I’ve lived in New Orleans for just six years now, but it feels like a lifetime in internet years when I think about the transformation of high tech in the state during my time here.

When I got here, the internet community was shaking off the crash of the dot-coms and New Orleans felt like a internet ghost town to me.  Though there were several successful internet companies locally, they weren’t connected through tech organizations or informal social networks.

There has been a confluence of events and initiatives that are starting to gel, and I believe Louisiana is on the brink of massive opportunity. Here are the things that are keeping me up at night and that I am positioning Voodoo Ventures to leverage.

• Tax Incentives – On the heels of the success of the film tax credit, the state instituted various powerful tax incentives that are starting to work their way into the consciousness of investors and startups.  They are here for the taking today.  The angel investor tax credit that enables an angel investor to receive refundable tax credits of 50% of their investment in a qualified Louisiana entrepreneurial business. Digital media tax credit enables a company to receive a tax credit worth 20% of expenditures in Louisiana.  The definition initially applied to video game development firms, as Geoff Daily reports, apparently Chris Stelly, director of film industry development within the Office of Entertainment Industry Development, feels the definition is expanded so that “that potentially any interactive Internet application could qualify.”

• Startup Ecosystem – When I moved here I’d go months without running into someone who worked on the internet.  Now I have lunch twice a week with folks doing exactly what I do.  The transformation has been dramatic.  It is both an influx of new talent to Louisiana, but more than that I think it is a new interconnectedness.  This results from new social networking tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Twitter being the most powerful locally at this point to connect the many techies in New Orleans and Louisiana.  Beyond that, I see movements taking place that are bringing a new energy to wanting to get together.  I say movements rather than formal organizations because most of the excitement is not “owned” by anyone.  People are self organizing with unconferences and meetups that are more chaotic but more satisfying than traditional organizations.  We hosted the first BarCamp in Louisiana in February and got a great response and generated a lot of connections.  The next BarCamp is being organized as we speak in Lafayette around the theme of the coming fiber to the last mile and the opportunities that will generate there (more on that later).  The need for a database of techies, startups, and the people that support them is one of the biggest initiatives that I have heard people talking about, and its going to happen very quickly.  Alan Gutierrez and I have been talking a lot about this and he may host it on ThinkNola.  Benjamin Reese has started a self organizing spreadsheet already and Jessica Rohloff wants to push this ahead.  If anyone has feedback on the best way to do it, I am all ears.  This needs to be by the community, for the community and probably warrants its own post.

• Katrina – Katrina was a terrible tragedy that affected so many in New Orleans and Louisiana.  Its impact is still being felt.  Out of great tragedy comes opportunity, and in years since Katrina, a new crop of talented people have moved to Louisiana.  New business have sprung up to replace old ones.  And there is a realization that the creative and tech economy can be the economic engine we need in New Orleans and Louisiana to supplement tourism, the port, and oil and gas.  I believe it will be.

• Air Force Cyber Command in Shreveport – Barksdale Air Force base has been selected as a provisional location for the Cyber Command center.  This is generating a tremendous amount of excitement in the state and has the potential to generated tens of thousands of new jobs in the area.  Already planning is underway for the Cyber Innovation center located there that will promote research and provide infrastructure to businesses and startups spawned by the Cyber Command center.  A recent editorial in the Shreveport Times touts the tremendous impact this will have on the state economy.

• Lafayette “Last Mile” Fiber Network – Lafayette is building out the country’s only fiber into the home network that is equipped with a free 100Mbps intranet for every subscriber and tied to the limitless dynamic computer power of Abacus Data Exchange’s LiquidIQ and the LITE Center’s array of supercomputers.  The network is owned by LUS, a public utility, (and not a telco) and will eventually reach about 120,000 subscribers in Lafayette.  The first residential subscribers will come online around January, 2009.  This is going to bring revolutionary increase in the bandwidth available to the internet that will undoubtedly spawn new services and business.  This is one of the first networks of its kind in the US, but it is a vision for the way we will all one day be connected.  Lafayette and Louisiana will get a sneak peak at what this speed of access can bring, and we have to opportunity to get a jump on developing business models and services that leverage it.

