by Larry Sivitz Could WHERE you play your favorite mobile game in the future, and the way it responds to your surroundings, create a more engaging and enjoyable experience than HOW you play? One Seattle company is finding it pays to know the score. Where real world and virtual world connect, friendly, local competition can [...]
Facebook creates Fan Pages. Twitter begets Followers. YouTube attracts Subscribers. And Google invites you to show your affection for content with the +1 Button. Still the founders of Seattle-based Giant Thinkwell perceive that fan engagement is “not very special, not very social and definitely not as much fun as it should be.” The company is [...]
Microsoft Windows president Steven Sinofsky took the bright red hot seat at the All Things D conference this week and like the technical architect of an economic recovery in post-recession America, presented his rationale of where Microsoft has missed certain “windows of opportunity” and how the next generation of Windows seeks to reimagine the future. [...]
by Larry Sivitz Excuse me, but do you know how fast you were going? Yes, we’re talking to you, Mr. Ultra DSL, and you, Ms. Broadband. Okay, you too, young Wi-Max. Do you know the Internet speed (and quality) powering your online connectivity when it comes to surfing the Web, downloading messages and media files [...]
Ending a long slumber for Puget Sound IPO’s and amidst a continuing dormancy for home values across much of America, Zillow, Inc, which operates real estate site Zillow.com®, Zillow Mortgage Marketplace, and Zillow Mobile, has lifted its head off the pillow and filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise [...]
by Larry Sivitz Danny Dover is a superb optimizer, both across the World Wide Web in search engine marketing and around the Web Wide World in life. Like those he has trained with his SEO checklists for optimizing a Web page, Danny is living out the checkpoints of his very own “bucket list” and pursuing [...]
by Larry Sivitz On an iconically overcast morning this March on Seattle’s First Hill, with less than an hour to go before a 70-year old patient was scheduled to go “under the knife” in a world-class, robot-assisted operating room, Swedish Orthopedic Institute doctors were preparing to perform a state-of-the-art partial knee replacement surgery, including one [...]
by Larry Sivitz Seattle’s Übermind has an elevated way of thinking about mobile connectivity and commerce. Their mind’s eye vision is both transforming and transporting. The client question: “How can we migrate our current commerce systems and business processes to the mobile space?” is a transformative challenge the company loves to get its mind around. [...]
by Larry Sivitz Looking out the downtown office window of Michael “Luni” Libes, the founder and CTO of Ground Truth, you can see the future of mobile marketing— and the past. From one point of view, you can peer over the Seattle street grid toward Pioneer Square, and at the offices of Ground Truth’s predecessor, M:Metrics, a [...]
by Larry Sivitz Had the Winklevoss twins taken their idea for what would become Facebook and called on Lee and Lucas Brown (also twins) who happened to be in Boston attending Babson College at the very same time, the history of “The Social Network” might have been very different. Instead of Jesse Eisenberg being nominated for [...]
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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]