504ward Business Competion Launches – $100,000 Grant Prize

The 504Ward was announced this week by Idea Village. It’s a business plan competition with a $100,000 grant to the winning business along with services by many other New Orleans area firms.

The competition is designed to attract new start-ups to New Orleans or to seed local start-ups with the expressed intent of providing good jobs for 23-35 year old’s in the city.

At the competition launch on Thursday night at Tipitina’s, representatives from Google were on hand to throw their support behind the competition. They included a promise to promote the compeition on YouTube which potentially will draw quite a bit of attention. An interesting component of the competition is its emphasis on a video component to the submission process. This is a trend that I see continuing to grow, we submitted a video application as part of our TechCrunch50 conference application.

The evening’s highlight was the unveiling of a short film produced by Trumpet and directed by Benjamin Reece promoting the rising to the challenge of entrepreneurship in the new New Orleans. Ben has emerged in the last several months as one of New Orleans’s brightest young talents along with his partner Tung Ly. His short film 50 People 1 Question has drawn attention all over the world, and he directed a inspiring short for the 504ward that you can watch below. You should come see him speak at the next Net2NO meetup. (Who is that guy in the opening shot I wonder.)


504ward Promotional Film from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

I am very excited about the interest and support in the New Orleans start-up community right now, and this is just another example of great things happening. Though the award will likely have a national applicant pool, I really hope that many bright young New Orleanian’s apply for the grant. I feel a sense of pride and a competitive desire to show that this award can be won by a home grown business that will benefit New Orleans, that great businesses don’t just have to locate a satellite office here, but that they can be born here. My personal challenge to local start-ups is that we take this award home ourselves. Let’s make it happen NOLA.

Learn more about the 504ward, read the complete rules, and apply. Applications are due December 4th.

Louisiana 2.0: 5 Big Opportunities Happening Right Now

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.)

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