Just wanted to make a note, that siteMighty.com is planning to offer even more opportunities to professionals, and along with more premium templates that have been recently released now there is an additional Advanced account plan coming up in October!

In the beginning of October 2007 please now look forward to this new Advanced plan on siteMighty.com, with following new features:

• 10 sites – Now you will be able to manage up to 10 sites in one account!
• Landing pages – Landing pages are pages of your site, that can be accessed directly through an URL. Page content is being set by you and is made of offers of your choice and html area at the top with any information you want to be displayed.
• Even more support – As 10 sites that are able to create in Advanced new plan will require more effort support team will provide top quality assistance to make it more comfortable for marketer and help to manage all web-sites!

So in October, look for Advanced plan during signup for siteMighty.com services!

VentureBeat reports that Draper Fisher Jurvetson is heading to Russia:

Besides Russia, the fund, called DFJ-VTB Aurora, will invest in the neighboring Commonwealth of Independent States, including Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine (home of another DFJ fund), and others. The fund plans to invest between $2 million and $16 million per company.

Initially, DFJ is not contributing directly to the fund. But, by helping pick companies, it will have the opportunity to co-invest in them down the line. Half of the money will come from the Russian government and twenty percent from the European Bank of Development and Reconstruction.

Thousands of highly-educated engineers and scientists in the region have the skill, talent and motivation to build big companies, said DFJ’s managing director in Russia, Don Wood, in an interview with VentureBeat — they just haven’t had the resources or role models to do so, he says.

This is great to see VC getting on board with the technology opportunities in Russia. Oleg, are you ready to start putting a business plan together for Flatsourcing?

I have been mulling over the concept of “agile business development” for while now. An extension of agile software development, I believe the more agile an entrepreneur can be in building a business, the sooner he or she will learn the success factors.

Think about the following methods for agile software development and how they might apply to creating a business:

• Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
• Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
• Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
• Simplicity
• Self-organizing teams
• Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

I’ve been talking to a lot to Gerard Ramos about the current set of agile business development, and how much he has embraced an embodied this approach with his current two projects: Swamble & Readum.

Swamble is a social wagering site that Gerard built based on a concept he devised last summer. He created an initial proof of concept site, launched that, received feedback could be fun to do this over web-based phones, re-engineered the site to work well in mobile phone browsers, submitted to Tech Crunch 40, got great feedback from Mike Arrington, was written up on TechCrunch, signed up 600 users, launched a Facebook app … you get the picture.

All the while, he was extremely outwardly focused rather than inwardly focused. He reacted to the requests of his users, and is building Swamble based on what people really do want, not what he thinks people want.

Last weekend, Gerard took agile business development to another level. With a partner in Las Vegas, Gerard entered Rails Rumble competition and in less than 48 hours created an entire web app called Readum.

Readum is a web app that people can use to create podcasts of the blog posts from blogs that they like to follow a daily basis. Imagine instead of sitting down and reading posts over a couple coffee in the morning, listening to the posts on your iPod as you head into work. That’s what Readum does.

I’ve checked it out, and I’m very impressed. I’m most impressed by the fact that El Luchadors were able to assemble this in less than 48 hours. Learn more about how they did it here. Congrats guys. Great execution on agile business development.

Head over to the Rails Rumble and check out Readum. Voting for the best web app in the competition ends this Thursday. The guys would love your support, so vote for Readum to inspire them to build it out so that we can all use it.

Great work guys!

Congratulations! “Basic” and “Intermediate” accounts on siteMighty.com now have even more opportunities!

Paid users on siteMighty.com usually already know what kind of content to fill in their web-site, how to perform at least some basic SEO and attract visitors to web-site that means earning money.

siteMighty.com provides even more tools now for paid users to make it even more comfortable and fast to create new web-sites by rolling out new premium designs only available for paid users.

Click on the “Design” menu inside your control panel in siteMighty.com and you will see new designs that you can choose from to create new sites.

Please don’t forget that only Intermediate accounts can create up to 3 sites in one account. If you need more, please just create another Intermediate accounts.

P.S. They say there is going to be new advanced account plan soon available on siteMighty.com that will allow you to create up to 10 web-sites in one account, create landing pages for your PPC campaigns and much more!

