In the new era of social media connectivity, “word-of-mouth advertising” takes many forms: Facebook “Like” buttons and “Status Updates,” Twitter “tweets,” FourSquare or Gowalla check-ins, and location-based user ratings and reviews. Each of these connections are the latest expression of the time-honored notion of spreading the “good word” over the backyard fence. But how do [...]
The just concluded holiday season marked an auspicious rollout for Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live Marketplace. The online PC game superstore that officially debuted on November 15th has removed the physical barriers between gamers and the titles they love through the convenience of the Web and the power of Games on Demand. The launch also marks [...]
In a region where high tech know-how is the intellectual capital driving the next-generation of industry and commerce, from avionics to maritime, biofuels to biotech, real estate to virtual reality, and video gaming to e-tailing, locating Seattle’s brightest legal eagles on a search engine’s Local Map should be as easy as spotting a Starbuck’s store [...]
With a concept of cinematic grandeur combined with a bookseller’s pragmatism, Amazon.com has thrown open the gates of Amazon Studios, part film laboratory, part financier, part production company, but all entrepreneur. Amazon Studios intends to award a combined $2.7 million in its first year’s worth of monthly and annual contests for the best scripts and [...]
Avvo, the originators of the Web’s first online consumer research, rating and referral service for Lawyers, has launched a new service area that applies the same, professional scoring, rating and interactive Q&A system it has used successfully for lawyers, to an entirely new marketplace, the nation’s 800,000 doctors. What is the pain point in the [...]
Of the most notable, i-tuned “digital marketing performance artists” in the Pacific Northwest, the multi-talented POP band of online strategists, designers, developers and project managers have been arguably Seattle’s most consistent hit makers for the past decade. Keeping 130 performers in rhythmic syncopation is no easy task, particularly when they are spread between the evergreens of [...]
Microsoft joined its partners in revealing nine new Windows Phone 7 handsets that will be available this holiday season from leading mobile operators in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. With more than 60 mobile operators in over 30 countries worldwide committed to bringing Windows Phones to market, the millions of people around the world [...]
The crossroads of the online world in two essential, international disciplines, Search Marketing and Web Localization, both vital to “going global,” conducting international business, and simply being social in a country other than the U.S.A. or in a language other than English, converged on Seattle last week. The event was, to borrow a French expression, [...]
Who will be next to vie for supremacy in Seattle’s social kingdom? It could be the majestically named King of the Web. As the stealth Website had been hinting at for some time, their concept is “simply too amazing, and if you knew it all, your head might explode!” But now that the names, and the [...]
If the Internet were a sovereign government (which some may argue it is on the basis of its universal protocols and democratic access to information), the title of Secretary of State would have to go to Vanessa Fox. Not only does Vanessa seem to log as many air miles as the U.S. state department’s Hillary [...]
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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]