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They work hard and make good money — which got even better in 2012.

Source: Riviera Partners

Average salary by programming language

The average salary of a Silicon Valley developer jumped about $4,300 in 2012 to reach $118,900, a new study by Riviera Partners, a technical recruiting firm in the Bay Area says.

Database specialists brought home the most bacon, at $130,500, while lowly front-end developers wrangling CSS, Javascript, and some small remnants of HTML pulled in a relatively lowly $109,200.

Interestingly, when you break down the numbers by coding specialty, relatively out-of-favor Java developers make the most money, at $122,400. Developers in the popular but perhaps more accessible PHP programming language make $106,700, while devotees of relatively new languages Python and Ruby bring home $117,900 and $121,400, respectively.

So what else is new?

Not gender equality. Silicon Valley engineers are still overwhelming male, with 86 percent of developers prominently featuring a Y chromosome.

More details in the infographic below:

photo credit: Carsten Schertzer via photopin cc

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Steam, the online gaming platform and community from Valve, seems to have fixed a security issue today that allowed anyone to easily get information about games played, achievements, and stats from a private profile.

Kyle Orland of Ars Technica reports that he found the hole while poking around his own Steam profile. He found that you could manipulate the HTML address to unearth a number of different “private” pages associated with his profile, as well as find games he’d played in the page’s source code. According to Orland, he was able to “independently confirm” that this did not just affect his profile but others as well.

People in general should be concerned about these kinds of privacy snafus — not just gamers. Like most things on the Internet, what you believe to be personal or shared just with friends often appears in unexpected places. Thankfully, the information exposed in Steam’s case didn’t include highly sensitive data such as credit card numbers or home addresses. But it’s likely just as annoying as having a Facebook photo leaked.

Orland first tried to find a private user’s (which happened to be his own profile) list of games played by typing in “/games/?tab=all” after the profile’s URL. That didn’t work and instead brought him back to the private profile page. So he inspected the source code associated with the page, and there, in plain text, was the list he’d been looking for.

After identifying the games, he played with the HTML a little more, choosing to search for achievements in the game Portal 2. He added “stats/Portal2/?tab=achievements” to the end of the URL and was immediately taken to the Portal 2 achievements page associated with that profile.

Using the same method, he found the player’s stats for specific games, as well as badges. Orland noted that an observant snooper could find the times that person was playing a game, if their profile was connected to Facebook, and when the profile was created.

As is courteous and traditional, Orland reported the hole to Steam before going public with his information. The holes have seemingly been fixed, but Valve has not responded to the bug report.

Steam image via Shutterstock

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If you’ve been hunting for a bundle of PC software that will allow you to code in seconds, easily publish intuitive elements to your website, and edit your images in a snap, then this VentureBeat Store deal is for you.

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This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

Want to build a website with ease…whether you have coding experience or not? This VentureBeat offer will help you do that – no matter how much experience you have in that realm.

MacFlux is an advanced HTML5 website design application, capable of creating stunning sites completely from scratch. Although MacFlux includes free website templates to help get you started, this powerful Mac web design software is more a creative design environment rather than a template-based solution. Not only that, but no coding is necessary. The sites you can whip up using this platform will look professional – and you can make them without entering a single line of code.

And we’ve got this powerful web design tool for just $35 for a limited time in the VB Store.

Here are just some of the features of MacFlux:

• Easy Website Creation: You don’t need to be a web developer or have any HTML experience to create and publish your own professional looking website.
• An Interface That Simply Works: The simple interface does not overpower the web design environment so it is easy to navigate through the tools that will make your website great.
• Quick-Start Templates: Create and publish your own website quickly by simply picking a pre-designed template for your blog, business website, online photo scrapbook, video showcase and more.
• Advanced Font Support: Unique fonts can help transform your content into an eye-catching, easy-to-read website. Upload your own font and link to it using CSS3 font code. MacFlux also supports the Google Font API, providing a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page.
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This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

When taking on a new venture or starting up a new business, if you’ve got a chance to give yourself a leg up on the competition…why wouldn’t you? And if you can do it for as little cost to you as possible, even better! We’re giving you such a chance with our latest VB Store offer, as this Learn Everything Tech Giveaway contains 15 eCourses valued at over $2000!

