Seattle Ready to Ban Trained Circus Animals, Microsoft Temps
Must Jump Through Hoops
While the Seattle City Council was debating whether to ban Ringling
Brother's Pondering Pachyderms and other commercially-employed circus animals
from working city venues, a packed hearing under the capitol dome tent in
Olympia showed the snarling teeth of high-tech workers vs. whip-cracking
personnel staffing ringmasters. At issue was how disclosure of employment
agency bill rates (the amount an agency charges a client company, NOT what the
employee gets paid), would affect workers and employers. Staffing companies
compared billing information to a "trade secret" claiming that
disclosure would undermine competition in the marketplace. Workers disagreed.
"The trade secret argument makes it sound like we are dealing with the
formula to Coke," said WashTech co-founder Marcus Courtney to the House
committee. "But the billing rate is neither the formula to Coke, nor a
trade secret since the client company knows and the agency knows -- it is time
that high-tech workers know what is being charged for their labor." Senate
Bill 6165, which would restore the right to overtime pay for hourly high-tech
workers, is currently stalled in the state Senate. Meanwhile, the circus
animals will continue working for peanuts.
Please don't feed the Webmasters.
"Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo." The Seattle Online
Network's monthly gathering at the watering hole will be held next week at
Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo. Feeding time for Seattle's creatures of the Net
will feature the fresh marketing morsels of John Durham, VP of Sales for
Winstar Interactive, Raynu Sood navigator of DoubleClick's Seattle outpost,
Maggie Boyer, Director of Media for Avenue A, (and formerly iballs), and Nicole
Hammes Cole & Weber's Media Planning Supervisor, who has been paper
training the PETSmart account. Pardon me, are those baboons over there or your
coders?
You GO URL
GO.com, the Internet business of The Walt Disney Co. that oversees some of the
Web's strongest brands, has moved 250 employees from the east-of-the-lake
offices in Bellevue to the historic Smith Tower in Seattle's Pioneer Square.
GO.com's Seattle-based cadre represents a variety of properties, including the
editorial and engineering teams for ESPN.com, (and that site's successful
fantasy game development team); production for ABCNEWS.com, and all editorial,
production and tech teams for entertainment sites Mr. Showbiz and Wall of
Sound. Fifty additional GO.com employees will remain in the Westin Building in
downtown Seattle overseeing the Web Operations Center that houses a total of
493 servers, including 96 database servers that support 1,206 databases. Smith
Tower, an engineering marvel when it was built in 1914, was the tallest
building west of the Mississippi until the latter half of the century. Today,
after undergoing extensive upgrades, the Smith Tower has become home to many of
the region's most promising technology companies.
Artsy-Smartsy
If it's the first Thursday of the month, it's the traditional Art Walk in
Pioneer Square when the galleries stay open late to host the peripatetic art
scenesters. The Seattle arts community has taken center stage recently, first
in Thomas Orton's debut novel, The Lost Glass Plates of Wilfred Eng, which is
being laudably compared to John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman or Henry
James's The Aspern Papers. Recent media-centricity has also thrown the
spotlight on the cinematic debut of Snow Falling On Cedars, the acclaimed
best-seller written by local resident (and neighbor) David Guterson. If you've
got a hankerin' for fresh popcorn and jaw-dropping digital sound, visit Paul
Allen's lavishly refurbished Cinerama theater. Tell 'em Bill sent ya'.
DVDay Trippers
The date February 2 has long been associated with such historic debuts as
baseball's National League (1876), basketball's ABA (1967) and in the world of
entertainment technology, the first 45-RPM vinyl record (1949). It is also on
this date that Seattle's M-2K was somewhat anti-climactically born. Yet, the
DVD development firm has triumphantly outlasted the 20th century with its
Bubblegum Crisis DVD series of hot-selling anime titles and the F/A-18E Super
Hornet Attack, the first flight simulation on DVD-ROM. Coming attractions? The
company intends to promote the Websites DVDROMshop.com and DVDreporter.com
covering the the best of DVD sites on the web, with discussion boards, movie
and hardware reviews and more.
Here's an unabashed plug for THIS WEEK'S BEST IN-SITES, a witty Web wrap-up of
the week's single best sites in Advertising, Marketing, Media, E-Com, E-Mail,
Better Ideas, Power Tools and more. Edited by leading Seattlelite Larry Sivitz.
It's FREE just for sending the word "subscribe" to insites@ideabank.com.
