I’ve lived in New Orleans for just six years now, but it feels like a lifetime in internet years when I think about the transformation of high tech in the state during my time here.

When I got here, the internet community was shaking off the crash of the dot-coms and New Orleans felt like a internet ghost town to me.  Though there were several successful internet companies locally, they weren’t connected through tech organizations or informal social networks.

There has been a confluence of events and initiatives that are starting to gel, and I believe Louisiana is on the brink of massive opportunity. Here are the things that are keeping me up at night and that I am positioning Voodoo Ventures to leverage.

• Tax Incentives - On the heels of the success of the film tax credit, the state instituted various powerful tax incentives that are starting to work their way into the consciousness of investors and startups.  They are here for the taking today.  The angel investor tax credit that enables an angel investor to receive refundable tax credits of 50% of their investment in a qualified Louisiana entrepreneurial business. Digital media tax credit enables a company to receive a tax credit worth 20% of expenditures in Louisiana.  The definition initially applied to video game development firms, as Geoff Daily reports, apparently Chris Stelly, director of film industry development within the Office of Entertainment Industry Development, feels the definition is expanded so that “that potentially any interactive Internet application could qualify.”

• Startup Ecosystem - When I moved here I’d go months without running into someone who worked on the internet.  Now I have lunch twice a week with folks doing exactly what I do.  The transformation has been dramatic.  It is both an influx of new talent to Louisiana, but more than that I think it is a new interconnectedness.  This results from new social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Twitter being the most powerful locally at this point to connect the many techies in New Orleans and Louisiana.  Beyond that, I see movements taking place that are bringing a new energy to wanting to get together.  I say movements rather than formal organizations because most of the excitement is not “owned” by anyone.  People are self organizing with unconferences and meetups that are more chaotic but more satisfying than traditional organizations.  We hosted the first BarCamp in Louisiana in February and got a great response and generated a lot of connections.  The next BarCamp is being organized as we speak in Lafayette around the theme of the coming fiber to the last mile and the opportunities that will generate there (more on that later).  The need for a database of techies, startups, and the people that support them is one of the biggest initiatives that I have heard people talking about, and its going to happen very quickly.  Alan Gutierrez and I have been talking a lot about this and he may host it on ThinkNola.  Benjamin Reese has started a self organizing spreadsheet already and Jessica Rohloff wants to push this ahead.  If anyone has feedback on the best way to do it, I am all ears.  This needs to be by the community, for the community and probably warrants its own post.

• Katrina - Katrina was a terrible tragedy that affected so many in New Orleans and Louisiana.  Its impact is still being felt.  Out of great tragedy comes opportunity, and in years since Katrina, a new crop of talented people have moved to Louisiana.  New business have sprung up to replace old ones.  And there is a realization that the creative and tech economy can be the economic engine we need in New Orleans and Louisiana to supplement tourism, the port, and oil and gas.  I believe it will be.

• Air Force Cyber Command in Shreveport - Barksdale Air Force base has been selected as a provisional location for the Cyber Command center.  This is generating a tremendous amount of excitement in the state and has the potential to generated tens of thousands of new jobs in the area.  Already planning is underway for the Cyber Innovation center located there that will promote research and provide infrastructure to businesses and startups spawned by the Cyber Command center.  A recent editorial in the Shreveport Times touts the tremendous impact this will have on the state economy.

• Lafayette “Last Mile” Fiber Network - Lafayette is building out the country’s only fiber into the home network that is equipped with a free 100Mbps intranet for every subscriber and tied to the limitless dynamic computer power of Abacus Data Exchange’s LiquidIQ and the LITE Center’s array of supercomputers.  The network is owned by LUS, a public utility, (and not a telco) and will eventually reach about 120,000 subscribers in Lafayette.  The first residential subscribers will come online around January, 2009.  This is going to bring revolutionary increase in the bandwidth available to the internet that will undoubtedly spawn new services and business.  This is one of the first networks of its kind in the US, but it is a vision for the way we will all one day be connected.  Lafayette and Louisiana will get a sneak peak at what this speed of access can bring, and we have to opportunity to get a jump on developing business models and services that leverage it.

These five factors have me incredibly excited right now about the opportunities that are presenting themselves right now to entrepreneurs in this state.  I’ll be sharing more about some things that Voodoo Ventures will be doing to leverages these opportunities and I’d love to hear what you think.

How are these changes going to affect our lives?  What opportunities do you see?

(If any experts want to expand on any of the details I’ve laid out or offer corrections / clarifications, please do so.  It’s a lot of information that I’m trying to aggregate.)

