What happens when location doesn’t matter, communication is instant, and we are all connected through the Internet? New business opportunities abound.

The New York Times had two interesting articles on outsourcing in their small business section on Tuesday. The first, a review of two Indian virtual personal assistant (VPA) firms was interesting. But the second one really caught my attention, the story of a company that provides tech support Yonkers, NY businesses from Bogotá, Colombia.

Etectonics is a company that has taken all operations that can be virtualized and located them in Bogotá, while maintaining a feet-on-the-street tech support in Yonkers. The interesting part of this is that for all intents and purposes the company is actually based in Bogotá, not in New York.

Outsourcing customer service and help-desk function is hardly novel. But few businesses have gone to Colombia; even fewer small businesses have integrated off-site offices as neatly in their operations as this six-year-old computer service company, which serves around 200 small and midsize businesses in the New York area through a voice-over Internet protocol call to Bogotá and keeps a videoconferencing portal on from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. That way, the workers in Colombia, 2,500 miles away from those in Yonkers, can act is if they are in adjoining cubicles.

Interestingly enough, this is much of the same approach that we’ve taken here with Voodoo Ventures and Flatsourcing. When we lost a key team member here in New Orleans this summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about how best to reengineer our company. I examined all of our business functions and found that though we had core competencies with our team here in New Orleans, because this is a knowledge-based business, it made a lot of sense for us to train our Flatsourcing team in Russia on these competencies, and ultimately this was a more scalable solution for us than hiring additional staff here in New Orleans.

The factors in this decision for me really turned inside out the way I think about our business.

• Our team in Russia all have masters degrees in computer science and recruiting additional team members is much easier there than it is here in New Orleans.
• Flatsourcing built siteMighty. This simple fact means that support for siteMighty is handled closer to the developers responsible for it by locating our support team in Russia. We reserved a New Orleans-based Skype phone number that actually rings to our support team leader, Dilyara, in Russia. Call us @ 504-717-4717.
• We time shifted our office hours so that our Flatsourcing Russian office overlaps with our clients in the UK, South Africa, and the US. Coverage isn’t 24/7 yet, but we’re moving that direction.
• Knowledge is transferable. Rather than hiring a SEO/PPC manager here and training them, and after a bad experience with outsourcing this to a Florida-based company, I made the decision to work through training these processes with our Flatsourcing team. After a few months of work on our projects, this will actually be a service that we can market to clients.

So, interestingly, we now are very much a US-based company, where most of our work is done virtually in Russia. At this point I’m the only member of the team here in the US, and we have anywhere between eight and 12 staff members in Russia. And after a few months of training in transition, we’re firing on all cylinders like never before. It’s amazing how flat world is.

Our friends at Synthasite launched in beta this morning, and I’ve in reviewing Synthasite Web publishing tools for the last hour. I’m extremely impressed with what they’ve been able to put together. Synthasite has come a long way since its tech preview earlier this year, at that point a lot of the initial functionality was there, but it wasn’t a simplified and elegant a solution as it is today.

I’ve reviewed Synthasite in the spirit of testing it out, have published my thoughts here using my Synthasite powered Voodoo Ventures site. Here are a few brief thoughts from my review:

• Uploading images is simple as can be.
• The site management functionality and brain dead simple publishing tool solves what has been the biggest problem for me with quickly putting up simple websites.
• The site management has been simplified since the alpha preview.
• It’s easy to create pages, drag-and-drop widgets, text blocks or whatever else you want to pull into the page.

I encourage you to head over to my Synthasite powered site for the full review.

Congrats to Vinny and his team for getting Synthasite launched. As I mentioned in the review, what impresses me most is that Synthasite is ready to be used by and provide value to anyone who wants to publish a website. The ability to download a zip file of the site you create and upload it to your own server means you can start using Synthasite for free today to create a high quality website.

Disclosure: The Flatsourcing team has worked with Synthasite to create the exterior pages of the site. We are very fortunate to be involved with this project. While the Synthasite team has done the heavy lifting with the creation of the Synthasite IDE, we’re pleased to be able to provide support and programming for the Synthasite.com portal. I’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks about our involvement, and the continuing expansion of Flatsourcing. Anybody looking for high quality, high value web programming and design, please let us know.

One of the staples of Web 2.0 is launching products using what 37 signals calls “The Hollywood Launch” or private beta invites. Hype and scarcity are well known promotional tactics, and hot web applications are creating buzz around their launches using these type of launch tactics:

• Prelaunch splash page with e-mail collection form
• Limited release invite-only private beta launch
• Leveraging social networks by releasing new invites to early adopters
• Building buzz by creating artificial scarcity – when demand outstrips supply you’ve got buzz

While this is not a new tactic in marketing, it’s now being employed by American Express with the launch of their new credit card, the Plum Card, a business management credit card. This card is being launched on November 5, 2007 with a limited release of 10,000 cards.

Makes you wonder if they’re trying to create the scarcity induced buzz that drives the mystique of the fabled American Express Black Card.

It will be interesting to see how this launch pans out. They could drive quite a bit of hype for the Plum Card, but my guess is he won’t be long until they’re offering it through credit card affiliate networks like siteMighty.

(shameless promo: If you don’t get the invite, search for other American Express business cards here.)