Mr. Enbar (Photo: Twitter)

If Mayor Bloomberg's billions of initiatives to help boost S.T.E.M. activity in our city didn't tip you off, New York suffers from a dearth of talented engineers. The Flatiron School, launched last year, has established itself as a coding mecca for professionals with no development experience hoping to break into the tech world and fill some of those empty coding gigs.

With a 10 percent acceptance rate, Flatiron has been pretty successful in placing applicants in jobs:  Last September, 100 percent of graduates scored fulltime developer gigs at places like Conde Nast, Universal and Contently, according to Adam Enbar, the school's cofounder.

Now, Flatiron is teaming up with Skillcrush, a New York-based digital literacy startup, to offer a two-week intensive program for high school students hoping to hone their developer chops. "The longterm goal will be to create a more sustainable after school program so that rather than kids doing ballet or karate or learning violin we can add coding to that mix," Mr. Enbar told Betabeat by phone. "We want to create a real ongoing program to help kids learn how to code."

The program, which will be taught by Skillcrush cofounders Adda Birnir and Kate McGee, will run from June 17th to June 28th with classes Monday - Friday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. With such similar mission statements, both Flatiron School and Skillcrush have been looking for an opportunity to partner up, and offering a summer program for kid coders seemed like the perfect sweet spot.

"One of the things that's great about high school kids is they're going to be super fluent in all of the school apps," Ms. Birnir told Betabeat by phone. "But what we’re gonna do is say, 'You’re really excited about the Internet, here’s how you go from being a consumer of the web to someone who’s actively participating in it. It can be for fun: you can make video games or Tumblr blogs or animated GIFs, but there’s also a way where you can have a real impact on the world through the Internet and through building web applications."

The program will be divided into three parts. The first will be dedicated to teaching kids typical web terminology and introducing them to HTML and CSS; the second will get them into the terminal and train them to think conceptually about programming; the third will intro kids to the hacker and maker movement.

"Our goal is really to just get these kids super excited about programming and computers and get them thinking they can be active participants as opposed to passive consumers," Ms. Birnir said.

Mr. Enbar told Betabeat that the first program will cost $2,000 and will only be admitting about 20 students. Manhattan Prep has provided a classroom for free, and Flatiron plans to donate the proceedings saved from renting a space to a nonprofit that teaches kids how to code.

"As we can create a business out of teaching kids to code we can also be empowering these nonprofits that are doing really great work," Mr. Enbar added.

"It's a similar approach to Ron Conway and Yuri Milner's deal with Y Combinator," Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro told Betabeat this afternoon, on his way to a board meeting. Mr. Shapiro, whose firm has invested in Kickstarter, Simple, TaskRabbit, and Codecademy, was referring to the blanket investment Collaborative Fund just announced--offering $50,000 a piece in all five of the startups to come out of Brooklyn Beta's "Summer Camp," an incubator of sorts.

(Last January, Mr. Milner and Mr. Conway launched the Start Fund to plunk $150,000 into every new Y Combinator startup.)

Brooklyn Beta, which launched in 2010, is a non-profit conference--going on right now!--put on by Fictive Kin, a design-focused product shop in Brooklyn. But the organizers, who target the “work hard and be nice to people” crowd (be still our cold heart), are expanding. For the first time this year, Brooklyn Beta offered a "Summer Camp," a 12-week incubator program where designer-developer teams focus on "making stuff that matters" and then present at this week's conference. The organizers offer $25,000 to each startup for a six percent stake and then reinvest the profit back in Brooklyn Beta.

Collaborative Fund's interest in funding the initiative came about through an investment they made in Creative Morning, a global morning lecture series for creative types. Creative Morning is run out of a coworking space called StudioMates in Dumbo, which is where Mr. Shapiro met FictiveKin partner and Stanford alum Cameron Koczon. The two discussed the importance of design and a shared frustration with "how Silicon Valley has such a heavy emphasis on engineering and placing engineering talent ahead of design talent," Mr. Shapiro told Betabeat. Part of the thinking behind investing in SkillShare and Kickstarter, he added, was looking for design-led startups.

But there's another overlap in the venn diagram between the two organizations: working towards something with a broader impact. "Not from a sacrificial or philanthropic angle, like a soup kitchen," Mr. Shapiro explained, but having people build applications, sites, programs, and services that push the world forward in a way that at a minimum is interesting and new, as opposed to pure entertainment or another photo sharing app."

