The Turing Fellows Program last summer placed 19 college interns out of 750 applicants at New York startups including Tumblr, Foursquare and others. Now, the paid internship program is expanding, and will place around 25 to 30 engineering, mathematics or computer science students at startups this summer. The application process, which quietly began earlier this month closes on Feb. 6.

The program is co-organized by Canaan Partners, FirstMark Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners and First Round Capital. This year’s crop of startups include Etsy, Second Market, BuzzFeed, Blip and many others. Other supporting partners include Amazon, SV Angel, David Tisch of New York TechStars, Silicon Valley Bank, and Esther Dyson, along with the New York City Economic Development Corp. and the New York City Investment Fund.

Warren Lee, general partner at Canaan Partners, told me New York is increasingly seeing more startups who are pulling in a lot of funding. The startups involved in the program have collectively raised half a billion dollars. But it’s a struggle to get talent, especially with so many companies popping up here. Startups taking part will be offering paid internships to the students, who will also get a $5,000 fellowship prize at the end of the program. Last year, 95 percent of the startups offered jobs to their interns, said Lee.

“I think this year startups realize it’s so competitive to get engineers and developers, even getting some help for the summer time, that’s something worth spending money on,” Lee said.

He said the program tried to pick a diverse group of startups that spanned advertising, mobile, e-commerce and financial technology to give students different opportunities. This year, he said the students will also get more educational and academic programming, including talks from influential entrepreneurs and investors.

So far, applications are 25 percent ahead of where they were at this point last year, when less than 3 percent of applicants were ultimately selected. The finalists will be flown in for interviews in late February, with final selections made a week later. Unlike last year, Lee said the startups will also get information on the semifinalists, giving them leads on talent who may be interested in moving to New York.

The program highlights the ongoing efforts by the New York tech community to address one of the biggest challenges it faces in becoming a tech hub that can compete with Silicon Valley. The city has traditionally had a shallower pool of engineers, and many of the existing workers were deployed in the financial sector. But the city is accelerating plans to attract tech talent through a number of initiatives, including a new applied science engineering campus that will be built by Cornell and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. NextJump and Nasdaq sponsored the Silicon Alley 500 last year, a job fair bringing together more than 500 top engineering students together with 50 local companies. And hackNY has also been helping place students with startups.

If New York wants to rival Silicon Valley, something Mayor Michael Bloomberg has publicly stated, it’s going to have to become more of a hotbed for tech talent. That’s the end game, making New York seem like as natural a destination as Silicon Valley for smart engineers and developers. One internship won’t solve the problem, but raising the visibility of New York on college campuses can have some much bigger effects, including building a bigger talent pipeline for the city.

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I sat down with Codecademy co-founder and CEO Zach Sims to hear about how the company got to this point so quickly, and what’s on deck for the months ahead. Here are a few key takeaways:

Necessity breeds invention

The idea behind Codecademy emerged out of the founding duo’s frustrations with the status quo of learning how to program. Co-founder Ryan Bubinski was already an experienced programmer who spent his weekends and free time during college teaching other students how to build web applications; but Sims was not nearly as familiar with coding. When the two entered Y Combinator’s summer 2011 class together in the hopes of launching a web startup, Sims tried to learn how to code on his own so that he could be of more help on the technical side of whatever business they founded.

“I was watching videos and tutorials and reading books,” Sims said. “But I found I learn best by building things and breaking things, not by just reading something. I wanted something interactive where I could learn in bite-sized pieces, and actually practice what I learned along the way.” So Sims and Bubinski decided to use their time at Y Combinator to build exactly that — and Codecademy was born. The company is now backed with $2.5 million in venture capital from a handful of elite investors including Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly Ventures, SV Angel and Yuri Milner.

Timing is everything

Codecademy’s message — that knowing how to write computer code is becoming just as important as knowing how to read or write — could not have come at a better time. While many sectors of the economy are suffering from layoffs and underemployment, the tech industry is having a full-on hiring crunch. Nearly every tech industry executive I talk to is currently looking to hire as many good engineers as he or she can find. The only problem is that not enough people right now have the programming skills necessary for those jobs.

Screenshot of an introductory Codecademy lesson (click to enlarge)

“Programming is the new literacy,” Sims said. “We’re all walking around with these phones in our pockets, using all these apps, but no one understands how any of it works. There are just not enough engineers, and this is the job of the future.” That Codecademy launched just when this started to become apparent on a larger scale has been key to its early success.

