According to a statement from the company, the 70-plus engineers that Amazon will hire will work on technologies for supporting various hypervisors, management tools and operating systems. This is effectively a major expansion of the development team Amazon has already had in Germany since buying Berlin-based Peritor last year – a purchase that led to the release of the OpsWorks devops toolkit this February.

The engineers, who will be hired over the next year, will also develop machine learning technologies to be used across Amazon’s business.

“Locating the development of key parts of the Amazon Web Services cloud in Germany speaks to the broad set of talent here and the investment we are making in the country,” the managing co-directors of the new Amazon Development Center Germany, Ralf Herbrich and Chris Schlaeger, said in a statement.

Amazon’s big European data center is located in Dublin, Ireland, although it also has a couple of edge locations in Germany (Frankfurt, to be precise) for content delivery purposes. The company also already has teams of AWS sales and business personnel in Germany.

UPDATE: Someone who would know says:

@superglaze they've already been hard at hiring machine learning folks the last 2 months.—
Mikio L. Braun (@mikiobraun) May 03, 2013

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What makes Kim so vocal? Well, he just organized the largest engineering job fair in New York last Saturday called SA500, an event staged at the New York Stock Exchange that brought together more than 50 of the top east coast companies with 500 top local engineering students. The event featured companies like Kayak, Tumblr, Living Social, Stack Exchange and others. Kim said he was pleased with the turnout but he realized there’s a lot more that east coast companies need to do to compete in the extremely tight market for engineering talent.

Though he looks at the issue through the lens of east coast companies, Kim has a lot of good thoughts for any emerging company looking to pick up talent. Engineers are prized commodities and success and failure depends on more than just ideas but talented workers who can put them into practice.

Kim said it comes down to three keys:

• Exploit home field advantage — East coast companies needs to really focus on recruiting in their backyard, specifically on college campuses. He said the east coast has some of the top engineering schools in MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and others and yet many of the best students migrate to the west coast because of the lure of Silicon Valley or direct recruitment from companies there. Kim said in a talk he had with Stanford president John Hennessy, Hennessy told him part of the success of Silicon Valley was Stanford’s commitment to local companies, which helped build a virtuous cycle with many entrepreneurs coming back and recruiting from Stanford and giving back to the campus. Kim said local companies need to build those bonds with universities and connect with students, who have a lot of reasons to stick around on the east coast but often feel they must head west. He said a new proposed engineering campus in New York by Bloomberg will be helpful but companies need to start sewing up east coast talent now.”A number of graduates want to stay on the east coast but they get courted by Facebook and Google,” Kim said. “You have to work harder to attract the same talent.”

• Bring out the big guns – One of the requirements of the SA500 was that companies had to send a CEO, founder or head of engineering. Kim said that’s critical because for companies who are not at the top of the heap, it takes the commitment of their key executives to sell students on their company. He said NextJump sets aside a whole Saturday with top executives to chat with prospective hires and convince them to join the company. The lesson is that to build for the future, CEOs and founders need to get deeply involved in filling the pipeline if they want to attract the next rock star to their team.”The CEO, founder or head of engineers can beat out a recruiter from another company. No one can sell their company and answer questions better than these people,” Kim said.

• Play for the long haul– Many companies are looking to fill holes, said Kim, trying to hire someone who can start Monday. But he said the biggest pool of  engineers don’t become available until they graduate in May. The key is getting on campus and courting them early, making sure they’re familiar with your company. NextJump, which has only been in stealth mode until only recently, often gets some of the prime position at campus job fairs because the company is very active in recruiting interns and hiring graduates. Kim said the company hires up to 25 interns a year – sophomores and juniors – paying them almost full salaries, which he said helps spread the word the company on campus and convinces many to join after graduate. He said NextJump hired about 25 engineers this year, almost all of them who had worked for the company as interns.”People try to win in the short term but they don’t get better and lose in the long term. You have to look at it in the long term. You need great top talent and if they’re becoming available in May, you need to work as hard for that person as the person who becomes available on Monday,” Kim said.

The bi-coastal talent war

Now, many companies are already doing these things. But there are lot of companies that could stand to invest more in some of these lessons. Engineers are key to the success of many start-ups, and there’s a talent war going on. This is one way in which Silicon Valley has an edge: Because it’s got such critical mass and recognition, so many companies there sometimes don’t have to work as hard to attract top engineers. The start-up scene in New York and the east coast is rising fast and companies are showing there are great ideas at work outside Silicon Valley. But I think Kim is right in that for the east coast in general and New York in particular to aspire to be a rival to Silicon Valley, it needs to take recruiting more seriously.