"Not that I have anything against that!" he was quick to add, "But that's something that we talk a lot about."

In addition to investing, Collaborative Fund has enlisted Ryan Jacoby, the former head of the New York studio of Ideo, the much-lauded design and innovation consultancy that boasts clients like Proctor & Gamble and Pepsi, to mentor the startups.

Mr. Shapiro said he wasn't sure at first how Collaborative Fund could help and contemplated sponsorship. "[Mr. Koczon] asked me to be a mentor, which is sweet, but I'm not adding any value," he said. Collaborative Fund is "the anti-Ron Conway, in a sense--not in a mean-spirited way, but we're sort of slow and deliberate and we don't make that many investments," Mr. Shapiro said, admitting some nervousness to investing in five companies pre-product.

Ultimately, however, he said, "It was really as much a bet on Cameron and his team at FictiveKin and their ability to select good people and bring in good talent. But it actually turns out that I'm pretty excited about the companies and the diversity of the teams and the actual problems that they're trying to solve."

Sadly, Mr. Shapiro, who said he will consider this kind of blanket offer for next year's class, had to fly out to San Francisco for that board meeting, and was missing today's line-up. But you can follow along with the speakers via Twitter under the hashtag #BrooklynBeta.

Here are the five startups from this year's Brooklyn Beta Summer Camp:

Sticker FM - a collaborative video platform allowing people from around the world to track and report in real time how a situation is developing.

Webe.at - a platform to easily follow, collaborate, and stylize calendars, breaking them out of spreadsheet-like boxes to include media rich content.

Farmstand - an app  that uses your location to show you where to buy local produce from farmers, CSAs, co-ops, community gardens, rooftop gardens and local markets.

MakersRow - a curated search platform and learning community that connects manufacturers and makers.

Skillcrush - a community-driven learning platform to help you increase your digital literacy and achieve your goals with technology.

Representatives from Shindig, Skillcrush and Appguppy answer questions about their products.

Crowded into NYU’s Skirball center, the New York tech world got one step closer to developing Skynet Tuesday night at the monthly New York Tech Meetup, just one day after NYTM reached the 25,000 member mark.

“What I fell in love with was the community. I had not really had any tech in my background at all, and yet felt totally at home here,” gushed Jessica Lawrence, the managing director of NYTM, as she announced their membership accomplishments to cheers from the boisterous crowd.

Perhaps of more relevance to the future of our society—Jonathan Gottfried, a developer evangelist at Twilio, did a live demonstration of the TwilioBot 3000, a possible predecessor of assassin cyborgs. Mr. Gottfried was able to control the TwilioBot with his phone, sending it commands by typing numbers on his keypad … until he accidentally hung up on the TwilioBot.

But the robot didn’t drive off the stage, and Mr. Gottfried was able to answer a few questions about the bot, including a dreaded revenue inquiry. “I feel like I won’t need venture capital once my robot minions have taken over the world,” he responded, eliciting laughter from the tech savvy audience.

Vook and Appguppy Mobile also demoed during the evening, two platforms that allow you to respectively create your own ebook or your own mobile app in a matter of minutes.

Appguppy, founded by Anu Nadkarni, Raj Dandage and Ash Nadkarni, lets you make an app about your favorite topic: yourself! The service lets you integrate your personal webpage and social media presence--say tweets about a concert date if you're a singer. Watch out Apple, because Appguppy bypasses app stores and allows users to sell their all-about-me app to iPhone and Android-using friends directly through Facebook and Twitter. “Now your friends can be obsessed with you on your phones,” Ms. Nadkarni said.

In the same DIY spirit, Vook simplifies the process of designing and marketing an eBook, a process that Matthew Cavnar, the vice president of business development for Vook, insisted was unnecessarily painful.  Using the platform, you can quickly move and resize images (something that could usually take days according to Mr. Cavnar) and even insert those big, swirly letters that start chapters in all the important books. Once completed, users can sell their eBooks through iBook, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Vook’s website, and violá, you have self-published your no doubt fascinating memoir.  (Warning: don't bother trying to pretend you wrote The Bell Jar; Vook does have a quick screening process for the eBooks.)

