Garrigan Lyman’s Chief Technology Officer Chris Geiser on the bright ideas powering digital marketing and creative advertising “Web technology is like lighting a film set,” Chris Geiser says. “It’s the spark that brings the medium to life.” Once a lighting technician for the award-winning TV show Northern Exposure and now CTO of digital marketing and [...]
Lee LeFever’s unique brand of video craftsmanship is far less common than his CommonCraft brand name might suggest. For the past five years, the Mount Baker producer, writer, director and voice-over talent, or Chief Explanatory Officer, (a different spell-out of CEO), has been breaking through the jargon and complexity of technospeak with a compelling tutorial [...]
by Larry Sivitz, Seattle24x7 Managing Editor The rising tide of Internet Search marketing that is known by synonyms such as “pay-per-click,” “sponsored search” and “paid search,” and acronyms like PPC, CPC, KPI and ROI, breaks gently along the rocky shores of Port Townsend, Washington, where it lifts large auto ferries and rocks hand carved wooden [...]
Before it became fashionable to speak of Googling, blogging, or i-Podding in your spare time, before broadb and and Wi-Fi entered the daily word-stock, not to mention the family room, before the Speakeasy Cafe became famous as Seattle’s first commercial Internet gateway and espresso bar where you could simultaneously click your spoon in a real [...]
Cash from Nigeria, Chat Room Romeo, The ‘Under Construction’ Blues. Each of these phrases could caption a screen-shot of the erratic events that transpire on the Internet each day. But penned by digital Web designer and singer-songwriter Jody Levinson (aka Eva Moon), the idiomatic language of the Internet is being handily transformed into rollicking music [...]
According to Wikipedia, the term Webmaster, is, well, a bit sexist. The catch-all handle for Web architects, managers, producers, designers, and programmers is grammatically amiss as more women (very few of whom prefer “Web mistress”) populate the field as a chosen career path. On the Seattle Web scene, nowhere is the gender transition more visible than at Google’s [...]
by Stacy Karacostas It’s been years since the Gartner Group told us 50% of Web sales are lost because visitors can’t find what they want. And 85% of visitors abandon a site due to poor design. Yet far too many small business Websites are still missing the mark by a long shot. Instead of having [...]
You can’t help but admire Danny Sullivan. His affable good nature, pleasing yet persuasive presentation skills, and uncanny understanding of the dynamics of search engine marketing have reared the Internet’s search engine industry, and even more importantly, the search engine community, out of infancy. Beginning as a journalist (and a native) in Southern California, Danny [...]
When Washington CEO magazine set out to identify the leaders of a new breed of Internet company – one that exemplified the “best practices” of a modern online business model — the journal was able to choose from a hotbed of companies being incubated in the high tech region known as the Puget Sound. In [...]
What do AT&T’s Bell Labs, Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs, the “Language Bank” of the American Red Cross and Seattle’s Literary Source have in common? For Northwest native Jennifer Hodgdon, who combines a PhD in physics and a passion for mathematical modeling and Web programming with a life of social responsibility, they are all part of [...]
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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]