Visits with some of Seattle’s big-name Silicon Valley invaders, details from some emerging startups, and new features for Microsoft’s underdog search engine are among the highlights in this wrap-up of the past week in Xconomy’s Seattle tech coverage.
—We stopped in for chats with leaders from both Facebook and Salesforce.com in the past week, checking in with those companies as they continue to scour the region in search of engineering talent.
In a sit-down with Facebook Seattle office lead Ari Steinberg we learned that Facebook has topped its original target of about 30 people and sees no need to slow hiring. Steinberg also said that the Seattle office’s engineers were quickly making a name for themselves back at headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, and in particular were taking a leading role in an update of the social networking powerhouse’s chat feature.
—Salesforce.com officially opened its Seattle office with a downtown charity volunteering event that included Mayor Mike McGinn—an actual Salesforce customer both in his official duties and on the campaign trail (sorry, Microsoft).
Woodson Martin, a senior vice president of the San Francisco-based cloud computing company, indicated that a recent lawsuit challenging a former Microsoftie’s hiring wouldn’t slow down Salesforce’s expansion. He also got in a signature dig against Redmond, saying that engineers “want to be out on the cutting edge and innovating, and not maintaining the status quo.”
—In startup-land, we checked out ShipSweet, a company from serial entrepreneur Ron Wiener of Venture Mechanics. ShipSweet is among the firms out there trying to crack some of the byzantine
