Hitting a Tipping Point in Louisiana

UPDATED 9/29/08: I’ve moved this blog post over to our wiki. Please continue to add companies here.

I was having the conversation on Friday night about if we are getting close to a tipping point here in New Orleans and in Louisiana with regards to technology and startup culture. As I’ve been talking about for a while, we need an ecosystem. Entrepreneurs need to know one-another and they need to know whats going on. We need organizations and a government that support startups.

Its happening right now.

Jessica Rohloff has been instrumental in getting Net2NO off the ground, and she has talked about getting a blog together that highlights the good things that are going on around here. The “Good News” blog it could be called. I’m a big fan of distributed systems: all of us blogging rather than one blog we all read, free unconferences instead of traditional conferences, meetups rather than meetings, groups with participants not committees.

I’m also a fan of just getting started, so here goes on the highlight reel of New Orleans tech & entrepreneurs for the last several weeks in no particular order.

  1. Brent McCrossen was in town last week and has secured office space open a branch of his startup, Audiosocket, right here in NOLA.
  2. Kenneth Purcell moved his company, iSeatz back to New Orleans from New York after Katrina. In August iSeatz was named to the Inc 500 and is the only Louisiana firm ranked in the top 500.
  3. Nic Perkins of The Receivables Exchange and the rest of the team at StartupNewOrleans have started to reach out to expat New Orleanian entrepreneurs in an effort to get them to relocate their business back here.
  4. Will Donaldson and the Tulane Entrepreneurs Association have put together a fantastic speaker series featuring some incredible entreprenuers that is open to the public.
  5. The Idea Village is launching the 504Ward initiative to to connect entreprenuers with talent and peers with some exciting things to come.
  6. Zach Kupperman recently launched PolicyPitch, a community powered platform for sharing public policy ideas. It’s in the running for a $10,000 grant from Advanta, so go vote for it now.
  7. Jessica Roloff (and many more) have gotten Net2NO launched. We had a first meetup last week and another is coming up in October. There’s a lot of energy in the group, so you should join.
  8. Jonathan Joseph, a Tulane grad, launched the Ultimate Football Network, a social media resource for fantasy football, at TechCrunch50 last week. Loren Feldman selected him as best of show.
  9. Eric Marcoullier, another Tulane grad and founder of MyBlogLog and GNIP has generously offered to come speak to the New Orleans tech community next April. We’ll be putting a BarCamp together around it. Details to come.
  10. Blake Burris, a Shreveport native has raised funding for a new Facebook app called Challenge which helps users create a support system for training. He’s also considering a move back to Shreveport to take advantage of the angel investor tax credits.
  11. Ben Reece, an techie and filmaker produced a short called Fifty People One Question that went viral on Vimeo. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should. Even Barrack Obama’s campaign dug it.
  12. Blake Killian now has 4 brands under his BlakeMakes empire. His videoblogging effort is taking off over at BlakeTakes.
  13. Jeffrey Lyons and his team are putting the finishing touches on IdeaBreaker, their Louisiana-born project management app that will be launching soon.
  14. Yours truly, Chris Schultz, was invited to the TechCrunch 50 conference to launch the new Flatsourcing Dashboard in the demo pit out there. It was an incredible experience.
  15. Tom Martin of Zehnder Communications and Brandmarken has launched NOLAdeals connecting locals with local businesses through a insiders membership discount program with no coupons.
  16. Neel Sus is in talks with several hospitals to implement his mobile patient data platform, eLYMPUS. His company’s website, Susco, was recently relaunched by Matt Wang of Good Work Marketing, a rockin local marketing and branding firm.
  17. Michael Karnjanaprakorn of AllDayBuffett in New York compiled a list of 100 great things going on in New Orleans and took the web by storm with the New Orleans 100.
  18. Catherine Markel alerted me to a great looking new hiring management web app called HireFly that she and her Metairie-based firm EmployApp has launched. It’s in beta right now and really looks impressive.
  19. Blake Haney and his crew have a new home called The Canary Collective on Julia street. It’s is an open gallery / workspace / screening room / party space. He’s also gathering some of the best and brightest above for a new effort he’s launching through Humid Beings.
  20. Dukky is a New Orleans startup that is going to revolutionize the direct mail industry by making it as easy to buy space on a demographically targeted mailer as it is a Google Adwords ad. Founded by Trumpet and other local partners.

I’ve moved this blog post over to our wiki. Please continue to add companies here.

Wow, 14 17 18 19 great things going on right here in Louisiana. Congrats to all. Congrats to us! We are hitting a tipping point and there’s no looking back.

Photo credit c@rljones

Flatsourcing Dashboard Launch in the TechCrunch 50 DemoPit

We’re thrilled to be launching the new Flatsourcing Dashboard at the TC50 DemoPit. We’ll be in the DemoPit tomorrow, and are will be doing it up New Orleans-style with Mardi Gras beads and bottles of Tabasco.
It’s been a lot of work getting the new Flatsourcing Dashboard ready for launch. Oleg, Alex and Timur have been working really hard to get everything prepped. We’ll be releasing it to all clients next week.

Hurricane Gustav threw us a curveball this week and unfortunately Will Donaldson isn’t able to come along, but my good friend Gerard Ramos has stepped up and will be helping me out. I’m excited to spend time with the former local New Orleans developer who’s stepped up to the big leagues now in San Francisco.

Everyone has worked really hard to get the Flatsourcing Dashboard ready, and it is something that we’ve been thinking about for a while now. We felt a need for a central location for our clients to collaborate with us. But, we didn’t want to lock clients into a proprietary project management tool, we pride ourselves on working within existing project management protocol.

The Flatsourcing Dashboard (login:voodoo password:123456) accomplishes some of the things we feel are important when collaborating globally:

  • Get to know your team with avatars
  • Keep up on your project with a “news feed” of all communications in Basecamp or any other project management tools.
  • Keep track of your contract and invoices all in once place.
  • Get in touch with us in an emergency instantly and easily.
  • Learn the best way to work with us with FAQ’s and a client manual.

All of this is in the Flatsourcing Dashboard, providing “outsourcing insight” to our clients and taking our services to a whole new level.

I’m so excited to be out here at TC50. If you’re in town and want to meet up, email me at cschultz@flatsourcing.com. Follow me on Twitter for updates.

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