Other notable presenters included Dashlane, Consmr and Instinct. Dashlane makes it much easier to spend your entire trust fund on Amazon by saving website passwords, emails, address and credit card information in a central location. So, instead of having to spend 15 minutes filling in the same information at every online checkout, the platform will automatically input your card number and billing information into online forms. For all you conspiracy theorists, the saved information is encrypted and can only be unencrypted with a special master password, a feature that pleased the many perpetually paranoid NYTM attendees. Dashlane does not keep any database of these passwords, only the users know them, so even if authorities subpoena the company, they would only have access to encrypted data. Dashlane: 1, Evil Government Masterminds: 0.

Consmr, which actually previously demoed at the NYTM about a year and a half ago as a website, is a smartphone app that also simplifies shopping, though in actual stores, by allowing users to scan barcodes and then see reviews of the product and alternative suggestions. Users can also look up top-rated products in certain fields, such as hair products for curly-hair.

Though Ryan Charles, the CEO of Consmr, struggled a bit with scanning the barcode on a box of Triscuits, the app does feature over 100,000 reviews. The platform will also soon be including nutrition information about food products. To underscore the brilliance of the design, Mr. Charles showed the crowd the page for a box of Trojan condoms. The top review: “Well, she didn’t get pregnant.”

Instinct, a real-life Guitar Hero-type app that teaches you to play the instrument, was a crowd favorite. Co-founder Brian Stoner practiced playing riffs as the audience clapped along. The website uses the computer’s microphone to detect the notes being played and indicate to the user whether they are hitting the correct notes. At the end of the lesson, users can show off their skills to a panel of three avatar judges. Mr. Stoner received a six, nine and seven from the judges for his lovely performance.

Shindig, a Skype-like platform that allows for more users and more complex interactions, Skillcrush, a tech education blog for anyone who has ever wondered what the hell an API or python is, Social Bycicles, which is pretty much a bicycle with a computer in it and Jirafe, a marketing tool, also demoed during the evening.

Ms. Birnir (addabjork.wordpress.com)

Much to the chagrin of Ladybeat, brogramming is again in the news today, but this time with an insightful piece from Mother Jones on the sexist slip ups fledgling startups are wont to make. Buried at the bottom is an anecdote about 27-year-old Adda Birnir, who decided to start a service called Skillcrush as "an online resource for women looking to learn code and feel comfortable doing it."

Skillcrush, which is still in its pre-launch phase, offers a set of online tutorials primarily focused on digital literacy--stuff like how to "beautify your blog," implement ads, and create an online store--aimed at helping everyone, not just women, beef up on their tech skills.

"What we’re looking to do is create an online technical learning community where people can come and do skill-based learning around everything from applied skills, like how to customize a blog and install it on a web server, and also [how] to learn HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails," Ms. Birnir told Betabeat by phone.

Ms. Birnir and her cofounder Jen McFadden think that the New York-based Skillcrush can help those with little web or coding skills wade into the wonderful world of the Internet. "We’re working really hard to think about how do we bring people in who have previously been not so comfortable with the Internet?" said Ms. Birnir. "We’re spending a lot of time thinking about how do we initiate people into this whole thing."

Skillcrush is helmed by three women and one man. Ms. Birnir and Ms. McFadden insist that while their experience with gender inequality in the tech sector may have informed the creation of Skillcrush, they want to make it as open an environment as possible. Translation: just because it's run by women and boasts a cute company name, doesn't mean it's just for the XX chromosomes.

"We're focused right now on trying to build a product that’s useful for whoever wants to use it," said Ms. McFadden. "We’re three women and one guy so I think that by nature of what we’re doing we have a little bit more of a feminine bent to it, but it wasn’t to create an exclusionary environment in any way shape or form... we just want to provide an environment that is fun and interesting and a little bit more light and accessible."

Skillcrush is still in pre-launch mode, but has an active Tumblr where the ladies post everything from quotes from their favorite tech-related articles to a helpful how-to column about tech troubles. The duo plan to expand Skillcrush beyond its current digital literacy offerings to include comprehensive programs on coding, as well as a potential partnership with lady powered Girl Develop It, an offline meetup for women who want to learn how to code.

"We love a lot of the things that are out there already," said Ms. McFadden. "We know the ladies from Girl Develop It and they’re doing amazing things...We’ve tried CodeCademy and it’s great but we see [digital literacy] as something that 3-5 years down the road everyone has to have a handle on. We want to provide something that’s more accessible to everyone."