I just got back from visiting my partners in Flatsourcing in Kazan, Russia. This was my third trip to Kazan, and by far the most exciting. This stems from both the growth we are experiencing with Flatsourcing, but even more importantly the changes that are taking place right before my eyes in the city.

On arrival in Kazan, one of the first things you notice is that the whole city is under construction. Since last year a major road repair program has taken place and pot-hole lines streets have been replaced with paved, widened highways. Soviet-era block houses are being replaced by new apartment buildings. I was fortunate enough to stay in a new apartment that Oleg’s family has purchased. In the last three years mortgages have become commonplace in Russia, and cars and apartments are fast becoming part of the middle-class lifestyle. Speaking of cars, as we drove to work each morning, we passed dealerships for Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai as well as Mercedes and BMW. Word is that the Chinese auto manufacturers will be invading next year. They already have their fleets on the road in the form of big beautiful city busses. Just last year the city bus fleet was ragged, its been upgraded by Chinese manufacturers like Golden Dragon.

Shopping malls are all over the place. Kazan actually has more shopping malls per capita than Paris. We ate lunch at a shopping mall food court at a Russian fast food chain ironically named CCCP (translated as USSR). I asked the guys if this was offensive or threatening to anyone. Nope, they said, they Soviet era has been relegated to nostalgia by modern capitalism that is fueling the country’s growth. CCCP now is simply a fast food joint serving the world’s biggest brand, Coca-Cola.

You can’t help but notice how IT oriented the city is. One of the things I trumpet about Kazan is that there are more than 20 universities, most of them technical. This is a university town graduating the next generation of computer programmers annually. Kazan, and Russia as a whole has a culture of IT. The coolest job you can have is a computer programmer. Being high tech opens the doors of opportunity, including working at Google in St. Petersburg, or eventually working in the US if you are good enough.

Billboards around the city advertise HP desktops and laptops. The government has just invested in a beautiful IT startup “IDEA Park” to provide office space to startups complete with furnished desks and computers. The rent is discounted 50% for winners of an annual business plan competition.

Two years ago Fujitsu moved an entire office from the UK to Kazan through a partnership with a Russian based IT company, ICL. Since then, IBM has moved in and is partnering with Kazan State University and there were rumors when I was there that Microsoft is next and that top talent is starting to be recruited by Microsoft.

I can’t wait to see what Kazan looks like next year. One thing is for sure, the Flatsourcing office will have quadrupled in size and we’ll be hiring more!

Finally, the hottest gadget in Russia by far is the iPhone. I brought three of them over for Oleg, Alex, and Timur and they were promptly unlocked and filled with some of the most amazing software that we’ll learn about over here in the near future. I ended up leaving my personal one behind as well. Even though carriers don’t sell them yet, and they go for upwards of $800 on the black market, our last night there we were surprised to see the women at the two tables on either side of us to be taking pictures of each other with their iPhones. An apt metaphor for falling borders in this ever-flattening world!

Happy birthday from the whole staff! It was nice to have you recently here in Kazan and hope you arrive on time enough to be able to celebrate a birthday with family! Hapy birthday!!!

I had lunch with a friend and mentor on Monday. Christopher Skinner founded MakeBuzz, a very successful online business strategy consultancy. He’s had a lot of success building a service business, he is from New Orleans, and has an office in New York too. He has built online marketing integration strategies for clients like United Airlines and other big companies with gross revenue above $20 billion.

I asked how he has grown his business and been successful bringing on board those BIG clients, the whales that we all want to be working for?

Perseverance, perception of the client problem and make due dates. Something like that. You have to absorb yourself into the client’s needs, not yours. I basically have few friends, no hobbies, I stay close to my family and stay focused. Lots of self denial. I don’t think any of this is extreme. I am not that studious. As Geddy Lee says, ‘we are not that smart and can’t figure out anything better to do’.

There you go. Life inside of one paragraph. No different than anyone else that tries.

I appreciate his response, basically Christopher boils it down to focus and drive. Decide where you want your business to be, and do what it takes to get it there, without getting distracted by the unimportant. Thanks, have a great summer in Europe!

OK, someone has to put an end to the misery. Web 2.0 has officially derivatived itself to death or at least relegated itself to a niche of a niche. I’m sure there have been proclimations elsewhere, but today I’m finished with Web 2.0.

I’ve been feeling this coming on for a while. Web 2.0 startups are falling over each other to appeal to the geekiest of the geeks. I have the tools I use daily, but I no longer get excited at the lastest greatest aggregator of social networks that I don’t even use.

Alex Muse explained the derivative nature of Web 2.0 social apps today in his post about why he doesn’t blog about Web 2.0 anymore:

Get this, you have a bunch of social tools you use: twitter, blogs, flickr, bebo, delicious, digg, linkedin, upcoming, youtube, pownce, disqus and so on. You want your friends to be able to follow your various feeds in one single place so you sign up for FriendFeed. FriendFeed enables you to share your stuff with others and enables you to consume your friend’s stuff all in one place. Get it? You have all these tools that generate XML feeds of your activity. FriendFeed gobbles the feeds and displays your activity in one place. Very few people I know (in the real world) have time to keep up a blog, much less any of the other social tools listed above. So the market for FriendFeed is relatively small. Now, back to Jason’s post on FriendFeedLinks. This application takes topics discussed on FriendFeed and organizes them based on popularity and is basically a meme tracker. Get it? This is an application for an application for another application and so on. I can’t keep up!

What has gotten lost in all of the chatter about Web 2.0 is the need for a solid business model. Jason Fried explained the importance of a real revenue model in his post titled Start a Business, Not a Startup.

Suggesting startups — specifically tech startups — don’t need to look for revenue opportunities now is akin to spoiling a child and shielding them from the outside world: They’re far less prepared when they eventually have to leave the house for the first time.

