Experience is the operative word when talking about the Web and “Experience Design” with Greg Nations, vice president of Interactive Services for the award-winning Seattle design firm known as Methodologie. It’s a uniquely interactive experience visiting Methodologie’s corporate Web site which just took home Best of Show honors in the interactive category at The Seattle [...]
“The Graphic Artists Guild is the only professional arts organization that engages in any sort of political advocacy and lobbying to make changes to the laws affecting artists,” notes the sagacious and elucidating Lisa Shaftel who has presided over the 160-member SPGA/Seattle Chapter (originally the Society of Professional Graphic Artists or SPGA) for the past [...]
The freelance lifestyle in Seattle, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, is not for everyone. But for those who are prepared to deal with paying the overhead of expenses like insurance and B&O taxes, promoting and selling themselves, collecting the bills, and living what can often amount to a solitary lifestyle, there’s [...]
In the new age of interactive learning, research reveals that what children do — what they actually experience for themselves first-hand, as opposed to what they may read or write — has the greatest impact on their comprehension and long-term memory. The challenge in education is creating the right environment for exploration and discovery. With [...]
For as long as he can remember, John Knapp has been involved in some form of teaching, coaching or training others to make technology a creative tool. When the graphic arts industry began its transformation from pictures to pixels, leveraged by the power of desktop publishing, John positioned his first company, Binary Graphics, to help [...]
Look, up in the sky. It’s the Space Needle, it’s a Boeing prototype, it’s a Columbia Center falcon. No, it’s SuperWebGirl! A woman who can scale large databases at a single bound, bend HTML in her bare hands…okay, is this the perfect metaphor, or what? It is for a career on the World Wide Web. [...]
For the first two years of their excellent Internet adventure, Rob and Dana Greenlee, co-founders of Loudvox, an Internet radio and audio production company, were on a regular weekend regimen. It started around 8:00am every Saturday with putting on the coffee and adding the finishing touches to a radio show script. 10am: Drive over to [...]
The narrow path to E-commerce success has proven to be steep and often insurmountable for many in the Pacific Northwest. Not so for Matt Hyde, head of the online operations of outdoor outfitter REI. It could be that Matt’s simply better outfitted for the climb. As the head of REI’s online sales (he’s the Veep), [...]
The dictionary offers two definitions of the word mogul. The first: an industry leader, a person of influence or distinction. The second: the sculpted or groomed contours of a ski slope. Remarkably, both of these definitions readily apply to the livelihoods of Dan Sundgren and Kristine Asin, co-founders of SeattleNetwork, the leading career networking community [...]
Less than 18 whirlwind months ago, a small group of women, virtually linked by the threads of an online discussion weaving across America and into the UK and Canada, struck up a conversation about starting a different kind of organization. The concept was one of an international non-profit group that would appeal to women who [...]
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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]