Venture Firm Kleiner Perkins is strategic in more ways than one. To attract top engineering talent, they’ve established the competitive KPCB Engineering Fellows Program. In this summer fellowship, engineering students spend a summer at Kleiner Perkins in the San Francisco Bay Area where they will be paid to develop their technical skills while being mentored by an engineering executive within the company. Fellows will also be invited to attend private events, such as talks by reps from Twitter, Groupon, Zynga and Chegg. They will also have the opportunity to network with other talented engineering students and technology luminaries at planned outings like a Giants game, camping in Big Basin, or a hackathon at Klout.
25 Fellows were just chosen from nearly 1000 applicants from over 100 universities. The universities the class of fellows are joining from are Franklin Olin, Rice, Princeton, UPenn, Carnegie Mellon, Brown, UCSD, University of Michigan, Duke, and University of Kentucky. According to TechCrunch, sample summer projects include working on an energy efficiency insight algorithm on Opower’s data platform, and developing graph analysis to provide data insight that will drive product designs at Klout.
Eligibility for the KPCB Engineering Fellows Program is open to outstanding undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at U.S. universities who are studying computer science, engineering, mathematics, physics or fields related to software development. The next application deadline is likely to be October 2012.
According to a leading mobile analytics firm, mobile app usage continued to see significant growth year on year, with overall mobile app usage up by 72.5%. Top mobile app categories including shopping, utilities & productivity and messaging also saw more than 300% growth. With 51% of time spent on mobile devices in comparison to 42% on desktops / laptops by end users in United States, global companies are partnering top app development companies to develop mobile application, which keeps them ahead of curve.