As Bob Mason, Co-Founder and CTO of Brightcove, who attended SA500, put it:

“A startup or emerging growth company’s success is primarily driven by the quality and passion of the team. Often each new addition can provide an opportunity for a step-function increase in company performance. CEOs, founders and other key executives would be foolish not to play an active role nurturing the emergent culture.”

Images courtesy of NextJump

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That is, of course, unless you’re one of the four co-founders of San Francisco-based startup Parse, a software platform that adds a cloud component to any mobile app. Part of Y Combinator’s summer 2011 class — and with a month to go until the official YC incubation period is over — Parse has already debuted in private beta and is gaining increasing amounts of traction by the hour.

Evidently, June and July 2011 were nothing but work for Parse’s founding team. But in an interview last week, co-founders James Yu and Tikhon Bernstam said they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Parse makes software platforms that allow mobile app developers to store their data on servers without having to configure server-side code or worry about deployment and maintenance. With its software development kits (SDKs) for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating system, Parse purports to “provide all the server-side functionality developers need for rich, Internet-enabled applications.” Essentially, Yu and Bernstam told me, what Heroku does for web apps, Parse does for mobile apps.

I got Yu and Bernstam to give GigaOM readers their elevator pitch, which you can check out here:

Parse is not without its competitors: Kinvey and Stackmob are both attempting to solve the same problem. Parse says it’s set apart by being simple on the surface with the most capabilities under the hood. “We just think we have the easiest and best experience for developers and the best documentation,” Bernstam said. “For us, it’s all about minimum configuration. Our philosophy is that you can type in a few lines of our code, hit run, and start saving data to our servers.”

Along with Bernstam who previously co-founded Scribd, and Yu who was Scribd’s first engineer, Parse’s founding team is rounded out by Ilya Sukhar, who was employee number one at Etacts which was acquired by Salesforce , and Kevin Lacker, a former Google engineer who previously co-founded a social gaming startup called Gamador.

With a rockstar founding team and the booming economy for mobile apps creating a growing market for app developer services, it’s no surprise that Parse has already proven hugely attractive to investors. The company has already taken on $1.1 million in funding from a cohort of backers that includes Y-Combinator, Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, to name a few.

While Parse is sure to attract acquisition interest in short order, the company’s co-founders told me they’re not interested in a quick flip. “We’re really trying to build an amazing platform for developers. We’re all engineers, and we’ve all felt this same pain,” Yu said. “Given the reaction so far, it would just be a shame to sell it right away. We’re all really passionate about this big vision. We think this idea is huge.”

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A discussion in the New York Times‘ Room for Debate roundtable explores the question of whether New York can rival Silicon Valley, and most of the participants come away saying no. But what many point to is the fact that New York doesn’t have to rival or emulate Silicon Valley; it can be its own success story, with its own unique culture. And that is what the region should be looking at first, rather than trying to gain some bragging-rights parity with the San Francisco Bay Area.

You can’t teach entrepreneurship

Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr and Hunch, points out that you can’t expect a campus to build a spirit of entrepreneurship, which she says can’t be taught. It needs to be nurtured through apprenticeship, which can happen faster if the city attracts more startups and engineers. Craig Mod, a writer and designer at the Shape of Digital Content Laboratory at Flipboard and also a mentor at incubator 500 Startups, said New York can’t become Silicon Valley but can create its own tech culture that builds off the local vibes of the city:

Rather than find a way to transplant Mountain View into Manhattan, New York should provide greater support for risk-taking. Nobody wants to see New York clone Facebook. Instead, we are anxious to see the sort of Facebook that can only emerge from the unique fabric of New York. Great start-ups emerge from great start-up culture. Silicon Valley has it in full. As for New York, it feels like something special is brewing. We’ll have to see.

New York Flavor

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley

New York is already excelling in many ways, said David Tisch, the director of accelerator program TechStars. He said that New York’s wealth of brands, ad agencies, publishers, content providers and media assets, along with its population density, is helping give birth to very New York–flavored startups like Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter, Meetup and GroupMe.

I have to agree. Having made the trek from San Francisco to New York in the past year, I see a really thriving tech culture here in New York that is extremely active and has some of the best traits of Silicon Valley. But what impresses me the most is that many of the best startups seem to resemble the city they came from and take advantage of New York’s strengths in finance, data, retail, media and advertising. These are things that Silicon Valley doesn’t have as abundantly. But it makes up for it by its scale, support and a culture of risk-taking, which ends up attracting bright minds from the East Coast.