We’re focused on the same thing here at Voodoo Ventures. Flatsourcing, our current focus is a service business in which we are packaging outsourced web development services into simple products that integrate well into a variety of organizations. siteMighty has always had a freemium revenue model and interestingly, the most productive revenue stream is from users who pay us for the software.

I’m excited to be sitting on a panel at the Sync Up conference that is being presented by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation.

Friday, May 2 - 10 a.m.
Sponsored by AudioSocketand CD Baby
“After MP3s: The Rest of the Biz Goes Digital. Booking, Touring & Licensing Through New Technologies”

• Brent McCrossen, President, AudioSocket (Seattle, WA)
• Elliot Adams, Chief Technology Officer, CD Baby (Portland, OR)
• Jon Kertzer, Zune (Seattle, WA)
• Andy Gadiel, Jambase (San Francisco, CA)
• Chris Schultz, Voodoo Ventures (New Orleans, LA)

We’ll be showcasing the Talent Exchange, the music discovery engine that we’ve built for the NOJTF. The Talent Exchange is a beta version right now that was built in a quick timeframe. But in the spirit of release early and release often, we will launch the beta version for Jazz Fest tomorrow, and I’m eager to get feedback from the other participants on the panel and the music supervisors and talent buyers who will be at the conference.

Thanks to Scott Aiges for the opportunity to participate in Sync Up. Look forward to seeing everyone at the conference and at the Fest!

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 got a chance to reconnect with Erik Hersman at SXSW & FOWA. He was on a great panel called Africa 2.0. I interviewed him about the site he helped create called Ushahidi.com to track the violence in Kenya surrounding the recent elections.

Erik Hersman - Ushahidi Interview from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.

Congratulations to Erik on all he is doing, I encourage you to visit Ushahidi.com and get involved. More about Erik can be found at WhiteAfrican and Afrigadget. As a fellow african-american, (born in Nigeria, raised in Kenya), the violence in Kenya has been very upsetting and I really appreciate all the effort that Erik (Hash) is making.

I got this e-mail yesterday:

Hi there,

I met you at/shared a cab with you after FOWA in Miami.  It was interesting talking with you; I didn’t see you at the party afterwards - most probably because I didn’t stick-around for long, which is a shame.

I hope you had a good time at SxSW. I intend to go one year, it sounds fantastic and seems like a good excuse to visit TX.  How’s things in The Big Easy?

Kind regards,
Chris Hart

P.s. I’ve made you a ‘favicon’ for Voodoo Ventures that would appear in the address bar/browser tab/favorites menu.

If you choose to use it, just chuck the .ico file in your root directory (Mozilla browsers find it automatically there) and add the following to the head of your pages:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />

Out of all the emails I’ve had flying around since my three conference swing this month, this one just blew me away.  Chris Hart, a web developer in the UK who I met in shared a cab with at FOWA in Miami, took the time to check out Voodooventures.com, noticed we didn’t have a “favicon” in the browser window, and created one for us.  I don’t know if this took him five minutes or an hour, but the thoughtfulness really strikes a chord with me.

Here’s a guy that  I’ll keep in touch with.  I’ll file this away in my memory, in addition to using what he created for me. And hopefully will be able to cross paths again and potentially do business together at some point.

Being helpful is cool. Thanks Chris.

PS: Anybody looking for a web developer in the UK would do well by contacting him. chris (at) everyone (dot) eu

I’ve been slow on the draw and have been meaning to write the guys from AwesomeHighlighter.com up since FOWA in Miami, and in the short three weeks since I met them they managed to amass more than 10,000 users.

Yep, thats right, three weeks ago they showed me a prelaunch version of their app that they were using to share awesome stuff with each other, and now they are top ranked on del.icio.us and growing like a weed. Speaking of del.icio.us, there hasn’t been too much innovation in their camp since the Yahoo acquisition, I think AwesomeHighlighter could have a real chance to add new value here and become a prefered bookmarking tool.

I met Joel & Luke at BarCamp Miami when I accidentally took Joel’s slot on the preso grid (you snooze you lose buddy;). But it was serendipidous because we ended up in some of the same sessions through out the day and decided to go to Cuban food for dinner.

These guys are everything that is cool about what is going on right now. Over a great ropa vieja, we rapped about Y Combinator, business models, funding needs and the lack thereof, and why building something that you would use yourself is the way to start. By solving problems you face every day:

Like, sending stuff to your friends, but not making them read the whole blog post or page to figure out what you wanted to share. What you think is cool is highlighted for them on the page. An idea so simple, it works.

Luke and Joel just applied to Y Combinator. I wish them them best of luck. I wish we had our funding strategy in place here in NOLA. Well, maybe we will.

In the meantime, check it out. It is awesome. (See this post Awesomely Highlighted).

This time every year something very strange happens.  As the snow melts up north, the allergies start kicking in down south, and people shake off the winter blahs all over, techies and web folks from all over the country flock to Austin, Texas for the annual rite of spring known as South by Southwest.

Last year was a great one, and I made many new friends and reconnected with old ones.  I made a prediction before SXSW last year that Twitter would be the social communication tool of choice, but who could have known the breakout it saw from SXSW last year.  I wonder what the breakout web app will be this year?

• I was asked just that yesterday in an interview with Austin’s Geek News hosted by Paul Terry Walhus.  Go check out the video interview at AustinCast to see my response.
• My schedule for SXSW is online so we can meet up in the sessions.
• I’m really looking forward to BarCamp Austin on Saturday.  I hope to lead a session and connect with a lot of old friends there.
• Want to hook up for coffee, dinner or a beer?  Hit me up on Twitter or on my cell at 504-931-6099.

See you in Austin!