I’m very excited to announce BarCamp NOLA to be held in New Orleans January 5-6, 2008. Brian Oberkirch and I were rapping this morning, and we decided to nail down the date for January. Blake Haney is excited about it too, and we’re even hoping to get Tara Hunt and Chris Messina there.

We’re going to be hosting the BarCamp right here in the Voodoo Ventures offices. For anybody interested here’s some pics of the layout. ( I’m also going to try to recruit the guys at Blutique next door to throw in their space).

Brian has the great idea of making the first day a traditional BarCamp day, and the second day a hack day, where we put together some piece of web goodness for deserving local charitable organization. Anybody interested, sign up on the wiki.

I’d like to find a struggling small business we could help immediately with a new site or enhanced Web services. Spend a weekend cranking as a team and launch the thing at the end of the weekend. We can get help from our friends everywhere with regard to code, design, ideas. Brains, we have them at the ready.

The New Orleans Brainjams event a year and a half ago was a fantastic experience, and I’m really excited to be rallying the troops for a bigger, better, badder BarCamp experience.

So put January 5th and 6th on your calendar, and go put your name on the wiki. For you out-of-towners, why not make a weekend of it. Come the BarCamp so you can write off your trip, stay for the Sugar Bowl, which will be the BCS National Championship game in New Orleans on January 8th.

Update: Join the Facebook group for BarCampNOLA here.

I’m very pleased to announce that siteMighty has been honored by New Orleans CityBusiness magazine as one of New Orleans Innovators of the Year, 2007. This is a real honor, especially because it is the second year in a row that we’ve won this award; last year we were honored for Huckabuck.com which we sold in October, 2006.

CityBusiness honored siteMighty in its “On the Brink” category. This is very exciting for for me as I feel this is exactly where SiteMighty stands today, particularly in light of our version 1.0 release earlier this week. You can read the whole article here, and here’s a brief snippet:

When creating siteMighty, which took a little more than a year to design, Schultz had a particular goal in mind. “The goal was to make it so simple that my mother would be able to do it.”

Since it’s debut in March, siteMighty has had more than 1,700 users nationwide. “The most satisfying thing is that users are making money by using our product” Schultz said.

A big shout out to my mom for letting me continually use her as my design inspiration. While I tend to say things like this, the truth is she’s a very capable Internet user, but it’s nice to have her as a muse for website design.

Thanks to everybody who’s worked on this project: Our partners NCS and Icommissions. The wonderful Flatsourcing team: Oleg, Alex, Timur, Dilyara, Rustmem, Evgueny, Ravil, Rustem & TimurB. Blake Killian. Our great summer interns: Will, Jeff, Claire, Tannia. And Susan and Jeff who are helping us take this thing to a whole another level. Stay tuned.

We are very excited today to announce the release of siteMighty.com v1.0. In the short six months since our beta launch, we’ve been able to roll out some really exciting new features based on the feedback from our users. siteMighty stands today at the forefront of affiliate site builders, and in the category of credit card affiliate site builders, we think we’ve got a winner.

Thanks to all our users who helped us out with feedback and testing our product through the beta phase. Here’s what you’ll see at siteMighty.com today:

• A brand-new home page – it better reflects our current identity is a credit card affiliate site builder, and one exciting new feature is the showcase area where we highlight our newest users in our top 10 users.
• Full release of the upgraded support – our goal is to make you money with siteMighty. To that end, will be offering as much help as we can through online support (FAQ, Knowledge Base) for all users, and live support (24/7/365 live chat, phone support, support tickets) for all paid users.
• New premium templates – we’ve got new premium templates for paid users and more on the way.
• Presorting of offers – the affiliate networks know what cards make money, and now your sites will be sorted with the default settings chosen by the affiliate networks. You can change your ordering at any time, but your site will start from scratch with the best-performing offers at the top.
• Upgraded SEO capabilities – we’ve enhanced the SEO functionality at the intermediate level. This will help users get more traffic from natural search engine rankings.

Thanks to our users, we hope you’ll continue to grow alongside us. It’s exciting to see you many of our users now earning great commissions through their siteMighty sites. We’re in business for you, so let us know what we can do to help you grow.

If you haven’t checked out siteMighty yet, there’s never been a better time to check it out. Sign up today. Thanks for everybody support, and congratulations to the whole siteMighty team!

- Chris Schultz