Most recently, Roseman (pictured on the right, with Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus on the left) oversaw last month’s launch of Zynga’s social games platform.

The platform, code-named “Project Z,” enables games to be played directly on Zynga.com, rather than through Facebook, making it an important strategy for the company as it seeks independence from the social network.

In addition, Roseman also served as the manager of the San Francisco-based company’s office in Seattle, where he helped to recruit engineers.

When reached by phone, Roseman briefly confirmed that he had left the company about three weeks ago, after the launch of the platform.

Roseman said one of the main reasons he was leaving was because he spent three to four days a week in San Francisco, and was looking forward to spending more time with his family in Seattle. He has not decided what to do next, but said he is looking forward to something entrepreneurial.

Before joining Zynga, Roseman was CEO of Evri, a semantic Web start-up funded by Paul Allen; before that, he was one of Amazon’s first engineers.

Zynga declined to comment on Roseman’s departure, but confirmed that Jim Veevaert is now managing the Seattle office. Previously, Veevaert was president of Jerry Bruckheimer Games, a games studio founded by the famous Hollywood producer; he also worked at Microsoft for more than seven years.

In January, Zynga told me it employed 50 people in Seattle and was hiring.

Since the Seattle office’s open house in April 2011, it has grown significantly.

To help attract talent over the past year, it acquired Gasworks Games and CupidsPlay, two Seattle-area companies. CupidsPlay developed a game that merged social games and online dating, which I’ve written about. The two acquisitions are fairly minor, and were primarily for talent.

According to LinkedIn, Gasworks Games’ co-founders Toby Gladwell and Andrew Kaplan have been working at Zynga for the past several months. Likewise, the co-founders of CupidsPlay Diwakar Gupta and CJ Huang have updated their profiles to reflect that they’ve been working at Zynga’s Seattle office for the past year.

Most recently, the Seattle game studio helped to launch Slingo on Facebook.

The blueprints would more than double Amazon’s current footprint in Seattle, and hints at the rapid corporate-level expansion the e-commerce company anticipates over the next decade.

Last month, Amazon purchased three contiguous blocks in downtown Seattle. Terms of the sale were not disclosed, but the multimillion dollar — maybe billion-dollar — deal will represent Amazon’s first significant land purchase, once it closes.

Last night, Amazon’s architects presented plans to Seattle’s review board, laying out the company’s vision for an urban campus, complete with three 37-floor office towers, an auditorium, retail space and a few shorter, six-story buildings, reports Eric Pryne, a reporter at the Seattle Times, who attended the meeting.

A 36-page report detailing all the different layouts and scenarios can be found on the city’s Web site here. An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on its plans, and apparently no company spokesperson spoke at last night’s meeting.

The plans are fairly shocking, given the company’s rapid growth over the past few years. Clearly, the company’s leader Jeff Bezos has a lot more surprises in store that may push the company beyond its core online retail and digital businesses,  including the Kindle.

At the end of the year, Amazon had 56,200 employees, up 67 percent year over year. Most of the hiring occurred in operations and customer service, including 17 new fulfillment centers.

It’s not clear how many employees Amazon has in its Seattle headquarters, but it already leases about 2.7 million square feet, including 1.7 million square feet in the so-called South Lake Union neighborhood, which has recently been revitalized by Seattle tech leader Paul Allen, and sits just outside the downtown core.

According to sources close to the situation, AOL’s CTO Alex Gounares is leaving the New York-based Internet company.

At AOL, he was in charge of all of AOL’s vast technical operations. He is among a number of execs who have been hired by CEO Tim Armstrong and then have departed.

Gounares came to AOL from Microsoft in May of 2010. He was corporate VP of Advertising Research and Development and CTO for the software giant’s Online Services division.

Sources said Gounares wanted to move back to the Seattle area.

His departure is certainly bad timing, in any event.

AOL has recently been targeted by activist shareholder Starboard Value, which put up an alternate slate of directors last week in a brewing proxy battle.

An AOL spokeswoman declined to comment.

The e-commerce giant (a term typically reserved for Amazon in these woods) is one of the larger examples companies from the Bay Area that are setting up shop here and looking to soak up some of the Northwest’s rich engineering talent.

Other companies with satellite offices in the Seattle area include Google, Facebook, Zynga and Salesforce.

