The sun came out during Heather Gold’s ebullient Seattle “debut” on the shores of Lake Washington, and so did the warm-felt participation of those in attendance at the sold-out WordCamp Seattle WordPress convocation at the University of Washington. Heather’s unique brand of interactive, interpersonal audience engagement, known as “Tummeling,” was on display during her “standing room [...]
The Seattle Sounders FC have a new mobile app afoot! The kickoff version of their first native iPhone mobile application is now available for download in the iTunes App Store. The free application will provide fans real-time access to the club in a mobile form including: traditional non-match day information, i.e., team alerts, scores, rosters, [...]
Do you qualify to participate in the “healthiest” of all social media networks? If you work, network, or otherwise link your company with health care delivery of any kind, be it general medicine, hospital administration, medical research, patient care, or health care marketing, media or PR, the time is now to engage! And you have [...]
The WordPress 3.1 fuse is ablaze in Seattle and burning down to April 16th with an unprecedented intensity of interest for what is fast becoming the most explosive platform on the Web for user engagement, content and commerce creation, SEO visibility, and App-based, remote control, mobile dexterity. “B There” at Word Camp Seattle 2011 for [...]
Live Internet event, hosted by King County Collaborative Law, presents author and HuffPost Blogger Monique A. Honaman, Wednesday, March 30th, 5pm In a region made famous for building online relationships faster than you can say Kiss.com, uDate.com, or PerfectMatch.com, today’s social media tools are not all that helpful for couples dealing with marital stress and strain. For those struggling [...]
Lockerz, a members-only social commerce website with nearly 18 million members worldwide, today announced that its much buzzed-about series, “The Homes,” has reached 1 million views in less than one week, just within its member community. “The Homes” is an indie rock musical starring Chelsea Kane. In response to the tremendous positive feedback from the [...]
Zillow.com and Yahoo! have launched an exclusive partnership that creates the largest real estate network on the web, according to comScore Media Metrix. Zillow’s sales force now sells local advertising across both sites, and the 4 million for-sale listings on Zillow now also appear on Yahoo! Real Estate. Zillow and Yahoo! Real Estate announced plans [...]
The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA), one of the largest statewide associations of technology companies, IT departments and individual technology professionals in North America, has announced the finalists for its 16th annual Industry Achievement Awards (IAA). The awards recognize innovation and excellence within the technology industry in Washington State. In addition to recognizing the state’s [...]
The Big Chill that swept through the Puget Sound last week and put so many Thanksgiving holiday plans on ice became the inspiration for one good-willed cybrarian (that’s cyber user and good samaritan combined) to raise money for charity through the clever use social media. Patty Campbell turned a dismal weather weekend into a “glass [...]
World Standards Day is celebrated each year on October 14 to pay tribute to the efforts of thousands of experts worldwide who collaborate within IEC, the International Electrotechnical Commission, as well as the ISO and ITU to develop voluntary International Standards that facilitate trade, spread knowledge and disseminate technological advances With at least 650 million [...]
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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]