Listening to users — online and off

When Codecademy’s users started getting together offline by scheduling real-life meetups, the company decided to follow them. Last week saw the launch of official Codecademy meetups, and there are now official meetup groups in 171 regional areas worldwide to let people get together in person to discuss their progress learning how to code. Also last week Codecademy launched a Q&A feature within its web product to let people talk to each other via online forums while doing the Codecademy lessons.

Getting bigger, but staying scrappy

For now, Codecademy does not make any revenue, but in the future it could start charging for more advanced lessons and premium services, Sims said. Any revenue generation plans are a bit farther out on the horizon, as right now the company’s focus is on growing its user base and adding new lessons to the core free service. One thing is certain, though: Codecademy has no plans to become an accredited learning institution that charges for a degree.

Sims, who studied Political Science at Columbia University but dropped out several credits shy of graduation, said that Codecademy is founded on the belief that skills are the most important factor in getting good work — not educational credentials. “If you look at a lot of Silicon valley companies, they don’t hire based on a degree. A lot of the best programmers in the industry never even went to college at all,” he said. “Your skills should speak for themselves.” That sounds like a worthwhile lesson in itself.

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McCain Stands For and On Offshore Drilling: McCain, standing astride the physical manifestation of his oily energy plan, reiterated his call for more offshore drilling. McCain’s original photo opp atop an oil rig was canceled because Hurricane Dolly was barreling across the ocean at the time. But Tuesday, under sunny skies, McCain told reporters helicoptered out to the rig: “It is time for America to get serious about energy independence, and that means we need to start drilling offshore at advanced oil rigs like this.”

Bloomberg Blasts Candidates Over Energy “Pandering”: Speaking at the 2008 National Clean Energy Summit, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg blasted the candidates for “pandering” to voters with short-term, gimmicky energy plans.

“We ought to be getting a real debate on our energy future from our major Presidential candidates. Instead, sadly, they’re treating us to a political silly season, with one candidate calling for opening up the nation’s strategic oil reserves and the other for giving the federal gasoline tax the summer off. For shame–the best that can be said about those ideas is that they’re pandering.”

The majority of the Mayor’s speech was devoted to outlining his hopes for an offshore wind farm near New York.

Schwarzenegger Thinks Inflation Is Good (for Tires): The McCain campaign had a field day with Obama’s true statement that properly inflated tires could save Americans gas. But now Republican California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has come out in favor of properly inflated tires, part of his endorsement of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers’ new “EcoDriving” program. One of the program’s 15 points says: “Sample maintenance practices include: Knowing which motor oil to use, understanding the importance of proper tire pressure and what affects tire pressure, understanding aerodynamics and much more.” Maybe we will see the Governator play a role in a potential Obama administration, or if Al Gore’s already taken that, maybe a spot in the Department of Transportation?

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It’s not often that the peacocks at NBC have much to puff their feathers out about. Other than The Today Show and The Tonight Show, NBC has consistently been the fourth-place network (behind FOX, CBS and ABC) when it comes to primetime programming. But the summer has been good to NBC. It has the season’s biggest hit with America’s Got Talent, as well as the Beijing Olympics, the rights for which it paid a reported $894 million. Given the fabulous ratings for the Olympics so far, not to mention the advertising revenue, which is expected to top $1 billion, it’s a good time to be at NBC.

The network, much to my delight, has also just rolled out the TAMi (Total Audience Measurement Index), which seeks to measure viewing across all of the available platforms – television (broadcast, cable, DVR and on-demand), online, and mobile. The free flow of data is good, and while NBC clearly isn’t looking to use TAMi as a way to sell advertising, it is looking to use it as a way to maximize television, video-on-demand, mobile and online viewing. It is a test-and-learn platform for NBC, for which I think the network should be applauded.

NBC has definitely embraced all of the various platforms for the Summer Olympics, and better still, plans to use TAMi for its regular news and entertainment programming as well. Some key data after four days of Olympics programming:

- TV is still king, with 90 percent of the exposure to Olympics content coming exclusively via TV viewing, with the greatest share coming from the broadcast network mother ship, NBC

- Only 10 percent of those in the U.S. are viewing the Olympics both online and on the Internet

- Only two-tenths of 1 percent in the U.S. are viewing content exclusively on the Internet

Though I imagine these numbers would change measurably if NBC was livestreaming all events on the Internet, I don’t know that the change would be significant. People are used to what they are used to and change does not come rapidly. Not everyone has broadband and as NBC’s head of research Alan Wurtzel points out, all the data suggests that people want the best viewing experience they can possibly get and if they can view it on their widescreen in high definition, they will.