These five factors have me incredibly excited right now about the opportunities that are presenting themselves right now to entrepreneurs in this state.  I’ll be sharing more about some things that Voodoo Ventures will be doing to leverages these opportunities and I’d love to hear what you think.

How are these changes going to affect our lives?  What opportunities do you see?

(If any experts want to expand on any of the details I’ve laid out or offer corrections / clarifications, please do so.  It’s a lot of information that I’m trying to aggregate.)

I came across Dave McClures “Startup Metrics for Pirates” presentation this week from the Foo Camp conference.

It really has some great metrics and is highly recommended for anyone starting a web-based business.  You’ll learn what you should be tracking, and the conversion funnel approach that I’ve talked about in the past.

AARRR Matey! Take a look:

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Charlie O’Donnell has a good summary of the big lesson from the Twitter – Summize acquisition confirmed today, and how $750,000 in funding helped Summize leap Tweetscan as the leader in the Twitter search space and get to the sale to Twitter.

So, when your investor is having this kind of smart conversation with an investor in one of your likely acquirers, you’re at a HUGE advantage.  This isn’t someone pitching your company to get flipped–this was some pretty high level thinking (and outside the valley thinking, I might add).

So while you’re protecting all your equity from those big bad investors, ask yourself the question of who’s having these types of conversations with key decision makers and thinkers about your company.  “Who’s a lot more experienced than I am that thinks intelligently about my company’s strategy–and cares about it?”

THAT’s the kind of investor that makes the rest of your equity worth multiples of what it is the moment they take their 20-30%.

The lesson: Early mover advantage doesn’t alway pay off if you can’t sustain your infrastucture due to lack of capital.

Well, maybe.  It’s one of two reasons.  Either, he wishes Silicon Alley Reporter had been 8 years later because he was doing all of this blogging stuff before blogging was blogging.  Or, because he wishes Mahalo had been a blog network instead of a semantic search engine. Either way, he’s just waiting out the storm because its about to be back to the amateurs (like me).

So, its time to mark the end of the uprising.  All of the tech blogs that bucked the “mainstream media” and have dominated the conversation for the last 5 years.  It is quite an achievement, and media is forever changed. But, the wall is crumbling. Let us recount:

• Preview: Conde Nast buys Reddit – Oct 2006
• MediaBistro cashes out – July 2007
• Scobelizer and Fast Company hook up – March 2008
• Conde Nast takes out Ars Technica. – May 2008
• PaidContent rocks it $30 mil – July 2008
• Guy Kawasaki sells Truemors – (what?) – July 2008

Who is next?  Well, two guaranteed predictions:

• Readwriteweb
• TechCrunch – Henry Blodget’s $100 mil valuation is just months away.

Ain’t it great when old media gets a whiff of new media?

I’ve been a fan of Eric Marcoullier since I first added the MyBlogLog widget to this blog a year and a half ago.  He (and his partner Todd) transformed blogs into social networks and Yahoo snapped up the company last year.

Eric and I hooked up at SXSW in March to meet for the first time in person after he had reached out to offer support for the BarCamp New Orleans.  I was thrilled to get a chance to spend some time with him and I asked him what he was going to be up to next.

He told me about Gnip.

The word “ping” spelled backwards.  I don’t pretend to be an internet infrastructure guru, but understanding what a ping is in laymans terms, and then applying it to the vast amounts of data being piped around thanks to your activities on the social web make it clear that GNIP is going to be a welcome solution.

Just as blog ping services gave blog search engines the notification they needed to update themselves when someone posted something new, Gnip will provide this service to pipe the data from data producers like Digg and Flickr to data consumers like Plaxo and MyBlogLog.

It’s a big responsibility, it centralizes data feeds but creates dependencies.  As we all understand from Twitters recent headaches, if data pipes get clogged, no one is happy.  If Gnip becomes the centralized system, it will be both extremely valuable and also extremely important player.  Simply put, it can’t go down.  But they’ve got the best in the business (Pivotal Labs) building their infrastructure.

I wish Eric the best of luck.  More details on the service here, here and here.

New Orleans Connection:

Eric went to Tulane.  He has expressed to me his desire to continue to support the New Orleans tech community and nurture our growth.  I know he’s be willing to come down to New Orleans for a talk or event this fall.  Let’s try to get this native son back to Louisiana and learn something from him… what do you say?