Friday morning the Net2NO krewe (aka NOLA <3 SXSW aka Y@T Pack) will be on the road to Austin.  This road trip has taken a lot of planning, and a lot of people have worked very hard to make it happen.  And now it’s here, so let’s rock it.  This post is based on my personal experience at SXSW over the last 4 years, but I still have a lot to learn, so I look forward to your thoughts in the comments

How to Rock It and Get the Most Out of SXSW

• Work Hard / Play Hard – You’re going to be dead tired a week from today so get over it.  Don’t party so hard you can’t make the panels, and don’t panel so hard you miss the parties.  I learn so much each year going to really interesting panels, I love seeking out new and interesting speakers.  But the best connections I make are over a few beers at the parties.  You have to be able to do both.  So suck it up and don’t plan on getting a lot of sleep, you’ve got to hustle at SXSW.
• Planning Your Panels – There are several good panel planners online.  These are great to sift through the panels ahead of time.  Me? I take a yellow highlighter and go spend an hour going through the SXSW book on the day I get there.  I select my panels based on person, not topic.  Anyone who you find interesting on twitter, or who may run a company you respect or think is cool is probably worth seeing.  I highlight out a schedule for each day, then tear of the panel picker and stick it in my badge pass holder each morning.
• What to Wear – While this isn’t going to be a problem for us, since we all have t-shirts, I’ll offer my 2 cents.  You’ll see a lot of hipster cool, ie: Threadless Dirty Coast tees.  You’ll see very few ties unless they are skinny or ironic.  Jeans are de riguer.   Be comfortable and if the weathers iffy, bring a jacket, because you might not make it back home before the evenings activities.  Generally, I take the conference day directly into the party circuit evening.
• What to Carry – iPhone & Moleskine.  Maybe a camera.  That’s it.  I don’t carry my MacBook to the conference each day, b/c personally I don’t need to immediately blog my day.  But really its because I just don’t want to carry it around.  A bag to carry stuff is nice, but you have to carry it around all day.
• Who to Meet – Anyone and everyone.  SXSW is literally the friendliest conference I’ve ever been too.  You can walk right up to your favorite web-celeb and introduce yourself.  Don’t be shy, that’s what we are all here for.  Don’t do anything alone.  Find people to go to lunch with, go to dinner with, go out with.  You’ll meet so many new friends.  Relax and have fun.
• Parties to Hit – Personally, I tend to skip most of the official parties.  A general rule, the bigger the name (Google, Facebook, Digg) the bigger the crowd.  Most of these parties are so packed that people are waiting outside for hours.  Not me.  It’s not worth getting in and then not being able to get a drink.  Go to the smaller, more intimate events.  Follow twitter and you’ll find them. They usually have much cooler people anyway.  The Dorkbot party and all of the outdoor happy hours are great.  I always have fun at these and like the outside ones. (Don’t miss the NOLA Party on Monday and St. Patricks Last Stand on Tuesday)
• Awards Night – Sunday night is the web awards night.  I skip it.  But then I don’t really like the Oscars or Grammys either.  You’ll hear who won on Twitter anyway.
• BarCamp – BarCamp Austin is a great way to spend a day or an afternoon away from the convention center on Saturday.  I go every year and spend a 1/2 day.  I highly recommend you plan to stop by.  Register @ Facebook.
• Twitter – Definitely the official back-channel for SXSW.  I wrote a post in 2007 about what social software would emerge at SXSW.  Clearly it is Twitter.  So much so that Dodgeball is now down for the count.
• Rawk It – this post was inspired by the the panel How to Rawk SXSW.  So go to that too.

In addition to those general way to rock SXSW, I’m super excited about what New Orleans is doing to take Austin by storm….

NOLA <3 SXSW – Road Trip Details – Lots of people have been asking me exactly what we are doing, so here is the down low:

• Who – 30 Louisianians will be jumping on a bus and cruising to Austin for SXSW.
• What – We’re going to promote New Orleans and Louisiana as a fantasic location for digital media & tech professionals.  We’ve got fantastic culture, quality of life, and a creative climate. Since Hurricane Katrina the city has literally reinvented itself and we’ve had an influx of passionate, talented young people who want to make an impact.  Our local chapter of Net2 has been instrumental in harnessing this energy and building a community of techies, now 175 strong in only 8 months.  The Downtown Development District , GNO, Inc and City of New Orleans Film Commission have been instrumental in our ability to pull this trip off.  We’ll be spreading the gospel of New Orleans at SXSW!
• Shirts – We’ll be easy to spot because we’ll all be wearing the same shirts.
• Booth – Stop by our booth 811 at the SXSW trade show to meet us, grab some schwag and tell us your story.  We’ll be giving away a free weekend in NOLA each day at 5:04pm.
• Panel – Shameless plug: Come to my panel Outsourcing 2.0 – Is the World Flat or Not? on Monday at 11:30 am in room 8.
• Party Bus – Look for the NOLA <3 SXSW party bus cruising around the convention center and the parties each night.  We’re providing free shuttle services between all the parties.
• Party – Don’t miss the New Orleans Party on Monday night 10pm-2am at the Lucky Lounge.  DJ Othertempo and the Austin Knights Brass band will perform.  It’s going to be a NOLA style throwdown. RSVP here.
• Twitter – follow @net2no for official details on the trip. And our hashtag is #nosxsw so you can search for that too.
• Google Group – all messages and discussion for everyone going on the trip.
• Blog – We’ll be posting everything on the Net2NO site.  Stay tuned!