Build a startup culture

What New York needs to do more of is build out the infrastructure for a startup culture. It needs to support the schools it has now and reach out to those institutions and their students to show that building a company in New York is as viable as doing it on the West Coast. Facebook, for example, was created at Harvard but eventually evolved in Silicon Valley. The challenge for cities like New York and Boston is to show that that doesn’t have to happen. It’s about creating critical mass in New York and working with what’s already available, said Chris Dixon, Hunch CEO in a recent blog.

We need PayPals – companies that spin out boatloads of talented entrepreneurs and “smart money” angel investors. Big successes also reinforce the “culture of equity” that is so strong in California – the idea that owning options in a startup is the best path to financial and career success.

If that happens, New York has a great chance to continue to thrive. Will it be a place for big hardware or biotech development or a true rival to Silicon Valley? Probably not. Silicon Valley has a major head start, and it’s not slowing down. But New York can build upon its heritage and culture to be its own tech destination. And it’s got a lot of room to grow. There’s a good amount of local talent and plenty of cash available; and with the lean nature of web and mobile startups, it doesn’t take much to get a startup going.

Use money wisely

But the city needs to use its money wisely. Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, recently wrote that only 21 percent of the graduates of New York’s state universities launch their companies in that state, while 69 percent of California graduates start their companies in California. He gave New York the best shot at competing with Silicon Valley, but he said the money for the campus could be better spent on building out New York’s startup infrastructure.

cluster efforts, such as the one Bloomberg is attempting to create in New York, never produce the intended result: greater innovation . . . Instead of using the $100 million to build a new university, use the money to seed start-ups, or educate the underprivileged to become entrepreneurs.

In many ways, New York was built on ambition and dreams, and there’s no reason it can’t replicate that success in technology. It is already seeing more VC deals than anywhere else outside Silicon Valley. But again, the goal shouldn’t be recreating an East Coast version of the Valley. It should be in nurturing the spirit of entrepreneurship and fully supporting the startup culture that is already blossoming. That will create something that may not rival or eclipse Silicon Valley. But it will be a place unto itself that doesn’t have to take a backseat to the Valley.

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Next Jump and NYSE are hosting the SA 500, or Silicon Alley 500, a bid to bring 500 top engineering students from Washington, D.C., to Boston to meet 50 of the best East Coast technology companies. The event, scheduled for Oct. 15, will attract students from MIT, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, Brown and Georgia Tech. Applications are being accepted for both companies and students here.

Now, there’s no guarantee that SA 500 will meet its goals for students and companies. But it’s a major effort to strengthen the New York and East Coast tech ecosystem and help companies to grow and thrive without losing talent to Silicon Valley. It also shows that New York is rising to the challenge of being a major tech destination.

“There are great tech opportunities on the East Coast, but the infrastructure for bringing tomorrow’s talents together with today’s entrepreneurs needs strengthening,” said Charlie Kim, the CEO of Next Jump. “By taking it to the next level with events like SA 500, we are bolstering the engineering community as a whole.”

Kim said the event is unique for its venue, a place few ever get to see, as well as its focus on engineers only, together with tech companies. He said Next Jump has taken the lead on this because it has made significant inroads in on-campus recruiting, and earlier this year it piloted a recruiting event in conjunction with the New York Economic Development Corporation in Boston that attracted 18 tech firms and nearly 200 students.

The SA 500 is just one of many endeavors intent on elevating New York as a tech hub. Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced plans for Applied Sciences NYC, a bid to build or expand a state-of-the-art engineering and applied sciences campus in New York City, a project for which Kim is a key advisor. Kayweb Angels, a new angel investment group, launched in April to solve New York’s engineering talent crisis by offering development resources to startups in exchange for equity. Hackcruiter, a New York–based startup, is helping startups find good engineers in New York and San Francisco.

As Chris Dixon, Hunch CEO and the co-founder of Founder Collective, pointed out in a blog this week, the problem isn’t so much about supply. It’s that New York has a problem marketing itself as a destination for engineering talent.

The problem is that NYC startups are basically unknown to students at MIT, CMU, Penn, and even (shockingly) to engineering students at NYU and Columbia (big props to HackNY for trying to fix this). East Coast CS students also view startups as a much riskier path than they actually are. I say this having been at dozens of events with East Coast students over the last year or so talking about startups. I’m constantly amazed that most of the students simply don’t realize startups are a viable option.

One event won’t change things for New York, but it may help in the overall marketing message for the city as it tries to convince engineers that it has plenty to offer.

