Meet the Dot Connector of Blue Dot Connecting the dots comes naturally to Kabir Shahani. As one of the inner circle of Blue Dot, a unique social bookmarking site that made its debut a few short weeks ago, Kabir’s personal and professional life is centered on connecting people, places and groups to the best of [...]
If domain names are the real estate of the Internet, you could think of Jothan Frakes as one part urban developer, one part architect and one part super agent to the stars. Since starting at the Internet domain game in 1994, Jothan has operated 5 ccTLDs or “Top Level Domains.” and worked for the company [...]
WashTech President Marcus Courtney arrived in Washington D.C. in March, just as details about Rep. Arlen Specter’s (R-Penn.) plan to expand the H1-B guest worker program to 115,000 visas were released. WashTech is focused on promoting Rep. Bill Pascrell’s (D-NJ) H1-B reform bill, which would cap visas at the present number of 65,000, and add [...]
Andru Edwards lives and works at the intersection of today’s chip-smart consumer electronics and network-savvy digital lifestyle. At GearLive.com, the popular blog he founded for devout “gear-heads,” he posts daily reviews of cutting-edge E-gadgetry that guide the earliest of adopters on how to accessorize their lives for pure techno-tantalizing bliss. The impre ssario moved from cyberspace [...]
Seeking out the finer things in life in the Emerald City of Seattle, not to mention Portland, Whistler, Vancouver, Hawaii or Las Vegas? Seattle impresario Glenn Walker is willing to do everything humanly possible to make sure that you enjoy a uniquely personal brand of preferential treatment. Thanks to the World Wide Web and more [...]
The brainstorm Bram Cohen had about sharing large files over the Internet makes even the usual February cloudbursts and tempests outside his Bellevue, Wa. residence seem fairly tame in comparison. Since it burst on the scene two short years ago, BitTorrent has done for file sharing (much of it the legal variety, by the way) [...]
Patricia Belyea is wired for the Web. The ebullient Seattle personality has been a fixture on the Northwest design circuit for more than two decades. In recent years, this savvy communications strategist has resembled a living, breathing hyperlink — instantly connecting people, projects and ideas in and around the Puget Sound graphic arts community. What [...]
The spawning of a new era in search engine technology can be found far upstream of the teeming reservoirs of Google, Yahoo!, Inktomi or Ask.com, just a few miles south of the path being spidered by the new MSNBot along the Northwest’s Burke-Gilman trail. As readers of Google’s recent SEC prospectus took note, “significant competition [...]
Donna Shirley knows the path to Mars. As program manager for the Mars Exploration Program for NASA, Donna was the original leader of the team that built the highly acclaimed Mars Pathfinder rover, landing a vehicle and several instruments on the surface of the Red Planet in 1997. For that historic mission, Donna also helped [...]
As the thirty-something president of The Hacker Group, Spyro Kourtis works hard to differentiate the firm, which under his tenure has grown to be one of the largest direct marketing firms in the West. The decision to aggressively integrate the Internet into the company’s campaigns has turned out to be a strategic windfall. The reasons [...]
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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]