In celebration of my favorite time of year, Jazz Fest, we’ve put together a set of Jazz Fest Cubes to help everyone wade through the wide array of choices this weekend at the Fest.

We were selected by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation to build the Talent Exchange, a music search engine that enables music supervisors and talent buyers to find Louisisana music and artists.

To commemorate the achievement of building this search engine (in just one month… hey, its beta), we compiled the Jazz Fest Cubes. We’re going to be sharing these with our friends who are attending the An Event Apart conference this week, and presumably sticking around this weekend for some music.

Want one?

Come by the Welcome, Party! connecting AEA attendees with NOLA BarCampers today at Lafayette Square for a special professionally printed version. Or hit me up and I’ll get one to you.

Or

Print your own version using the embedded files you see in this post. Print, snip, tape, Voila!

We were thrilled to get to work on the Talent Exchange for NOJHF. Here’s what Scott Aiges had to say about it:

The mission of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation is to promote Louisiana’s music and culture. In support of that, we decided to build a search engine that would give music supervisors an easy way to discover music by Louisiana artists for licensing in film, television and commercials, and for festival talent buyers to find artists touring in their region for live performances.

We hired Flatsourcing to build the Talent Exchange for us. With just a month to build it, they fully committed to the project and got to work. The whole team communicated with us every step of the way, and made sure they shared our vision for the project. We’re thrilled to launch the beta version of the Talent Exchange at our new conference, Sync Up: The Jazz & Heritage Music and Media Market. Thanks to the great team at Flatsourcing for helping us get the job done!

Look forward to celebrating this great time of year with all our local friends and everyone else who’s in town. Happy Fest!

I’ve got 99 friends on Facebook but I hear from Jason Calacanis more than anyone. He has turned Facebook into a marketing platform for his human-powered search engine, Mahalo. And he doesn’t pay Facebook a dime for this primo branding opportunity.

Every morning I log in to Facebook and there is a link is posted through Mahalo with the Mahalo logo right next to it. As you can see by the screenshot of my news feed, yesterday (and most days) he had 5 items all with the Mahalo logo right next to it.

So how does he do it?

Well, the next generation of optimization is taking shape. First it was search engine optimization (SEO), next came social media optimization (SMO), and now we’ve got news feed optimization (NFO).

Dave McClure thinks “its effin’ brilliant.” and I’m sure other marketers are taking note. Inside Facebook has a very comprehensive post on how you too can optimize your submissions for Facebook’s news feed. Some of their tips:

• The most important thing you can do as a Facebook application marketer is to publish engaging, authentic Feed items.
• Be sure you optimize your Feed items for all of the Feed item elements made available to you by Facebook: title, body, and images.

Now here’s an amazing tidbit from Inside Facebook “News Feed publishes just a little more than 0.2% of the stories it considers.” Meaning Calacanis must truly be the master of NFO.

Now interestingly, Calacanis has taken on the search engine optimization industry before.

The SEO folks got really pissed off at me for saying “SEO is bulls@#t.” last year, but the truth is that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman.

Do you consider having your Facebook newsfeed dominated by headlines posted to Mahalo (and using the Mahalo logo as the image rather than an image related to the story) to be Facebook SPAM? At the very least, is the rationale behind posting it “optimizing” links for Facebook, hence marketing those links (Mahalo)?

(Now I know I could unfriend Calacanis or block him from my feed, but thats not the point. How is he getting so much content in there in the first place?)

The point is, is it OK to use what others are using for conversation and updates for marketing. And don’t tell me he’s not, because that is exactly what those 5 Mahalo logos every day are doing there. What do you think?

We had a great weekend for BarCamp NOLA. We had about 45 participants and everyone contributed to make it a great weekend. Saturday was BarCamp with two sessions going on concurrently all day and Sunday was Hack Day where we worked on two different non-profit profit projects.

BarCamp NOLA - Weekend Video from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.

There are more detailed summaries by Brian & Alan. Thanks to everyone who participated, it was a great weekend. Let’s do it again soon.

What happens when location doesn’t matter, communication is instant, and we are all connected through the Internet? New business opportunities abound.

The New York Times had two interesting articles on outsourcing in their small business section on Tuesday. The first, a review of two Indian virtual personal assistant (VPA) firms was interesting. But the second one really caught my attention, the story of a company that provides tech support Yonkers, NY businesses from Bogotá, Colombia.

