A bunch of startup marketing mumbo-jumbo later and you tell me you're looking for a coder to help you.
WTF?! You said you were technical?!
Say what you mean. Ask if they are a programmer.
I think reason being is that before, mechanical engineering was just purely, mechanical engineering, where as now the mechanical engineering degree (in my old uni anyway) was combined with mechatronic, which was robotics, and alot of low level process control type courses that for obvious reasons required alot of programming ... They basically fell under the same department
It makes me wonder whether Peter Thiel is right when he says that the Valley should think more about flying cars and not about 140 characters. I wonder whether the people in the Valley lost the ability to think about anything other than 140 characters.
It sure is a competitive advantage of other high-tech regions in the world: less (or different) tunnel vision.
Once again, it's context. In many worlds technical means other things, but to North American VCs looking at software/apps/etc, it means you know how to get the app/site/whatever running. Since we're talking about the startup world, I really can't see how a potential investor would see it as anything less than deceptive if you said "yeah I'm technical" and then revealed you don't have the capabilities to implement your idea.
"Technical" translates to "someone who's actually building something physical". It's guiding the division between social/business/marketing constructions and, well, technical ones. I'd think the argument applies equally the the guy building the hardware (when that happens) and maybe even to the ID guy building the enclosure.