determine the Market Value of the World’s Most Famous Residence The average price of a home in America these days is $223,000 – a lot of money, but nothing compared to the $667,000 monthly mortgage payment for what would undoubtedly be the most [...]
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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]