I’m speaking at SXSW

Woohoo! I got some great news on Wednesday that the panel I submitted called Outsourcing 2.0 – Is the World Flat or Not? was approved and will be a session at SXSW Interactive 2009 in Austin.

I’m so excited about this. It will be my first time speaking at SXSW. I’ve been as an attendee the last three years and it is a great conference. I always learn a ton and have a lot of fun.

Ben Reece, Brian Oberkirch and I had lunch together yesterday and talked about the positive reinforcement and encouragement that our social networks provide us. Lifting up the community is something we all try to do, and we all have benefited from greatly. I felt this yesterday firsthand when I tweeted out my excitement and within an hour was flooded by warm emails, plenty of congratulatory tweets and a great blog post. It is powerful and was personally very touching to have a community that supports each other this way, as Brian said at lunch, “a rising tide lifts all boats” and that is exactly what we are doing with the NOLA tech scene.

So, thank you to all who voted for the panel, the feedback I received from SXSW really considered this highly. I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to make the trip to SXSW Interactive March 13-18, 2009. It is a great conference.

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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