October 8, 2024

You’re the Boss Blog: Coding Start-Ups Compete for Booming Market

Would YOU learn to code from this man? The ambassador talks shop in a Treehouse tutorial.Courtesy of Treehouse.Would YOU learn to code from this man? The ambassador talks shop in a Treehouse tutorial.

Start

The adventure of new ventures.

If you build it, they will code.

That’s the attitude behind a groundswell of learn-to-program start-ups, all competing to put aspiring coders through their paces online. With target audiences ranging from neophytes living under rocks – “What’s a browser?” – to tech-savvy kids, entrepreneurs and mid-level developers, these young Web companies use game mechanics and narrative techniques to hold users’ attention and are part of the ongoing boom in online education.

Here’s a look at three coding start-ups that are leading the way:

Treehouse

Video tutorials welcome students to Treehouse Island, where they arrive in a zeppelin, meet a mysterious, eye-patch-wearing ambassador (see photo above) – think Mister Rodgers transposed to “Lost” — and unravel mysteries while learning to code in HTML, Ruby, Python, PHP and JavaScript. The service went live in November and offers three beginner-oriented learning tracks: Web design, Web development, and iPhone/iPad application creation.

Founder: Ryan Carson, 34.
Location: Orlando, Fla.
Employees: 23.
Financing: $600,000 angel round closed in October.
Revenue: Monthly sales hit $175,000 in December.
Users: 6,500 paying subscribers. Corporate clients include Disney and Estée Lauder.
Business model: Users choose between two tiers of access and pay $25 or $49 monthly, with a $9 student plan coming in February.
Special sauce: “We’ve done partnerships with Facebook, WordPress and LivingSocial,” Mr. Carson said. “They’re going to start recruiting people who’ve unlocked our badges for internships and jobs.”

Codecademy

Working inside the start-up incubator Y Combinator, a pair of former Columbia students noticed a lack of user-friendly online tools for beginning programmers. Codecademy began offering JavaScript training in August, quickly attracted major investments from Union Square Ventures, SV Angel and other heavy-hitters, and plans to roll out more programming languages soon. The company’s new initiatives — Code Year, a yearlong tutorial that started this month and attracted more than 350,000 users, and Code Summer+, a youth partnership with the White House announced last week — have won big attention.

Co-founders: Zach Sims, 21, and Ryan Bubinski, 22.
Location: New York City.
Employees: six.
Financing: $2.5 million venture round closed in October.
Revenue: None.
Users: more than 850,000.
Business model: “There is no revenue model at the moment,” Mr. Sims said. “Our first thing is the product.”
Special sauce: Broad appeal. “We got an e-mail from an 85-year-old stroke victim using it,” said Mr. Sims said. “We’ve seen people in almost every country in the world sign up.”

Code School by Envy Labs

In 2010, Web applications consultancy Envy Labs unveiled Rails for Zombies, an interactive Ruby on Rails teaching suite. Some 60,000 coders let the game eat their brains. Hoping to build on that success, the young company introduced Code School in March, targeting users who already know some programming but want to keep current with Ruby, HTML5, CSS3, CoffeeScript and jQuery. It plans to expand to an audience of new and younger users.

Founder: Gregg Pollack, 34
Location: Orlando, Fla.
Employees: Of Envy Labs’ 23 employees, a rotating cast of about five work full-time on Code School at any one time.
Financing: No outside money. Bootstrapped with $280,000 so far.
Revenue: $250,000 since debut.
Users: 90,000 registered for content, including free offerings like Rails for Zombies; 2,000 paying subscribers monthly.
Business model: $25 monthly subscription fee.
Special sauce: “We’re a different kind of start-up. We’ve used our consulting work to fund the development of projects like this,” Mr. Pollack said. “And the content isn’t introductory. Most of our customers are existing developers.”

Do you agree with programmer evangelists that coding is for everyone, especially entrepreneurs? What do you think of these rival start-ups’ plans, and would you consider using their services? Do you do your own coding, or outsource the task to others?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=cf7d06d542b4a3176e3aa866b0a334aa

DealBook: Guilty Verdict Reached in Another Insider Trading Case

James FleishmanNorbert Von Der Groeben/ReutersJames Fleishman

8:22 p.m. | Updated

A former salesman at a Silicon Valley research firm was found guilty of conspiracy and wire fraud on Tuesday, the latest person to be convicted in the government’s sweeping investigation into insider trading at hedge funds.

After a two-week trial and just several hours of deliberations, a jury convicted James Fleishman, who worked at Primary Global Research in Mountain View, Calif., of orchestrating the secret exchange of information between hedge fund traders and employees at companies that included Advanced Micro Devices.

“Once again, a jury of 12 men and women has recognized insider trading for the crime that it is,” said Preet S. Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan whose office tried the case.