“I’m surprised I ended up at eBay, but the story is compelling,” said Ken Moss, who was hired in November to be eBay’s VP of managed marketplaces technology; Moss is GM of the Redmond office.

A long-time Microsoft employee whose claim to fame includes inventing the Pivot table in Excel, Moss more recently co-founded CrowdEye, a start-up focused on search technology and later on stock market prediction.

He said eBay’s dedication to the region is one of the biggest selling points for recruitment.

Most of the 75 employees that currently work there were hired over the past few months, and a small team has been here for seven years. Among the newbies I met were a number of Microsoft veterans who had been there for 12 to 15 years.

Moss says he will report directly to eBay’s CTO Mark Carges, which is “a signal to the whole company that diversified development is for real.”

“We are first-class citizens,” Moss said, referring to sometimes strained relationship between remote workers and a company’s headquarters.

Eric Brill, VP of eBay’s research labs, is also based in the Redmond office, and has been working part-time there since joining the company in 2009.

Moss said eBay will be looking to hire a range of technologists, from college graduates to senior leaders, including developers, testers, researchers, data miners and other positions.

While I was at the office on Tuesday, the mountains were peeking out from the clouds and were easy to spot from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the fourth floor. It was easy enough for everyone to have a window seat in the open-floor plan.

Although the employees just moved in on Monday, a sign outside the building already announced eBay’s presence. Inside, workers were busy putting the final touches on the space to make it feel like eBay. Primary colors of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted the office walls; with a bit of Seattle flair, conference rooms were named after Northwest tribes such as Puyallup and Quinault (and other names that might be difficult for San Jose-based employees to pronounce).

But missing were some of the perks that some recruits expect these day — no shuttles to and from work or fancy cafeterias, for instance. 

In fact, eBay has a long way to go to compare with what Google has done here. Since entering the market seven years ago, Google has hired more than 900 employees, spread across two locations, a spokesperson confirmed.

One office is in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood; the other is on the Eastside.

The two offices are geographically divided by Lake Washington, which can be crossed by one of two floating bridges — or by boat, if you are crafty enough. The traffic bottlenecks make for a horrendously notorious commute, so having two locations that straddle both sides is a huge perk — like having offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.

Because of Google’s size here, many of its perks are similar to its Mountain View headquarters, including free meals prepared by chefs, frozen-yogurt bars and other, mostly food-based, luxuries.

In eBay’s case, the new digs are located deep on the Eastside, a couple of miles past Microsoft in Redmond, and roughly 15 miles from Jeff Bezos’s empire in downtown Seattle. Recently, Amazon relocated its headquarters to a brand-new campus in South Lake Union, a neighborhood being revitalized by former Microsoft executive Paul Allen.

Other outside companies that have also established sizable tech centers here include Facebook and Zynga. A couple others have gained offices through acquisitions. Electronic Arts, for instance, now has a large office here, after acquiring PopCap; EMC now has big expansion plans here, after purchasing Isilon.

And Geekwire, a Seattle-based technology blog, is good at keeping an ongoing tally, including recent moves into the area by Jawbone and SweetLabs, a San Diego-based start-up, based by Intel Capital and Google Ventures.

Two years ago, Facebook opened an office in the heart of downtown Seattle. It plans to move soon to a 27,000-square-foot space that will have room for about 135 employees. The 70 or so engineers in the office today have worked on projects such as video calling, the Facebook iPad app and other big issues, such as security.

Last April, social game maker Zynga opened an office in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood, hoping to absorb some of the game talent here, spawned from Xbox and Nintendo, and cloud-computing knowledge from Amazon. It has 50 employees today, but declined to say how many it planned to hire in the near future.

As with most of these companies, eBay believes it can find a diversity of talent here that can’t always be easy to hire in the Bay Area.

As a Seattle native, and having covered tech here for the past 12 years, including an eight-year stint at the Seattle Times, I might not be the most unbiased on the subject. But I’ve seen first-hand the breadth of talent here, from Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, T-Mobile and many others, including a strong start-up pool.

Despite that, the local tech community often suffers from an inferiority complex when it compares itself with the Bay Area, which is much larger. Still, it seems that Silicon Valley companies are finding a number of excuses to travel north to drink from the area’s plentiful tech waters.

Evidently, Seattle has a lot of hometown pride in Amazon’s Kindle Fire. That, or CEO Jeff Bezos has been particularly generous in gifting the low-end tablet to local friends and neighbors.