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• Learn how to Make iPhone & iPad Apps Without Any Programming Knowledge ($497): Learn how to make apps for you and your business without any programming.
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One lucky winner will be selected on December 10th, 2012 and the more you spread the word, the better the chance you’ll have of winning. (Note: Draw date is subject to change.)

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs is optimistic about the future of the mobile web, but as it stands now, he simply isn’t satisfied with the mobile web’s accessibility and openness.

“We’re standing in the middle of a tremendous platform shift,” Kovacs said today in a keynote at the CTIA Wireless conference. “[But] I look around our industry and I see a lot of walls going up again. The reason we could plug in our computers and access the Internet in the first place was because we could agree on standards.”

Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox web browser, has a reason to be agitated at the state of mobile web. With Google and Apple increasingly controlling how the web works on mobile devices, a player like Firefox could get boxed out.

“The essence of it is that we are individuals and we want choice,” Kovacs said. “It’s impossible for me to believe that one or two companies will be able to curate content and foster development for 5 or 6 billion people around the world. It doesn’t add up.”

Kovacs said 7.2 percent of the world is now using mobile browsers, but by 2017, more than half the world will be using mobile browsers. That means Firefox needs a strong presence on mobile on top of its fairly strong hold on PCs and Macs.

He said he hopes HTML5 continues to grow and that, with 3 million HTML developers today, the web experience will continue to evolve and native platform development will fall off.

“Someone in this room will re-imagine the way we experience the mobile web,” Kovacs said. “We have to do better. HTML5 has taken off. It’s only a year old. A lot has happened in a year and a lot continues to happen.”

The way forward for mobile, Kovacs said, will be openness, standards, and a common language.

“Imagine if we all spoke a common language,” Kovacs said. “Image the explosion of innovation that would happen. I can’t predict the future, but I do know that the future is sooner and scarier than any of us can expect. … I’m pretty sure there will be one thing we can rely on: the web.”

Hybrid app development employs native capabilities while also serving as a strategic stepping stone towards adoption of HTML5.

A hybrid app is a native, downloadable app, that runs all or some of its user interface in an embedded browser component. To the user, a hybrid app is almost indistinguishable from a native one: it is downloaded from the app store or marketplace, it is stored on the device, and it is launched just like any other app. But to developers there is a huge difference, because instead of rewriting the app from scratch for each mobile OS, they write at least some of their application code in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and reuse it across devices.

The term “hybrid” actually spans a wide range of possibilities. Some apps, like the Bank of America, Facebook and Yelp iPhone apps, simply load some pages from their web site as part of the app. Other apps, like the Tower Madness game, include a few embedded pages that are written in HTML. But there are other apps, like Harmonius (a graphical sketchpad) or Logitec’s Squeezebox Controller that have their entire UI implemented in HTML.

From a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense to adopt HTML5 as early as possible. Industry heavyweights have pointed to HTML as the only viable cross-platform technology. Add the rumors about Facebook’s “Project Spartan” (believed to be an app store for HTML5-based mobile web apps), and Microsoft’s announcement that developers will be able to use HTML5 and JavaScript to create applications for the touch-friendly Windows 8, and it almost becomes just a question of “when” companies will adopt HTML for app development rather than “if”.

A primary reason that many companies are not already jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon is the belief that HTML apps cannot access native device features. Indeed, pure mobile web apps (i.e., those that run in the browser – not hybrid ones) are currently restricted in their access to features such as the camera, microphone, address book, and so forth. And while there is work in progress at the W3C to allow web apps to access such device services, mobile browsers do not currently provide such functionality – a key requirement for many innovative mobile apps.

But in the world of hybrid apps, frameworks such as the open source PhoneGap library make it possible for JavaScript code to query the compass, take pictures, find or create contacts and appointments, and tap many other device features that mobile web apps are barred from accessing.