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In a stiff hiring environment like this, once-uncommon perks like free lunch, snacks, massages and foosball tables are practically required. How can a startup, or even a larger tech firm, attract top engineering talent? Here are a few ways that companies are trying to set themselves apart:

• Matchmaker, matchmaker: Anyone who applies for an engineering position at online dating site Zoosk between August 3 and September 30 and gets hired will be put into the running to win a date with either Samantha or Steve, two actors who starred in recent Zoosk TV commercials. Zoosk says it will cover all of the costs of the date, including a round-trip flight to Los Angeles, a chauffeured limousine and dinner. Sure, it’s gimmicky, and it plays into the stereotype of the dateless programmer — but it does sound like fun.

• All vices welcome: Remember the days when hosting an open bar was enough to get a roomful of tech industry talent? Nowadays, event organizers have upped the ante significantly. Take the super luxe party Silicon Valley event planner 50Kings is throwing the night before the Techcrunch Disrupt conference opens in September. From the invite: “We’re taking over the home of a prominent member of the Paypal Mafia and turning it into our very own private casino. Real tables, pro dealers, cocktail waitresses, strict security and high-stakes play. Serious tech players are flying in from Seattle, LA, Las Vegas and we even have an RSVP from an NBA All-Star. The party is on us, but there is a significant minimum table commitment.” Work hard, play hard, indeed.

• Entrepreneurship 101: It seems counter-intuitive, but several startups have taken to providing their employees with classes on starting their own companies. The New York Times has reported that real estate website Redfin gives regular classes on entrepreneurship at its headquarters in Seattle. Similarly Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and the current CEO of mobile credit card processing startup Square, gives his employees regular talks on topics such as how to raise venture capital. The thinking is, savvy engineers are likely to get the itch to start their own companies. Giving them the tools to learn how to do so in house may entice them to keep working as employees for as long as possible before they strike out on their own. And in this environment, whatever keeps engineers on your team is a good thing.

Of course, nothing lures in potential employees quite like cold hard cash. Financial incentives such as high salaries, solid stock option packages and lucrative bonuses are a given — and they’re getting bigger by the day. This infographic from Focus.com provides a great snapshot of today’s salary situation:

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Tess Aquarium.

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As the data on MIT graduates and the sectoral share of science and engineering employment suggest, it is conceivable that some degree of talent allocation between entrepreneurship and employment was affected by the rise of finance. Recall Figure 3 [shown below]: If we presuppose that some fraction of those scientists and engineers working in the financial sector would otherwise have started companies, we can imagine perhaps a slight effect of financialization on potential entrepreneurship. This also points to a question of the quality of companies being started, which we discuss below. It is difficult, again, to make firm statements as to causation, but the historical data seem to suggest that a two-way feedback effect exists.

Financialization could have a suppressive effect on potential entrepreneurship by draining away human capital. Conversely, an underlying decrease (or, at least, not an increase) in entrepreneurship creates a shortage of new financing opportunities for the financial sector, meaning the sector must find other outlets in which to be innovative and make money from money—causing the sector to expand.

The report acknowledges its drawbacks; for example, it draws causation from a variety of factors hugely affected by outside variables, from the overall economy to generational shifts in views about entrepreneurship. It also relies heavily on data from 2006 or earlier, which omits the impact of the latest bursting of the financial bubble as some of that innovation in finance resulted in the mortgage crisis. The study also looks at the rate that science, engineering and math (STEM) graduates have moved into the financial sector as opposed to starting companies.

The report’s primary argument is that Wall Street pay is so monumental startups don’t really have a chance to recruit the best and brightest of the so-called STEM graduates. This can make it difficult for startups to find more employees, which affects the overall quality of the startups.

Here’s where I think the survey breaks down a bit: It equates STEM graduates with the pool of founders. Many startups today are created not only by those in the so-called STEM fields but also by liberal arts, business and other graduates . I’ve written before how simple it can be to create a “startup” with little code and access to someone’s cloud platform. I don’t think these startups are out to create a business necessarily, so I don’t think they are the audience that the Kauffman report is talking about, but it’s also true that some of those startups will become a business.

Plus, even for those that start out in a STEM degree program, history is littered with college dropouts who go on to build huge companies. Yes, the debate between dropping out to start a business or stay and graduate continues to rage, but I think the survey misses a crucial point about entrepreneurs: For most, starting a business isn’t a career choice; it’s a calling. Thanks to an idea, a passion, a strong desire to never work for anyone else, most people start companies because they can’t do anything else. Typically, those founders create the strongest companies. If they fail, they’re still likely to go back and try again.