According to Jumptap’s November survey of ad requests on its mobile ad network, an estimated one out of every 124 Seattle residents owns a Kindle Fire. That’s about double the number in San Francisco, where an estimated one in 249 residents has a Fire. And it’s significantly more than any other major city that Jumptap surveyed (Denver: 1 in 260; Atlanta: 1 in 263; Washington, D.C.: 1 in 292). That said, one in 124 isn’t as large a number as it sounds. Seattle’s current population is about 563,374, so one Kindle Fire per 124 residents amounts to only about 4,543 Fires sold there.

Another noteworthy data point: A lot of those Fire-using Seattleites live in close proximity to Amazon. Twenty percent of the Fire traffic Jumptap observed on its network during November originated from within one mile of Amazon headquarters.

Not all that surprising, I suppose. Amazon employs a lot of people in Seattle, and it’s certainly plausible that a fair number of them might be using the Fire, whether it be for testing or personal use.

In any event, the Fire appears to be doing well in Jumptap’s assessment. Traffic from the device on its network grew 270 percent in November.

“The Kindle Fire made a bigger splash than many were expecting,” Jumptap CMO Paran Johar told AllThingsD. “Its success may cannibalize larger device players like Apple in the future, and we’ll most likely see tablets at lower price points come from those players in the next year.”

In a statement, HTC said it would purchase Seattle-based Dashwire to strengthen its mobile cloud-based services offering. Cloud services allow users to store data, documents, and photos via the Internet rather than on devices.

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Zynga is poised to file for its initial public offering, according to sources close to the situation.

The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission could come as early as this week, or next week at the latest.

The move is not entirely unexpected, given how well the recent IPOs of several Internet companies have done recently, including business networking site LinkedIn last week and Russian search giant Yandex today.

Their strong performances show the huge investor appetite for fast-growing and high-profile Web 2.0 firms. Wall Street is also prepping for eventual public offerings from social buying site Groupon and, the big fish, Facebook.

Zynga’s valuation in its last round of funding was $10 billion, but it is likely to price itself higher in an offering.

After all, LinkedIn now has a market valuation of $9 billion, double its pre-IPO price.

Whatever the price, a Zynga IPO is a major coup, especially given how quickly it has morphed into one of the most important forces in online gaming, largely via distribution on the Facebook platform.

The company claims that it has 250 million people actively playing its games every month. Its largest game currently is CityVille, which attracts 90 million monthly users, reports AppData. Its original Poker game still manages to attract 35 million monthly users.

Its early titles, such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, first vaulted the San Francisco-based company into consumer prominence, and it has recently struck a number of high-profile branding deals with Lady Gaga and the makers of the upcoming animated movie “Kung Fu Panda 2,” among others.

That’s also meant a solid business. Zynga reportedly generated about $400 million in profit last year on about $850 million in revenue, although sources said the filing will reveal much more robust numbers.

The company has also grown its work force quickly. Last year, Zynga hired more than 800 people and today has more than 1,500 full-time employees in 13 offices, spanning six countries.

Recently, at the opening of its new Seattle office, its founder and CEO Mark Pincus–who has tried to hit the start-up jackpot many times before–said he had Amazon-sized ambitions for Zynga, referring to that city’s online retail giant.

Depending on how the offering goes, he might want to think bigger.

Sources said Goldman Sachs will be among the lead bankers in the Zynga offering.

Zynga declined to comment on its IPO plans.

Jive CEO Tony Zingale told me that Jive has been working closely with OfficSync for some time. Office workers spend so much of their time working on documents in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel that it’s a logical place to add the kind of collaboration tools that are the cornerstone of what the social enterprise is all about. “We’ve built deep integration that brings Jive and Office close together,” Zingale said.

The next move, Zingale said, which will come in the third quarter of the year, will be to use OffiSync’s technology to link Jive with that other foundation of office life, Microsoft Outlook. “Email is the place where so much content is created and stored, it is the collaboration system,” he said.

Zingale wouldn’t disclose financial terms of the deal, though he did say that OfficSync is being bought out completely. It was founded by two Israeli brothers, Oudi and Roy Antebi, both Microsoft veterans. Oudi, the CEO, ran marketing campaigns for Microsoft Office and Sharepoint, both in Israel and then at headquarters in Redmond. Roy, the CTO, lead a development team in the Microsoft SQL Server division.

