10.14.2002 by Seattle City Councilmember, Heidi Wills Whether it was their great love of trees or the chance to see Dave Matthews perform a free concert, something special drove more than a thousand people to Victor Steinbrueck Park on Sept. 29 to rally in support of protecting our old-growth forests. In the face of new [...]
4.22.2002 George Gilder talks about technologies in terms of abundances and scarcities. At the public policy conference held mid-April by Seattle’s Discovery Institute and themed “Re-igniting the Tech Economy,” the man who wrote the law that “Bandwidth grows three times faster than computing power,” took time out to theorize the entrepreneur’s role in technology’s evolutionary [...]
By Larry Sivitz, Seattle24x7 11.05.2001 If you missed the TechViews 2001 October Investors’ Forum, you missed an evening of uncommon common sense with Rob Ryan, the entrepreneur, author (and board chairman of at least seven companies) who, after selling Ascend, the networking organization he founded, to Lucent for (not a typo) $25 billion dollars, retreated [...]
By Paul Reynolds, Seattle24x7 8.01.2001 It’s been the best of times. It’s been the worst of times. Allright, it’s been the worst of times — the worst in recent memory — for our non-union brothers and sisters who have not only lost their jobs in the latest rounds of employment cutbacks, but increasingly their dignity. [...]
By Mario Persona 5.01.2001 Quality should be like reason. Something human beings have by nature, and animals don’t. But we treat quality as an additional service delivered to the customer. Like in the story about two friends who ordered two whiskies. “In a clean glass!”, remarked one of them. Back with the two glasses on [...]
By Soula Jones 7.20.2000 Let’s face it: Seattle is not regarded as a restaurant capitol of the world. At least not among gourmets. One of the Food & Wine editors was out here not long ago, trying to find “best new chefs.” And she gave up. Evidently, there were no Cinderella chefs in the Sound [...]
By Julie Hill 3.1.2000 Even we–by no means technophobes–were skeptical about HomeGrocer.com, the Seattle-based online-grocery service. For one, their Peach-emblazoned vans seemed a little too precious for Seattle’s pot-marked streets. But now that we’ve bitten into the Peach, we’d do it again. Here’s why: Selection. With more than 13,000 different items, HomeGrocer (HG) offers just [...]
by Dan Bertolet 2.10.2000 Recently, Onvia.com has lured several seasoned newspaper reporters into its lair. Must be a content oasis, right? Wrong: the Onvia.com website is DIM. The front page is numbingly busy, plastered with column after column of tiny font I can barely read on my 1024×768 monitor. Considering this front-page assault, Onvia’s “Work.Wisely” [...]
by Dan Bertolet 2.1.2000 I don’t use a cell phone myself — no reason to. But a few weeks ago my friend Rob called to ask who had the best cell-phone deals (just because I’m an engineer I must know, right?). I told him to look in the paper, which these days means “go to [...]
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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]