So while I can buy into the argument that there are a missing generation of scientists, mathematicians and entrepreneurs ready to join startups because they were lured by Wall Street’s high-pay, I can’t buy that there are many entrepreneurs among that crowd that have forsworn building their own business for the sake of a gilded paycheck. So yes, Wall Street may be taking away prospective employees, but perhaps a wider base of engineering and science talent would help solve the problem? Maybe our immigration programs should be revamped, or perhaps a greater emphasis on science and math will pay out in more children choosing to go through those degree programs.

The report concludes by imagining what would happen as the financial sector becomes a smaller proportion of the gross domestic product. Its authors conclude that not only could entrepreneurship rise, but the quality of companies will improve and then through the growth of those new companies, financial services will be available to meet their needs as opposed to creating bizarre financial instruments that seem to be the equivalent of shell games. It’s likely that we’ll soon be able to test that conclusion.

Picture courtesy of Flickr user epicharmus.

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Steve Rubel and I have been chatting quite a bit lately about netbooks. Steve is a “cloud guy” like me — he constantly uses web-based services and applications in lieu of software clients. For folks like us, devices such as the netbook and smartphone are our best friends.

Earlier today, Steve was asking me if I could drive an external monitor from my new Toshiba NB205. More importantly, he asks what resolution and color depth is supported. Although I use my netbook more on the go than in my home office, I explained to Steve that the ol’ VGA port on most netbooks might look paltry compared to today’s DVI and HDMI outputs, but don’t be deceived. Since the majority of netbooks run the Intel GMA 950 chipset, you can actually pump a resolution 2048×1536 at 32-bit color from that little netbook! In the above picture, I’m using the Toshiba NB205 on my external monitor at its native resolution of 1920×1200. There’s plenty of room for multiple browser windows, and of course, I have several tabs going in each.

Now this situation still isn’t ideal for video intensive gaming or enjoying high-definition movies. But from a productivity standpoint, it works extremely well. And if you don’t want to use the smaller keyboard and trackpad of a netbook in a case like this, it’s simple to add a wireless keyboard and mouse. The NB205 model I bought supports Bluetooth — the less expensive models don’t — so I have the option.

We tout the mobility of these little laptops all the time. But there’s something to be said for the immobile benefits as well. Why constrain yourself to a 10″ display at 1024×600 if you’re sitting still and have an external monitor to use?

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News of the new direction for Mac hardware comes from job postings, which have been garnering quite a bit of attention for Apple lately, considering the recent buzz about chip-making related positions. Now Cupertino seems to be looking for a few good 3G QA, design, and testing engineers to join their camp. The job descriptions, listed on their Hardware Engineering jobs site, list a variety of wireless specifications, with 3G among them, and the jobs in question talk about Mac applications specifically, so this isn’t just an iPhone-oriented position, as I initially suspected.

There’s already been all kinds of buzz about AT&T or other telcos offering bundles, including both 3G wireless plans and subsidized MacBooks, but so far nothing’s come of it. It’s very possible that either AT&T or Apple floated the rumor in order to try to gauge customer interest in such a package, and are only now moving to build the tech into their hardware because the response they received indicated that it would be worth their while. Question is, how much of a premium will Apple be charging for the new hardware addition, if any, and what kind of plans will the cell phone companies be able to offer?

Even if Apple is going forward with this, and the deal is good, there’s also the fact that tethering is apparently included in iPhone OS 3.0 to consider. Why would they shoot themselves in the foot, so to speak, by offering iPhone users a way to use 3G mobile broadband with their MacBooks without taking advantage of a built-in in antenna? There’d be no incentive for owners of those devices to sign up for an additional plan to take advantage of built-in MacBook 3G access.

It’s possible that the price of purchasing 3G antennas has become so affordable that Apple is willing to put them in as just one more incentive for prospective buyers, rather than as a significant selling point. Personally, I know I’d rather have it than not, even if my iPhone is able to tether on my existing wireless plan. We’ll just have to wait and see what develops, which will likely take at least a year, considering the types of positions Apple is hiring for.

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It’s hardly a surprise that Google is leading the pack, but the composition of the top 10 is pretty interesting. It’s good to see the old stalwarts, especially chipmakers (who are facing some seriously tough times), are staying competitive. Too bad their stocks aren’t doing so well — but then, what do they say about buying low? :-) I am surprised, however, by the absence of Cisco Systems and Intel.

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