The case spotlighted so-called expert-network firms, once a fast-growing cottage industry on Wall Street. For a handsome fee, these firms connected hedge funds with paid consultants, or experts, who provided insights into companies and industries. Prosecutors exposed a problematic piece of their business model: Some of the consultants were executives of publicly traded companies, and they leaked secret information about their employers to the hedge funds.

Primary Global, which had prominent clients including the hedge fund SAC Capital, is the expert-network firm that has been the central focus of the government’s investigation. It has since closed its offices, and the government has charged at least seven people connected to the firm with insider trading crimes. A Primary Global spokesman declined to comment.

The government accused Mr. Fleishman, 42, of Santa Clara, Calif., of arranging meetings and telephone calls during which illegal tips were being swapped about Apple and other technology stocks. Two assistant United States attorneys, Antonia Apps and David Leibowitz, tried the case for the government.

Ethan Balogh, a lawyer for Mr. Fleishman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Judge Jed S. Rakoff set Mr. Fleishman’s sentencing for Dec. 21.

Over the last two years, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged 54 people with crimes related to insider trading. Of those, 49 have pleaded guilty or been convicted.

Mr. Fleishman was the sixth person to take a case to trial. All six have been found guilty, including Raj Rajaratnam, the former head of the Galleon Group hedge fund and Winifred Jiau, a former consultant at Primary Global.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5d0328d03ab4e78e45c27c33a8a15bbd

China’s Economy Faces Obstacles in Rebalancing

China has vowed repeatedly, most recently during the just-concluded visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who met in this city with Vice President Xi Jinping, to overhaul its state-directed growth model and empower its consumers to spend more on their own, something that would makes its economy more sustainable and help the sluggish world economy as well. But leaders in Beijing and places like Chengdu are finding it difficult to steer China away from growth that relies largely on infrastructure projects, construction and export manufacturing, economists and financial analysts say.

“China’s leaders are committed to altering their country’s macroeconomic landscape,” Evan A. Feigenbaum, a China analyst at Eurasia Group, a global consulting firm, said in a statement attached to a report released Aug. 17. “But the country’s political economy will not change as fundamentally as many in China and abroad hope. And the next decade is likely to be more fraught than conventional wisdom suspects.”

China has incentives to change its model: its economic policies contribute to wasted resources, vast social inequality and a soaring inflation, which leaders fear will fuel social instability. The consumer price index went up 6.4 percent year-on-year in June, the biggest jump in three years. The 12th Five-Year Plan, a blueprint for development from 2011-15, gives an outline for better distributing economic growth across the country, and thus giving households more spending power.

Yao Yang, an economist at Peking University, said Chinese leaders knew that the domestic economy put too much money in the hands of corporations and the government. They agree that they have to increase social welfare to encourage domestic consumption and dampen mass discontent.

But there are obstacles that limit the ability of leaders to shift direction. For one thing, China continues to empower its large state-owned enterprises at the expense of private entrepreneurs, which results in market inefficiencies on where and how capital should be allocated, analysts say. Those large enterprises have enormous influence on policy makers. State banks also tend to favor government-backed projects, which are often capital-intensive endeavors like infrastructure building.

At the provincial and lower levels, one reason officials support capital-intensive projects arises from the way such officials are measured by the central government in annual reports. The rate of local G.D.P. growth is a top criterion by which the officials are judged. Their careers depend on it, and capital-intensive projects give short-term lifts to growth numbers. Another reason officials promote such projects is corruption: it is relatively easy to take bribes or skim money from large state investment projects.

To cope with the global downturn in 2008, the central government pumped $586 billion of stimulus money into the economy and loosened lending by state banks. Companies set up by local governments borrowed heavily. Victor Shih, a Northwestern University professor, said that based on official figures released this summer, total local government debt across China is $2.4 trillion to $3.1 trillion. The upper estimate is equal to half of China’s G.D.P. in 2010. Interest payments on the debt amount to more than $150 billion per year.

“Right now, the banks are encouraged to ‘restructure’ all of this debt such that little of it will become nonperforming loans,” Mr. Shih said in an e-mail. “However, there might be a problem if inflation is high or if deposits continue to leave the banks’ balance sheets.”

In the first half of 2011, even Chengdu, whose 15 million residents have a reputation as laid-back, tea-drinking, spicy-food-loving sybarites, had an impressive 15.1 percent real growth rate that was significantly higher than the national average, according to an official report. Such rapid growth in an interior city can help with economic rebalancing. It redistributes wealth and shifts consumer spending away from the much wealthier coast. But it raises questions about the local economic model.

Li Bibo contributed research from Beijing.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/world/asia/25china.html?partner=rss&emc=rss