I’m excited to see old friends and new at SXSW.  Here are my digits, let’s connect:

• Email me @ cschultz@voodooventures.com
• Follow me @ twitter.com/cschultz
• Call me @ 504-931-6099

My presentation for The Feast last Friday revolved around lessons I have learned in my 9 years as an entreprenuer and business owner.  I’ve included the slides below, but wanted to add some notes, because many of the slides are not self explanatory.

• Impostor Syndrome – An entrepreneur’s crisis of self confidence.  You’ve got to believe in yourself to make anyone else believe in you. So you just quit your job 2 weeks ago and started a company… that’s what you do now, go for it with confidence.
• Sprinklers & Golf – That’s where I started my career after college.  From sprinkler salesman to business development of golf course management contracts. The only problem, I don’t like golf.  You must do what you are passionate about.
• TRS80 & Vegas – What am I passionate about? I’ve loved computers since the days of BASIC on a Trash-80 and I love going to Vegas.  My best friend Matt and I were in biz school and traveling back and forth to Vegas.  So we decided to start a company that combined the things we love.  Internet + Vegas = Internet-based Bachelor Party Planners
• Biz Cards – I have a biz card fetish. 1) we printed at Kinko’s with the logo design by Bill Gates (MS Word Clipart).  2) BachelorBlowOut got a little more professional 3) changed the name to Destination VIP because no-one takes you seriously with a name like BBO 4) Got aquired.  Notice title change.  Realized 8 months into it that 25% owner means youre not in charge any more, so 5) started Voodoo Ventures
• Charts - big changes over the last 10 years.  Cost of starting a startup is falling to zero.  Witness Y Combinator, TechStars, etc.  Meaning, the number of startups is skyrocketing.  Result? Best bet is to bootstrap until you have something “real”. 3 stages of a startup.  1) Ramen soup phase – you should be able to scrape together something and get a few customers to get yourself to 50k in rev. 2) Then the bootstrapping starts and you grow your company to 500k.  3) Growth capital is available beyond that because you have a real business.  This is where I believe more capital will be entering the market.
• You’ve got a Website, Now What – You need traffic.  Best source for traffic = Google.  How to get free traffic from Google?  Dan Finnery gave me my “The Graduate” moment in 2001 when he whispered in my ear “Search Engine Optimization“.  Check your current website, if your page title says “Frontpage” you ain’t got it.  Learn this and do it.  It’s free and easy and powerful.
• Customer #1 – Relentless focus on getting in business.  Get that first customer.  Until someone writes a check, you aren’t in business.  Mine was Dave Mullen who wrote us a check for $5000.
• Friction - Now that things are getting serious, you are going to get distracted from your business by all the other “stuff” you have to do.  Legal stuff, IRS, opening bank accounts, permits, insurance, etc.  You will figure this stuff out.  Don’t pay a lot of money to do this, you can do this yourself.  Find an attorney who will give you a break and help you grow with them.  Don’t fall victim to paralysis by analysis.  If you mess something up, someone will tell you. Just keep moving forward.
• Funding - Several options: 1) credit cards 2) rich uncle, friends & family 3) wife (mines not available) 4) cash flow.  This is why cash flow is king.  Focus on driving revenue.  Cash flow = sustainability.
• How Do You Make Money? – figure it out.  You don’t have the luxury of not focusing on it.  Google Adsense ain’t it.  And you’re not getting bought by Google.  How do you add value, and what will people pay you for?
• Markets - I started my first company in Vegas in 2001.  Vegas boomed, and so did we.  A rising tide lifts all boats.  New Orleans is seeing the same energy, and rumblings right now
• Be Local but Act Global – Don’t focus just on your city.  Have a global strategy for your supply chain and collaboration.  Also focus on global customers, not just local ones.  But have a personality and leverage whats special about you being in New Orleans. Culture, music, social change.
• Be Disruptive – If someone is telling you to slow down, you’re doing something right. If you’re making people mad or nervous, thats a good thing.  My first idea was GrooveOn.com and I called a bunch of record labels in LA and asked for their digital music rights. In 1999.  They were mad. And scared.  Understand?
• Launch Early and Often & Fail Fast – We built and launched Huckabuck.com, a meta search engine for $50,000.  We did some crazy things like signing Rebirth Brass Band to a ringtone contract and flying a plane around Jazz Fest.  Then we got a check for $2.42 for our first month revenue. Spending $25,000 to make $2.42 doesn’t compute so we sold it.  Launch to sale in 9 months.  Not a home run, but a single and it was fun.
• Failure - You learn a lot from failure.  You have to erase fear of failure from your mind.  Be fearless.  You will fail, but you are not a failure.  Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do it again.
• Ideas Are a Renewable Resource – They are also worthless unless acted upon.  Keep following your dreams and making your ideas a reality.
• Give Without Expectation – This builds social capital.  The old term for it is Karma.

