On February 15th, NEO Global Development (NGD) announced the launch a regional office in Seattle, Washington. John deVadoss, a former Microsoft executive, will assume the role as the director of the office.

DeVadoss has more than 15 years of experience with Microsoft, and co-founded text11, a messaging service that integrates machine learning. While at Microsoft, deVadoss was responsible for driving the success of .NET with architects in Microsoft’s competitive efforts against Java/J2EE, and most recently built up Microsoft Digital from zero to $500 million in business worldwide.

NGD Seattle plans to open doors to the office sometime in February. Immediate efforts will focus around recruiting local development talent in the Seattle metropolitan area. Examples of large software companies in the area include Microsoft, Amazon, and Expedia, plus more.

The siting of the new NGD facility is representative of NEO’s recent efforts to establish relationships with Microsoft and other local companies.

NEO co-founder Erik Zhang said: “Seattle has huge developer resources and a strong atmosphere of innovation, and NEO has always placed great importance in technology development. Now that we have set up the Seattle office, we have more resources for engineering and enhancing the NEO’s developer experience to make it the most developer-friendly blockchain platform.”

The NGD Seattle announcement lands a day before NEO’s second DevCon, held in Seattle the weekend of February 16th and 17th. The event will take place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, featuring presentations from Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang, in addition to the following keynote speakers including:

Miha Kralj, managing director of Accenture, the world’s largest consulting company

Parimal Deshpande, founding member & director of marketing of Xbox Game Pass, and

Dr. Joseph Williams, Washington Governor Jay Inslee‘s ICT industry sector lead.

For developers interested in building on the NEO blockchain, NEO DevCon will feature an all-day workshop to provide hands-on coding courses and mentorship. Participants will learn how to set up a NEO development environment, build a smart contract, and publish it on the blockchain.

Free tickets are still available for students and developers who apply via GitHub. More information about applying can be found in previous NEO News Today coverage.

To reserve a place at the development workshop, send an email RSVP to NEO at devcon@neo.org.

For more details and to book tickets to NEO’s second DevCon, visit:

devcon.neo.org