OfficSync is backed by investments from GTD Capital, a Seattle-based venture capital firm, and Vertex VC, an Israeli fund.

Its also Jive’s second acquisition in as many moths. In April it acquired Proximal Labs as it was just getting out of the gate itself. And in March it sent a pretty strong signal about its intentions toward going public sooner rather than later when it added four directors, all of them with public company experience.

I asked Zingale if last week’s IPO by LinkedIn had caused him to consider quickening his pace toward filing an S1 with the SEC. “Obviously we were very interested observers,” Zingale said. “Clearly we’re very riveted by the benefits of being a public company, but I can’t say anything specific about our plans.”

Jive has something important in common with LinkedIn. One of its investors is Sequoia Capital which has invested a combined $27 million, leading a Series A funding round in 2007 and a Series B in 2009. Kleiner Perkins got in on the action leading a $30 million Series C last year.

While other sales positions have been hit hard by the recession, ranging from newspaper reps to real estate agents, it turns out not every one is losing out.

Fueled by hundreds of millions in capital and real revenues, the daily deal phenomenon is creating thousands of new sales opportunities–and the competition is heating up for trained workers with the contacts and experience.

Founded in 2007, LivingSocial has 1,350 total employees and Groupon, which has only been around since 2008, has more than 7,000. That’s not including all of the copycats, which also must hire local representatives in order to be live in a particular market. National providers are also flooding into the space, including well-established companies like Google, Facebook and Yelp.

But these aren’t the stereotypical door-to-door salesmen with briefcases full of samples. They carry iPads loaded with flashy presentations and are pitching something entirely new.

They are trying to sell local restaurants, spas, and yoga studios on the idea that in exchange for offering a steep discount, new customers will walk in their doors.

The frothy local sales market has been noticeable for Jessie Burrough and Harry Jigamian.

Burrough joined LivingSocial more than a year ago, becoming the company’s 24th employee after working as a commercial real estate broker for years. She is now responsible for some of the trendiest and most-trafficked neighborhoods in Seattle.

“It’s super fun, and it’s exciting when you believe in what you are selling. I remember thinking, this is a no-brainer, and that it is so easy to sell. I loved the idea,” she said.

For Jigamian, the decision was also easy, though he’d never heard of LivingSocial before they approached him.

He was a newspaper sales rep for the online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He now oversees LivingSocial’s local sales office as general manager. “I did not know what LivingSocial was, but I knew that online was where everything was going. Now the only two questions are, ‘Where does it go from here, and how high does it go?’ It was all too much to say no to.”

If you aren’t familiar, companies like LivingSocial and its larger competitor, Groupon, offer a voucher for a steep discount, usually amounting to 50 percent off. Customers pay upfront for the coupon. Half of that revenue goes to LivingSocial, and the other half goes to the advertiser, who will end up making 25 percent on the overall transaction.

Normally, deals aren’t valid until a certain number are sold, sort of like buying bulk at Costco. That’s where the “group-buying” term comes from.

While it’s a large chunk to swallow, the daily deal companies want merchants to look at it as akin to placing an ad in the newspaper–except instead of hoping people see the ad and come into your establishment, you will know exactly how many people paid for one and how many redeem it.

Mostly, the focus has been on local commerce; increasingly, it’s expanding into national brands and advertisers, opening the door to nationally-focused sales people as well. (In a separate post today, I wrote about LivingSocial’s latest nationwide promotion on flowers for FTD.com after its prior offer on Groupon failed.)

Mitch Spolan, SVP National Sales for LivingSocial, said he decided to leave his job at Yahoo and join LivingSocial because, with group buying, “there’s no modeling and no guessing. You know when someone buys a voucher that they are fundamentally buying a ticket to come in and see that store.” As Spolan helps to build out LivingSocial’s national sales team, he says the concept makes it easy to recruit. “The sales people understand that. There’s such a desire to be in this space.”

Still, closing a sale can be difficult on the national or local level.

Some merchants have been burned after selling thousands of vouchers, and then losing money on every customer who walks in the door. For a small retailer with low margins, it can run them out of business.

Here’s a look at a day in the life of Burrough and Jigamian as they make two sales calls, and a video in which they explain how they got into the business.