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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I had lunch with a friend and mentor on Monday. Christopher Skinner founded MakeBuzz, a very successful online business strategy consultancy. He’s had a lot of success building a service business, he is from New Orleans, and has an office in New York too. He has built online marketing integration strategies for clients like United Airlines and other big companies with gross revenue above $20 billion.

I asked how he has grown his business and been successful bringing on board those BIG clients, the whales that we all want to be working for?

Perseverance, perception of the client problem and make due dates. Something like that. You have to absorb yourself into the client’s needs, not yours. I basically have few friends, no hobbies, I stay close to my family and stay focused. Lots of self denial. I don’t think any of this is extreme. I am not that studious. As Geddy Lee says, ‘we are not that smart and can’t figure out anything better to do’.

There you go. Life inside of one paragraph. No different than anyone else that tries.

I appreciate his response, basically Christopher boils it down to focus and drive. Decide where you want your business to be, and do what it takes to get it there, without getting distracted by the unimportant. Thanks, have a great summer in Europe!

I’ve been slow on the draw and have been meaning to write the guys from AwesomeHighlighter.com up since FOWA in Miami, and in the short three weeks since I met them they managed to amass more than 10,000 users.

Yep, thats right, three weeks ago they showed me a prelaunch version of their app that they were using to share awesome stuff with each other, and now they are top ranked on del.icio.us and growing like a weed. Speaking of del.icio.us, there hasn’t been too much innovation in their camp since the Yahoo acquisition, I think AwesomeHighlighter could have a real chance to add new value here and become a prefered bookmarking tool.

I met Joel & Luke at BarCamp Miami when I accidentally took Joel’s slot on the preso grid (you snooze you lose buddy;). But it was serendipidous because we ended up in some of the same sessions through out the day and decided to go to Cuban food for dinner.

These guys are everything that is cool about what is going on right now. Over a great ropa vieja, we rapped about Y Combinator, business models, funding needs and the lack thereof, and why building something that you would use yourself is the way to start. By solving problems you face every day:

Like, sending stuff to your friends, but not making them read the whole blog post or page to figure out what you wanted to share. What you think is cool is highlighted for them on the page. An idea so simple, it works.

Luke and Joel just applied to Y Combinator. I wish them them best of luck. I wish we had our funding strategy in place here in NOLA. Well, maybe we will.

In the meantime, check it out. It is awesome. (See this post Awesomely Highlighted).

Things are starting to come together for BarCamp New Orleans. The dates have been firmed up for February 16-17, 2008. We’ve got a great new logo featuring a flambeaux designed by Lisa Cohn from Willdoo.

We are looking forward to a great turnout of Gulf Coast geeks, techies, digerati, and entrepreneurs. Please join us for this great un-conference event, and the first BarCamp to be held in New Orleans.

A quick summary of the resources we have:

• Register yourself Barcamp NOLA wiki
• Join the Facebook group
• Download the one sheet. Use this to help us find sponsors and promoters for the event.

One of the most important things that we’re focused on is trying to find a nonprofit and/or small business to build something for. Day two of BarCamp (February 17) will be “hack-day”. We will be building a website, blog, or anything else that can help out a local New Orleans business (and that we can get done in one day). Help us find a deserving organization.

Anybody can complete the form below to apply:

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Back in the heyday of the NBA I used to love watching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. No matter what kind of game MJ was having, Phil Jackson would rest him at the end of the third quarter and for the first few minutes in the fourth. He’d come off the bench rested and ready, and go on to do the most amazing things I’d never seen basketball court, more often than not leading the Bulls to victory.

And sometime during the fourth quarter, Marv Albert would remark “he lets the game come to him.”

Sometimes as an entrepreneur you have to let the game come to you. Things don’t always move as quickly as you want. Software doesn’t get developed overnight. Search engine rankings take time. And user adoption of your product doesn’t happen overnight.