Etectonics is a company that has taken all operations that can be virtualized and located them in Bogotá, while maintaining a feet-on-the-street tech support in Yonkers. The interesting part of this is that for all intents and purposes the company is actually based in Bogotá, not in New York.

Outsourcing customer service and help-desk function is hardly novel. But few businesses have gone to Colombia; even fewer small businesses have integrated off-site offices as neatly in their operations as this six-year-old computer service company, which serves around 200 small and midsize businesses in the New York area through a voice-over Internet protocol call to Bogotá and keeps a videoconferencing portal on from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. That way, the workers in Colombia, 2,500 miles away from those in Yonkers, can act is if they are in adjoining cubicles.

Interestingly enough, this is much of the same approach that we’ve taken here with Voodoo Ventures and Flatsourcing. When we lost a key team member here in New Orleans this summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about how best to reengineer our company. I examined all of our business functions and found that though we had core competencies with our team here in New Orleans, because this is a knowledge-based business, it made a lot of sense for us to train our Flatsourcing team in Russia on these competencies, and ultimately this was a more scalable solution for us than hiring additional staff here in New Orleans.

The factors in this decision for me really turned inside out the way I think about our business.

• Our team in Russia all have masters degrees in computer science and recruiting additional team members is much easier there than it is here in New Orleans.
• Flatsourcing built siteMighty. This simple fact means that support for siteMighty is handled closer to the developers responsible for it by locating our support team in Russia. We reserved a New Orleans-based Skype phone number that actually rings to our support team leader, Dilyara, in Russia. Call us @ 504-717-4717.
• We time shifted our office hours so that our Flatsourcing Russian office overlaps with our clients in the UK, South Africa, and the US. Coverage isn’t 24/7 yet, but we’re moving that direction.
• Knowledge is transferable. Rather than hiring a SEO/PPC manager here and training them, and after a bad experience with outsourcing this to a Florida-based company, I made the decision to work through training these processes with our Flatsourcing team. After a few months of work on our projects, this will actually be a service that we can market to clients.

So, interestingly, we now are very much a US-based company, where most of our work is done virtually in Russia. At this point I’m the only member of the team here in the US, and we have anywhere between eight and 12 staff members in Russia. And after a few months of training in transition, we’re firing on all cylinders like never before. It’s amazing how flat world is.

I’m very excited to announce BarCamp NOLA to be held in New Orleans January 5-6, 2008. Brian Oberkirch and I were rapping this morning, and we decided to nail down the date for January. Blake Haney is excited about it too, and we’re even hoping to get Tara Hunt and Chris Messina there.

We’re going to be hosting the BarCamp right here in the Voodoo Ventures offices. For anybody interested here’s some pics of the layout. ( I’m also going to try to recruit the guys at Blutique next door to throw in their space).

Brian has the great idea of making the first day a traditional BarCamp day, and the second day a hack day, where we put together some piece of web goodness for deserving local charitable organization. Anybody interested, sign up on the wiki.

I’d like to find a struggling small business we could help immediately with a new site or enhanced Web services. Spend a weekend cranking as a team and launch the thing at the end of the weekend. We can get help from our friends everywhere with regard to code, design, ideas. Brains, we have them at the ready.

The New Orleans Brainjams event a year and a half ago was a fantastic experience, and I’m really excited to be rallying the troops for a bigger, better, badder BarCamp experience.

So put January 5th and 6th on your calendar, and go put your name on the wiki. For you out-of-towners, why not make a weekend of it. Come the BarCamp so you can write off your trip, stay for the Sugar Bowl, which will be the BCS National Championship game in New Orleans on January 8th.

Update: Join the Facebook group for BarCampNOLA here.

One of the fundamental principles that we operate on with siteMighty is having data at our fingertips so that we know what is going on at all times. We do this by 1) setting metrics, 2) gathering data, and 3) presenting it in an actionable way.

I have staked the growth of siteMighty to analytics: we have to know how we are doing and act accordingly. One of my failings with Huckabuck is that we built a great web-app but never had any idea how or if people were using it. In the end, the most concrete data we had were the $2 checks that rolled in from our advertising rev-share.

I got serious about this at SXSW in March. siteMighty was ready for beta launch, and functionally it was ready, but we already knew that we didn’t have data tracking and analysis tools that would enable us to stay on top of siteMighty. And as I’ve said before, getting to launch is like pulling up to the starting line, the race hasn’t even started yet, so I knew we needed tools to understand siteMighty. Ryan Carson blogged about his meeting with Ryan Allis the 22 year old CEO of a multi million dollar company. Ryan wrote:

What really struck me though, was how he knew his numbers inside and out. He is absolutely hard-core about measuring everything. It was like a slap in the face - as CEO of Carson Systems, I just don’t know enough about what’s going on.

