When Claude Hopkins wrote the classic treatise on Scientific Advertising in 1923 he proclaimed that copywriters must acquire the most detailed knowledge of their clients’ products that is possible. Today, Hopkins would demand that Web writers, designers, producers, media planners, search optimizers and marketing managers apply the same discipline to understand the science of online [...]
Thanks to a priceless gem of a domain name, and crowned by sparkling technology, administrative and software crown jewels, one of the Emerald City’s most popular web properties has become the virtual king of online directory assistance and contact management. By letting your fingers do the clicking at WhitePages.com, you can quickly perform people, business, [...]
The Seattle area’s largest “A round” last year went to the first licensee of a new effort to more ambitiously license Microsoft’s broad base of under-utilized IP. Its name was Inrix. When something as significant as that happens it’s worth taking a closer look. So Seattle24x7′s Dave Chase weighed in with David Kaefer, Director of [...]
This November, for the first time in American history, around 50 million Americans used electronic voting machines similar to ATMs. What separated these automated transactions from the ones we bank on everyday is paper thin, but it’s as important as our US Constitution. When you vote electronically, there is no receipt. Without that accountability, our [...]
Imagine you are the marketing VP of a retailer or a direct marketing company. Your CEO comes to you and congratulates you on the fine work you’ve done running the company’s online commerce operation. Now comes the hard part. The CEO essentially says to you that you’re going to need to double sales over the [...]
The seeds of the cellular phone revolution that were planted in the fertile economic climate of the Pacific Northwest during the 1980′s have proven to be evergreen, growing into a forested grove of wireless leaders and innovators, some large and well-trunked like T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless (which has been merged with Cingular) and Western Wireless, others [...]
Could Keith Smith, the co-founder and CEO of 180solutions, be the most misunderstood man in Internet advertising? It might appear that way, if you go by some of the discussion board chatter that has attempted to pigeonhole (in the past, at least) his search assistant technology as a rogue form of adware. The software, which [...]
As the world’s most interactive medium of information exchange, the Web generates enough forensic evidence on individual online “behavior” to make a CSI detective team positively giddy. That is, of course, if you know where to look. Sure, the Internet lacks “Caller ID” and there are elaborate lengths hackers can go to disguise their identity. [...]
Now that the storm clouds and flash floods of the Internet community’s watershed years have subsided, the newly emerging Seattle Web scene could be painted with a rainbow of colors instead of just the local emerald green. Hot local Web shops like ZAAZ, Pop!, RedCell and Smashing Ideas are doing a majority of their business [...]
Is there anyone in Seattle who is NOT selling, streaming, licensing, managing or producing digital music these days? Not, we would gather, from the blizzard of announcements that began accumulating in January faster than a sudden Seattle snowstorm. The Internet-pitched battle-of-the-bands (and bandwidth) for online music sales has pit Puget Sound brother against brother, RealNetworks [...]
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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]