Eating Lunch in a Flat World

Oleg & AlexI went to lunch today with Oleg and Alex here in Kazan, Russia. The whole experience reminded me of how flat this world has become. Oleg drove us to lunch in is Toyota, he said that Japanese cars are really considered to be much higher quality then the Russian Ladas. We went to a mall that is the first branded mall I have ever seen, called Mega Mall, a Russian company. It was right next to IKEA, a Swedish company. On the other side was the a do-it-youself megastore OBI, a German company.

Inside the mall, we went straight to the food court for lunch. Alex chose his favorite restaurant, McDonalds, and got his usual order of a Fresh Mac meal (a Big Mac modified with tomato’s and lettuce). Oleg got a chicken sandwich meal from KFC. I was the only one to actually have a meal from a Russian company, and it was a Greek gyro at that.

The world truly is flat.

Доброе утро from Kazan, Russia

zoo russia 070Dobraye ootro from Kazan, Russia, home of Tatsoft.ru and Flatsourcing.com. It been a long trip over here, but I arrived Tuesday night after several flight delays and about 60 hrs of travel.

Its great to be over here with our entire development team and to be spending time with Oleg, Alex, & Timur, my partners in Flatsourcing.com. We all are getting a tremendous amount out of working together face-to-face. Even though we talk can daily via Skype, email, and phone, nothing supplants seeing each other in person.

zoo russia 073We’ve laid out aggressive plans for ourselves for the next few days, and started today with hashing through the details of the siteMighty Advanced Analytics module. This is an incredibly sophisticated tool that will enable us to fully optimize PPC campaigns by pulling in cost & conversion data. It’s quite a task, but 6 hrs today enabled us to finalize the specs and really move forward on it.

We are all really looking forward to Russia’s inaugural BarCamp this weekend. We’ve got a lot of excited attendees, and many software development firms in the region will be in attendance. I’ll be blogging about the event and the rest of our adventures together, so stay tuned.

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