It is critical to know what is going on. So, here’s what we are doing about it:

I designed an analytics dashboard that is mocked up over the the right there. Here are the important things we wanted to track:

• Open support tickets
• The Visitors / Conversion / Paying Users funnel (more on that below)
• Server bandwidth usage and capacity(so we’re prepped for a TechCrunching)
• Aggregate stats on our users sites so we know if they are seeing success
• Revenue stats

Our conversion funnel was designed to really understand how many people we have to get to visit siteMighty in order to actually make a paying customer out of people. I got a lot of insight into doing this from Mike McDermont from Freshbooks. I basically built our funnel around the ideas he presented here on Vitamin. I lifted his conversion funnel for our mockup. (Thanks Mike!)

So, after three iterations of our analytics dashboard here we are. Our current version is over to the right.

This has be instrumental in helping us understand what is going on with siteMighty, react to the needs of users, and evaluate the success of our marketing efforts. We keep this screen up all day for a live look at what is going on.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on any successes with analytics or challenges with not having the data you need. I’d be happy to provide insight into what we are tracking and why, and please feel free to use anything you can learn from our analytics package on your web app.

• Related caveat: I just ordered the new book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning which has been highly recommended. Check it out.
  

There was a lot of talk last week about Google’s recent quarter with profits rising by 69% in the quarter. Google’s got its groove back and it is becoming clear that it is not just an expansion of the pie, but it is at the expense of its rivals. Elinor Mills of CNET News explains:

The contrast between the financial results announced last week for the two top search engine companies couldn’t have been more stark… Google’s share is rising at the expense of Yahoo and Microsoft. While Google’s share rose 6.1 percentage points last year, Yahoo’s fell 0.6 percentage points and Microsoft’s dropped 1.1 percentage point, ComScore numbers show.

There is no better predictor of the future than the past. And interestingly, we’ve seen this story before, played out in previous generations of the computing era. Each computing era has had its own killer app, and each of these eras is marked by the struggle for dominance with an eventual winner being crowned. King Microsoft, it’s time to hand the throne over to Prince Google.

In my lifetime, the three killer apps have been: operating systems, followed by office productivity software, and now in the internet age, search. Each of these have been figurative money factories for the winners. And each has been marked by a fierce struggle with an eventually winner being crowned (soon followed by talk of monopoly power).

Let’s take a look at these battles:

Battle of GUI Operating Systems: 1984 - 1995 (1)

• Combatants: Apple (Mac OS, 1984), IBM (OS/2, 1987), Microsoft (Windows, 1985)
• Apple took the early lead in the battle for the GUI operating systems with the introduction of the first Mac OS. Microsoft didn’t start to establish it’s dominance until the introduction of Windows 3.1 in 1992. IBM took at swing at reclaiming the operating system of the personal computing platform it created in 1987 but it never got traction. By 1995 with the introduction of Windows 95, the war had been won by Microsoft.
• Winner: Microsoft

Battle of the Office Software Suite: 1990 - 1995 (2)

• Combatants: Apple (AppleWorks 1991), Corel (Corel Office, 1991), Lotus (Lotus SmartSuite, 1992), Microsoft (MS Office, 1993)
• In the early 90’s software makers started to bundle word processing software with spreadsheet software. Wordperfect had been the leading word processing software until Microsoft released its Office Suite. Lotus was an early player too, led by its early spreadsheet software, Lotus 123. Microsoft eventually established dominance as compatibility became crucial for collaboration, driven by its ubiquity in the business world.
• Winner: Microsoft

Battle of Internet Search: 1996 - 2007 (3)

• Combatants: Ask (1996), Google (1998), MSN Search (2005), Yahoo Search (2004)
• The first Internet era created search engines. They were features of portals that were somewhat of an afterthought because the money was in banner ads. Goto.com, (later Overture) invented search advertising business model in 1998 (4). And immediately a business was created out of search. Google soon perfected the the search advertising business model with the launch of Adwords in 2000 (5). And though Yahoo, MSN, & Ask all relaunched their search engines during the mid-2000’s, Google’s dominance has been established.
• Winner: Google

I believe that it is time to close the chapter on this era’s killer app: search advertising. Google is clearly dominant and is pulling away from the field. I wonder what the next great business model will be.

