Wade Wegner

Wade Wegner, the former director of technical evangelism at Microsoft, has been named chief technology officer at Bellevue-based Aditi Technologies. At Microsoft, he was responsible for leading the team that played a role in driving Microsoft’s technical strategy for the cloud computing platform Windows Azure. He was also the co-host of Microsoft’s Cloud Cover Show on Channel 9, and played a role in events such as TechEd, BUILD and MIX.

“Aditi has one of the most exciting visions for emerging technology platforms in the Microsoft ecosystem,” said Wade in a press release. “A key part of my role will be to help our customers build and execute on a future ready technology strategy and I look forward to working with Aditi’s global engineering teams to build repeatable frameworks that can help clients accelerate this journey.”

Wegner’s appointment follows the hiring of another Microsoft tech evangelist. In February, the company hired Steve Marx — who CEO Paddy Rathinam described as “Mr. Azure” — as chief Windows Azure architect. Last year, the company acquired Cumulux, the 2010 Microsoft Cloud Partner of the Year.

Ralph Haupter

The head of Microsoft’s China operation, Simon Leung, has stepped down for personal and family reasons, the company announced today. Leung held the title of chairman and CEO of Microsoft greater China, joining the company in 2008 from Motorola. He will be replaced by Ralph Haupter, the current area vice president of Microsoft Germany and a 7-year veteran of the company. In addition, Gordon Frazer — managing director of Microsoft U.K. — is taking over as chief operating officer of the China region. He’s replacing Michel van der Bel who will head up the U.K. unit.

“As Microsoft looks forward to our next wave of growth and innovation, we consider these new leaders for the Greater China team as a great complement to our very strong existing team. These changes reflect a deep commitment to both the region and to creating new opportunities and challenges for our most talented people,” said Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International.

Mario Obeidat

Patent holding company Pendrell Corp. has named Mario Obeidat as vice president of licensing. He most recently held the position of telecommunications licensing at Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures. Pendrell CEO Ben Wolff, the former CEO of Clearwire, said that Obeidat has a “proven track record” leading some of the “most significant patent licensing transactions in recent years.” Kirkland-based Pendrell, formerly ICO Global, now owns more than 1,500 patents, including a purchase of more than 1,300 earlier this month.

SpaceCurve, a  “big data” startup that’s developing new ways to analyze location-based services, has named Charlie Barbour as vice president of development. It also hired Hans-Martin Will as part of its senior technical staff. The Seattle company raised $2.7 million in February, and named former IBM and Novell marketing exec John Slitz as CEO. “SpaceCurve is gearing up to take on huge new market opportunities in geospatial and real-time data and analytics,” said Slitz. “Charlie and Martin are the first of many accomplished Big Data scientists and engineers we plan to hire over the next year to build and launch our products.”

Andrea Eatherly

Seattle startup Placed — formerly known as Sewichi — continues to bolster its team after raising a $3.4 million venture capital round from Madrona Venture Group and others earlier this year. The mobile analytics upstart just tapped Andrea Eatherly as director of marketing and business operations. She most recently served as director of client services at Quantcast, where CEO David Shim previously worked. The company also promoted Nick Gerner to the position of director of engineering. “The addition of Andrea, and promotion of Nick, not only highlight the progress that we’ve made in the past year, but our continued focus to be the standard in terms of location analytics,” said Shim.

CoreLink Data Centers has named Chris Bennitt as manager of two Seattle area data centers. Bennitt previously worked in positions at Qwest, MCI and Panasonic Avionics.

Groupon’s international boss Marc Samwer has stepped down. GigaOm reports that life at Groupon is “pretty complicated right now,” pointing out accounting problems and regulatory issues in the U.K. Austrian Veit Dengler, a former executive at Dell, T-Mobile, McKinsey and Procter & Gamble, has taken over for Samwer.

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