“Giving back” to the community is among the noblest of virtues. When the community in question is a territorial space of 64 squares covering not only Seattle, but the entire USA (if not the world), it becomes an investment of royal proportions. That’s what happened when Seattle investment all-stars Erik Anderson and Scott Oki, along [...]
It’s 11:30 p.m.on the night before an “everything riding on it” presentation. The “do or die” project has your eyes transfixed on the computer screen, tracking the disparate elements of a brochure, a Web site, and a PowerPoint presentation. The text is down on the page, but the visual content is still indicated by empty [...]
Across the nation, in hot-wired universities, corporations and even small businesses, virtual learning courses are taking off. Industry watchers forecast that U.S. companies will spend $11 billion annually on online-training courses by 2003, and universities and other higher-education providers another $10 billion. John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco Systems, has gone so far as calling [...]
In 1883, 25-year-old Harold Preston arrived in Seattle by train from Iowa. He quickly established a solo law practice, before laying the foundation for what would become one of the Northwest’s largest legal firms, from one office and 13 lawyers at the end of the 1960s, to 350 lawyers practicing in six U.S. offices and [...]
If there isn’t yet a “killer application” for the wireless Internet, there is definitely a “killer statistic.” And here it is: In the U.S., more than 60% of wireless phone use is done inside a car. That would only seem logical, considering that we Americans spend much more time in our cars than Europeans do [...]
Slowly, but surely, investment-banking firms are coming to Seattle. Last year, Goldman, Sachs & Co. created a permanent perch here. And in mid-January, WR Hambrecht & Co. moved into the Bank of America Tower downtown.While New York-based Goldman Sachs epitomizes the investment-banking establishment, California’s WR Hambrecht & Co. is more of a maverick. It caters [...]
Allrecipes.com began the new millennium by being named the #1 Food & Cooking website by Nielsen/NetRatings. What’s even more impressive is how they got there. Allrecipes achieved the top spot with next to zero advertising. So far, it has relied mostly on word-of-mouth referrals based on the interaction of its strong online community — people [...]
Good news for all you couch potatoes: If Myrio Corp. has its way, video-on-demand will soon be available over your household telephone line. Using set-top boxes on our TV sets, we’ll be able to watch digital television channels, buy pay-per-view programs, rent the latest videos, play interactive games and surf the Web at high-speed. And [...]
The Internet is becoming less Anglo-centric. English-language content on the web is 50% to 60% of the whole (vs. probably more than 90% a decade ago). And more Internet companies are catering to their foreign customers/workers via non-English websites. Ready to assist them is Bellevue-based Glides. Via “UniSite,” its proprietary software, and an army of [...]
The best Internet companies are those that use the medium to do things that simply were impossible before. Not just adopting new channels for selling the same old things, but creating entirely new markets that would not have existed in the “old economy.” Fremont-based ShareYourWorld is a perfect example. Billing itself as the Web’s first [...]
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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]