Access to device features is not the only difference between hybrid apps and mobile web apps. Another important difference is that hybrid apps are mostly distributed through app stores: You don’t browse to a hybrid app – you download and install it.

Also, HTML pages of a hybrid app can be transmitted by a web server, but that’s not a requirement. To improve performance, hybrid apps can include a bundled copy of all required web resources (i.e., HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images) so that users will get instant access to them, without having to wait for a web server to send them over.

Differences aside, hybrid apps share some traits with mobile web apps. Unlike pure native apps, which make direct use of the graphics APIs and UI services provided by the operating system, in hybrid apps, most pages are executed by the rendering engine of a browser – much like they are in web apps. This means that, currently, only natively coded pages can achieve game-quality graphics, and although this is less relevant for business apps, you probably won’t be seeing the likes of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 written in HTML for mobile devices anytime soon.

Fortunately, the leading smartphones and tablets have very powerful HTML rendering engines, which already support most of the upcoming HTML5 and CSS3 standards.

JavaScript toolkits like Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile and dojox.mobile are fully compatible with the hybrid app development model, making it easier to achieve a look and feel that is often indistinguishable from native. As a result, hybrid apps running on mobile devices with reasonably modern hardware can achieve highly interactive and impressive user interfaces using just HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

For those cases where your app does require special graphics or system-level interaction that cannot be achieved with HTML, hybrid apps can combine web pages with native ones. One interesting hybrid example is an app by Korean credit card Lotte (pictured below), which has 100 pages written in HTML (reused between Android and iPhone), along with a small number of native pages that implement an augmented reality feature.

Other organizations are developing hybrid apps, while planning to turn them into HTML5 web apps in the future without having to rewrite them from scratch.

From a strategic point of view, development organizations should seriously consider adopting HTML for mobile app development sooner rather than later. The hybrid app model, although not suitable for all app development needs, provides a cost-effective solution for a very wide range of downloadable app types and allows gradual entry into the new world of HTML5 while future-proofing your investment.

Ron Perry is chief technology officer at Worklight, a leading HTML5, hybrid and native platform for smartphone and tablet applications.

Search engines rely on schemas, or HTML tags, to improve results and make them more accurate. When webmasters set out to optimize their sites for SEO, they can use these markups to help push their sites to the top of results.

A lengthy note on schema.org gives a little more background and explains why finding common ground with website markup is so important:

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

This isn’t the first time the biggest players in search have collaborated on a project of this nature. In 2006, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft came together to create sitemaps.org, which helped standardize Sitemap protocol.

Previously, the group announced that sites like YouTube could use H.264 royalty-free until 2016. Now, those sites can use the codec to drive their HTML5 streaming video for free forever.

HTML5 is the latest revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the programming language that makes up most of the web. It’s being looked at as a challenger to Adobe Flash in many ways, since it allows for web animations and video without the use of a plugin. Many video sites — like YouTube and Vimeo — are readying HTML5 video offerings, but controversy has erupted over which video codec is better suited to drive HTML5 video.

H.264 is currently the most mature codec available, but open source advocates prefer alternative offerings like Ogg Theora, or Google’s new WebM video standard. Mozilla refused to support H.264 in Firefox (even though it’s supported by IE9, Google Chrome, and Safari), because it didn’t want to pay licensing fees to the MPEG LA group.

As NewTeeVee points out, “MPEG LA is still charging for H.264 encoders and decoders, as well as for the use of H.264 in a number of other areas, including paid video streams and downloads.” Meaning that if Mozilla wanted to support the H.264 standard, it would still have to pay a fee.

MPEG LA’s decision was likely inspired by Google’s WebM standard. Google managed to rope in many high-profile hardware and software partners — including AMD, ARM, Logitech, Brightcove, and Skype — who together could strong-arm the industry away from H.264 video. Not surprisingly, MPEG LA has threatened to create a patent pool license to extract fees from WebM partners.

While making H.264 royalty free for many sites is a keen business move on MPEG LA’s part, it hasn’t won the battle for HTML5 video dominance yet. There’s certainly still room for a completely free offering, especially since Google is the driving force against H.264.