To understand what’s at the crux of the $1 billion Viacom suit against Google for copyright infringement, look no further than the guy who has become the flash point for the suit, Stephen Colbert. Colbert spent Monday’s episode giving a platform to the debate of copyright law and fair use that is embodied by the current collision of old media content owners versus new media technologies that enable the mashing up of that content.The Colbert Report has been at the crux of the Viacom-YouTube/Google suit since Viacom first sued and highlighted the fact that copyrighted episodes of the The Colbert Report were freely available on YouTube. The Electronic Freedom Foundation then sued Viacom over YouTube’s takedown of a Colbert parody produced by MoveOn.org and Brave New Films.

On Monday’s episode, Colbert mapped out the players with skin in the game with his guest, John Perry Barlow of the EFF. Here’s an extrapolation of what he whiteboarded for the audience:

Colbert was at his subversive best as he gave platform to the EFF’s suit against Viacom and their interpretation that a parody of a parody is fair use of The Colbert Show. While he is clearly beholden to Viacom, (”they own me, baby… I am their bitch”), by giving a platform to the EFF he is emboldening the enemy of his parent company.

Watch the clip right here (via ColbertNation.com, not YouTube) to see Colbert lay it all out:

Colbert clearly “gets” what is going on with mashup culture and that value is added by allowing the market to remix and remake content that he is creating. And all of this casts a reflective glow back to his show. To showcase his point he announced the Stephen Colbert:For Your Editing Pleasure contest, encouraging views to download footage of his mock interview with PBS’s Gwen Ifill. Viewers are encouraged to edit the footage to make Colbert appear in as unflattering a light as possible and resubmit it to the show. Through this contest he is showcasing that creativity that can be unleashed when content is freely distributed, and how smart copyright owners are encouraging the remixing of their content facilitating deeper connections with their audiences.

I wrote a post earlier this week about our success in building an outsourcing partnership with our team in Russia. We’ve built a strong partnership with our team, and I mentioned some of our success factors: trust, respect, and team. Today, I want to share a list of more actionable dos and dont’s for building a successful outsourcing partnership.

When you start outsourcing, DO:

1. Write great specs - Have the discipline to clearly define what you want from your outsource partners. Great specs will help you clearly define what you want, and once you have them, communicating what you want it easy.
2. Evaluate references - Check their prior work, talk to their previous clients. Nothing is a better indicator of future success than past performance.
3. Assign a project manager on both ends - Designate one person on each team responsible for all communication between each side. Without clearly defined project managers communication will break down.
4. Make deadlines matter - Let your outsourcing partner give you their estimation of when the project will be completed. Then make this deadline matter by applying financial bonuses for early completion and penalties for late.
5. Agree on communication methods ahead of time - If you will need to talk to them on the phone, make sure everyone agrees to this ahead of time. A mix of email, instant messenger, and a project management tool like Basecamp with occasional Skype calls will probably work out great.
6. Get to know each other personally - Send pictures to each other, hook up a webcam to Skype for videoconferencing. Go see them if you can. Building personal relationships will help you get through the stresses that come with outsourcing.
7. Be a good client - Respect the constraints of your relationship. You probably aren’t their only client. Their time is valuable too. Have the discipline to know what you want, write it down in a clear way, and stick to your own deadlines.
8. Keep the ball in their court - Never let a feedback request or question from them linger in your email inbox. If there is an open issue on your end, it means something is not getting done on their end. Work to keep the ball in their court at all times.
9. Pay on time - Nothing will cause a partnership to go downhill faster than not paying the bills.
10. Remember what you’re in it for - Hopefully you are getting great work at a great price. Outsourcing can be stressful at times, but remember why you are doing it. Outsourcing works.

When you start outsourcing, DON’T:

1. Just go for the cheapest provider - Too many people think outsourcing is just about saving money. Go for the mix of high quality product at a cost that works for you.
2. Be lazy - This goes along with being a good client. If you don’t work hard on your end, they won’t either. The old saying about computers applies: “garbage in, garbage out.”
3. Let the project hit the death spiral - If things seem off course from your end they probably are. You need to take back control of the project. Most often this is caused by a communication breakdown.
4. Rush them - You should have established a project deadline based on their estimate. This is the most realistic delivery date you have. Rushing them will lead to quality problems.
5. Pull the plug - Successful outsourcing is a lot of work. And you’ll learn and grow the more you do it. Don’t pull the plug on the project at the first road bump. Work through it, you’ll be glad you did.

These tips were culled from our experience in working with our team at Flatsourcing. We’d love to hear any of your thoughts and ideas. If I’ve missed something let me know. Good luck and happy outsourcing!