About a month ago I felt myself pressing. I was pressing too hard to get siteMighty to the next level. I was pressing too hard on my team, our partners, and our business model. I realized this one night when I literally laid in bed all night with my mind racing and unable to sleep. I was pressing too hard.

So I made the decision to step back. I let the team step forward on siteMighty, and instead of trying to press so hard to grow fast, let things take their natural course for a while. We have a fully developed product, our users like it and are finding success with it, and we have a great team behind it at supporting it.

It was an incredibly freeing moment when I realized I could take a break from siteMighty and stop pressing so hard.

So that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’ve been focusing my energy on building the business infrastructure for Flatsourcing which has been going incredibly well, and is something thats been waiting for my attention for a long time.

And today I realized that the game was coming to me.

• A good friend of mine signed up for an account with siteMighty and gave me some great feedback on it.
• I looked in on our support tickets and stats that I’ve been purposely ignoring for the last couple weeks. They’ve been handled excellently by our support team.
• Today we received a revenue-share check from a partner it was literally 10x what it was last month. That means we’re growing but more importantly our users are growing. Wow, if that’s what stepping away will do, I’m heading to Panama.
• Most of all, I’ve been having fun again.

Letting the game come to you feels great. Pressing too hard feels stressful. It’s a lesson in entrepreneurship and I won’t take lightly.

Thanks for the life lesson MJ.

Joel Yarmon shot video last night of my talk at the Tulane Entrepreneurship Association. It was a great opportunity to have a great conversation with an interesting audience of fellow entrepreneurs. Thanks to Joel for blogging about this on the Tulane Freeman School Blog.

I’m very excited to have been invited to speak next week at the Tulane Entrepreneurship Association (TEA) meeting. Entrepreneurs are exciting to be around, and none are more exciting than MBAs ready to take on the world.

Being invited to speak brought back memories of going to see these types of talks during my days in the entrepreneurship program at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. I was there in the heyday of the dot.com era, and we had swashbuckling entrepreneurs marching in telling us how they were going to change the world. Their energy and enthusiasm inspired me to start my first company while getting my MBA.

As I’ve always said, there’s no better time to start a business then while you’re in school and your student loans are paying your bills. As an Internet entrepreneur, the biggest difference is that today, the barriers to entry for starting a business are literally crumbling. There really is no better time than now.

If anybody in the New Orleans area is around next Monday, come by the TEA lecture series and get in on the conversation.

• Tulane Entrepreneur Association Speaker Series
• Monday, October 15th at 5pm
• Freeman School of Business. 7 McAllister Drive. Goldring McAlister Hall II. Room 3111.
• Map

If anybody if anybody that can be there reads this post, please let me know what you’d like to talk about in the comments below. I’m really looking forward to this opportunity.

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!

Wow, someone is finally getting it right about New Orleans. Business Week published an article yesterday highlighting what I have been saying for years: New Orleans is a great place to start a business!

It’s exciting to hear our friends highlighted in this story:

Robert LeBlanc, an EO Accelerator member who founded the nightclub Republic after the storm:

“Everybody knows that there have been a lot of problems endemic to New Orleans, and a lot of that is because it has been such an insular city for such a long time,” LeBlanc says. “We wanted to do things to connect the people who are in New Orleans with the new people who were coming to New Orleans, to create those bonds and those communities.”

Neel Sus, fellow EO Accelerator member who launched SusCo Solutions last year:

“Everybody wants everybody to succeed, and I think if anything Katrina has motivated people to open it up more.”

And most of all, a big shout out to Blake, this is an exciting highlight to mark the launch of Killian Interactive:

Blake Killian, who left a small Internet startup to found his own online marketing firm, Killian Interactive, this summer, says Web-based companies have another advantage: Their businesses didn’t suffer the same damage during Katrina that traditional companies did. “We just grabbed our laptops and headed to higher ground,” Killian says.

Congrats to all, and most of all congratulations to New Orleans entrepreneurs, we are getting our story out and New Orleans is on the move.