In the new era of Social Media and RSS syndication, Web publishers can cut the ties that bind them to a single, physical Web page, and cut across time-worn practices to new methods of content collaboration. Was this the inspiration for the birth of Crosscut, the decidedly different online news publication by former Seattle Weekly [...]
by Larry Sivitz and Jennifer Grimes The season’s two major search marketing conferences, WebmasterWorld/PubCon in Las Vegas and Search Engine Strategies in Chicago faced a showdown this year, ready to drag race down the spectacular Las Vegas strip and Chicago’s Miracle Mile, respectively, from their usual pre-holiday pole positions. Only this time the inside track [...]
Representative Jay Inslee has made another strong pitch for a neutral Internet as part of a teleconference for Rock the Net, a nationwide campaign to fight for net neutrality and derail legislation that threatens access to music and cultural programming online. Inslee was joined by Nabil Ayers, owner of Sonic Boom record stores and independent [...]
Web’s First Video-Sharing Father’s Day Spotlights Online Dad-Daughter Duet with Idol Contestant & StarSearch Songstress From YouTube to Yahoo!, iFilm to vSocial, for Father’s Day 2007, Web video-sharing has captured the world’s attention and imagination like never before. On what could be considered the Web’s first universal video-sharing Father’s Day, Seattle Internet company named EFinancial.com [...]
GotVoice Just Put Voice Mail into Email What Could Be Easier Than That? by Larry Sivitz Finally Consumers Can Manage Voicemail Just Like Email – For Free! Got voice mail? Got Email? GotVoice has just made it possible to access your voice messages anywhere you have access to the Internet, and that goes for voice [...]
by Larry Sivitz “Teatro ZinZanni is the ultimate iDinner! An astronomical, gastronomical and anatomical side-splitting, interactive tour de force.” — Seattle24x7.com Where else but Seattle, where everything is becoming interactive, could you dream of it? A fabulous five course gourmet dinner. A live musical orchestra. An interactive, no-holds barred comedy revue. Troupes of table treking [...]
Your News, Your Way. NewsCloud and Newsvine are a study in contrasts, and the future of online news. The turf battle over readers and revenues that rages on between the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post Intelligencer, is so, well, yesterday’s news. The real contest that is brewing over the future of news in Seattle [...]
Bainbridge Island Teen Blogger authors eBook to Help Consumers Find Low-Cost Travel Fares Quickly Bainbridge High School senior Sam Sellers has converted a childhood interest in travel to a career that is really getting off the ground. His first book, the 152-page “Take Control of Booking a Cheap Airline Ticket,” helps readers all over the [...]
by Charlene Slayton Frustrated by government and empowered by technology, Americans are filling needs and fighting causes through grass-roots organizations they built themselves – some sophisticated, others quaintly ad hoc. This is the era of people-driven politics. From a homemaker-turned-kingmaker in Pittsburgh to dog owners in New York to a “gym rat” in southwest Florida, [...]
SEATTLE — “Desperate Housewives” on your iPod. Jay Leno’s monologue on your cell phone. Brian Williams delivering the night’s news on your computer. And “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” available whenever you want to watch it – not just Thursday night. Each of those developments became possible in the past few weeks, part of an extraordinarily [...]
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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]