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

The dustup between the Demo conference and the TechCrunch 50 conference has spilled over to the NY Times today with some of the press-friendly accusations coming to the forefront:

To Michael Arrington, the elbow-throwing, supercilious founder of the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, Demo’s business model amounts to “payola.”

This coming on the heals of the accusation by someone loosely associated with the Demo conference writing to Alex Muse accusing Jason Calacanis of plagiarism. I happened to think that Calacanis’s demo tips for a startup were incredibly valuable, and I’m enjoying his conversion from blogger to emailer as a whole. The startup tips rang true for me, because a couple weeks ago we demoed our pitch for the TC50 to Heather Harde.

Well, the news is, out of the 1038 startups that applied, we didn’t get to the final round of 50 that will demo on stage, but we did get invited to participate in the “Demo Pit.” In the demo pit we’ll get to showcase the new Flatsourcing Dashboard to all conference attendees, and we’ll be vying with a bunch of other startups trying to do the same thing. It’ll be chaotic, fun, exhilarating, and a great launch pad for the Flatsourcing Dashboard.

So, what is the Flatsourcing Dashboard? We’ll I could tell you, but then I’d be violating our pledge to the TC50 conference. So for now we must keep it under wraps, although we may offer a few sneak peaks as things get closer.

What I can tell you is we plan to shake up the collaboration space by offering a tool that truly provides “Outsourcing Insight”.

We are thrilled to be DEMO-ing at TC50! Follow Will & me on Twitter for updates. And if you will be in San Fran Sept 8-10, we want to meet up with you. Drop us a line.

Stay tuned!