Just a quick suggestion, you might want to make it so a developer cannot apply to a particular startup by preference. For example, I may have been fired in a past life from Dropbox and never want to work there again, or I may be currently working at Kayak. I can only imagine the hilarity that would ensue should your boss happen to come across your resume.
We're mainly focused on US university students, so we don't anticipate it being a big problem, but we do have company preferences in the profile (yet to go live), so students can pick and choose which companies they want.
We'll get the encoding fixed.
Why would you want to apply for that many startups, simultaneously? Seems to me like they would all be working with wildly different technology solving wildly different problems...
I don't know about you, but I want people excited working with me.
To answer your first point: Our contest will cover different areas of problems, and certain companies will only be available for application if specific questions types are answered.
One of the main appeals for CodeSprint is that you don't have to work on the same puzzle twice. A lot of companies now have a FizzBuzz-style filter, and we're trying to make it so you have to FizzBuzz only once.
There will be a hard cutoff, in which we are only considering score.
With that said, in the profile (which hasn't launched yet), we let you fill out fields / github accounts to further flesh out who you are. Companies are given a complete profile of students, and then give us their preferences on who they'd like to interview.
We liken ourselves to the Common App. Consider the contest portion your SAT score, and your profile page everything else.
I considered making the title "Apply to 50+ startups simultaneously", but that would have been disingenuous. While yes, we have over 50 companies participating, only the top 1 or 2 scorers would realistically be given the opportunity to interview all 50+ (if they really wanted to).
We're still debating internally about how to match startups with top scorers. We want to include both applicant and company preferences.
Ultimately, I think we're going to have to wait until we see the distribution of scores before we make a decision. Secretly, I'm hoping there will be incredibly obvious cutoffs for bracketing, as opposed to some of the Dutch Auction ideas being thrown around.
With that said, if you're in the top 10, and want to interview all of the companies, I'm fairly sure we can arrange that.
Time-lapse was a "cool feature" requested by one of our early companies that we decided to implement on the main InterviewStreet site. If you cut and paste completed code, it won't affect your score whatsoever, and it's up to the specific company whether or not they consider being able to see your in-code thinking process as important.
Also, you have a small html entity encoding issue: http://cl.ly/3h2R240m0K2D1z2M1M3k .