It’s to be expected that NBC will claim that the Internet and other platforms aren’t cannibalizing the broadcast television network, but rather are additive. This certainly seems to be the case for the Olympics. Among the 10 percent who are watching both on TV and the Internet, Wurtzel notes that about 60 percent of that viewing is essentially using the Internet as a DVR to catch up on missed events, but around 40 percent of it is re-watching events they saw on TV and enjoyed. From NBC’s perspective all of this is viewing it wouldn’t have captured if it didn’t use multiple platforms, and to a large degree, I agree.

I’m often tormented to the point of wanting to grab an Anchor Steam when I see reports detailing data of new media success. The trend is up, and that is something to be excited about, but I frequently see stories like this one, celebrating MTV’s success of online viewing of the Jonas Brothers clips on MTV and six million streams equaling more than 60,000 hours of programming and outperforming web streaming for The Hills finale. But when six million streams produce 60,000 hours, that means that average viewing was a mere 1.6 minutes 36 seconds per stream. The overwhelming preponderance of data suggests that the average Internet video viewing is well under 3 minutes. The overwhelming preponderance of data suggests that the average Internet video viewing is well under 3 minutes.

Here’s the thing: TV is still king. If The Hills draws four million average viewers for an hour, that’s four million hours of viewing; in that case, 60,000 hours represents but 1.5 percent of total viewing. It’s not nothing, but it’s just 1.5 percent. And 60,000 hours of viewing compared to something like the Olympics, for which, last night alone, NBC had 38.97 *million* hours of viewing does not even make up two-tenths of 1 percent of total viewing. New media reporters owe it to themselves to do their homework now that cross-platform data like this is actually available and such comparisons can be made.

For now, mobile and VOD are absolutely tiny. Online isn’t tiny, but it’s not as big as many of us would sometimes like to believe. The good news is this: Online viewing will definitely grow, and NBC plans to extend TAMi to all programming, including shows like Heroes and Chuck. It seems to me that at some point they can’t experience truly impressive growth — be in online, with VOD, or mobile — without ultimately cannibalizing the broadcast network.

The Olympics is a huge event, with many hours of programming, which means that NBC gets more total viewing because of multiplatform availability. But because there are 3,600 hours of programming over a couple of weeks, and only 56 hours or so that wind up being broadcast in primetime on the broadcast network (including the portions that actually run past the official primetime end at 11 p.m.), any cannibalization would be masked.

But it seems inevitable that as broadband usage grows, it will cannibalize viewing from the broadcast network. Heroes is only on once a week for one hour, with around 24 new episodes a year. Especially for those who have no DVR and could not watch it live, online really is additive viewing. Best of all is the level of control it gives over the viewer experience. More and more, people will watch programming (except probably sports and other major live events) on their own terms.

From all appearances, that cannibalization is still a ways into the future, and by the time it happens it may not matter so much to the networks. Why? Because if a show like Heroes drops down to 8 million hours of viewing on the broadcast network, but picks up 6 million hours of viewing via other platforms, the networks will still be able to sell it, and they won’t care. Certainly in the case of the summer Olympics in Beijing, more platforms equals more viewing. That’s great news for everyone.

Again, I tip my cap to NBC. While I agree with NBC that TAMi can’t or shouldn’t be used as an advertising currency, it is a great testing ground for understanding how all the platforms tie together, I hope NBC will release all the TAMi information available for all programming. When we kicked off TVbytheNumbers.com last September, we did so with a virtual panel on Internet Video metrics. From our perspective there hasn’t been a lot of progress since then. TAMi may not be perfect — it certainly will not measure illegal downloading or streaming sites — but it’s at least a good start, and hopefully one that will lead to standard measurements used by all content providers.

Robert Seidman co-edits the blog TVbytheNumbers.com which focuses on television metrics.

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The only expected warnings was the suggested upgrade to a WDDM graphics driver, which according to the Advisor: "Your current graphics card does not support this." I won’t know for sure how well Vista works on the Q1 until I actually install it, but the "core experiences" look promising.

By the way, I used the Tablet Snipping tool to capture the fullscreen results from the Q1′s native resolution of 800 x 480 to give you an idea of the screen res and clarity at the native setting. Click the pic to get a feel for the native screen res.

-kct

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