We got our submission in today for 504ward.  We’re excited to be a part of the competition and ready to rock on moving the Launch Pad forward.  We’ve been somewhat under the radar with this project until now.  Starting today, we’re looking for local New Orleans entrepreneurs who want to get out of their bedroom and into a stimulating, collaborative and fun environment without the burden of traditional commercial leases.

Launch Pad – 504ward Business Competion Submission from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.

Startup businesses are born in a spare bedroom or college dorm. Once off the ground, entrepreneurs need an office for legitimacy and support, but find traditional commercial office leases daunting and expensive. The Launch Pad is a flexible office space for startup companies. We provide short-term leases, furnished offices, a support staff and multiple networking and educational events to get a new business off the ground.

Innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. The core value Launch Pad provides is the interaction, networking, and mentoring among entrepreneurs in a modern workspace. Our office space includes access to the services that all startups need so entrepreneurs can focus on their core competencies and build viable businesses.

Launch Pad is the brainchild of entrepreneurs who are intimately aware of the startup culture in places like New York, San Francisco and Austin. Launch Pad will be New Orleans hub for events like Startup School, BarCamp, Co-working, Net2NO. Launch Pad will thrust New Orleans into consideration for entrepreneurs nationwide deciding where to start businesses.

Want in on Launch Pad? Got feedback on what would make it work for you? We want to hear from you.  Contact us today for more details.

The 504Ward was announced this week by Idea Village.  It’s a business plan competition with a $100,000 grant to the winning business along with services by many other New Orleans area firms.

The competition is designed to attract new start-ups to New Orleans or to seed local start-ups with the expressed intent of providing good jobs for 23-35 year old’s in the city.

At the competition launch on Thursday night at Tipitina’s, representatives from Google were on hand to throw their support behind the competition.  They included a promise to promote the compeition on YouTube which potentially will draw quite a bit of attention.  An interesting component of the competition is its emphasis on a video component to the submission process.  This is a trend that I see continuing to grow, we submitted a video application as part of our TechCrunch50 conference application.

The evening’s highlight was the unveiling of a short film produced by Trumpet and directed by Benjamin Reece promoting the rising to the challenge of entrepreneurship in the new New Orleans.  Ben has emerged in the last several months as one of New Orleans’s brightest young talents along with his partner Tung Ly.  His short film 50 People 1 Question has drawn attention all over the world, and he directed a inspiring short for the 504ward that you can watch below. You should come see him speak at the next Net2NO meetup. (Who is that guy in the opening shot I wonder.)

504ward Promotional Film from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

I am very excited about the interest and support in the New Orleans start-up community right now, and this is just another example of great things happening.  Though the award will likely have a national applicant pool, I really hope that many bright young New Orleanian’s apply for the grant.  I feel a sense of pride and a competitive desire to show that this award can be won by a home grown business that will benefit New Orleans, that great businesses don’t just have to locate a satellite office here, but that they can be born here.  My personal challenge to local start-ups is that we take this award home ourselves.  Let’s make it happen NOLA.

Learn more about the 504ward, read the complete rules, and apply. Applications are due December 4th.

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.)

In celebration of my favorite time of year, Jazz Fest, we’ve put together a set of Jazz Fest Cubes to help everyone wade through the wide array of choices this weekend at the Fest.

We were selected by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation to build the Talent Exchange, a music search engine that enables music supervisors and talent buyers to find Louisisana music and artists.

To commemorate the achievement of building this search engine (in just one month… hey, its beta), we compiled the Jazz Fest Cubes. We’re going to be sharing these with our friends who are attending the An Event Apart conference this week, and presumably sticking around this weekend for some music.

Want one?

Come by the Welcome, Party! connecting AEA attendees with NOLA BarCampers today at Lafayette Square for a special professionally printed version. Or hit me up and I’ll get one to you.

Or

Print your own version using the embedded files you see in this post. Print, snip, tape, Voila!

We were thrilled to get to work on the Talent Exchange for NOJHF. Here’s what Scott Aiges had to say about it:

The mission of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation is to promote Louisiana’s music and culture. In support of that, we decided to build a search engine that would give music supervisors an easy way to discover music by Louisiana artists for licensing in film, television and commercials, and for festival talent buyers to find artists touring in their region for live performances.

We hired Flatsourcing to build the Talent Exchange for us. With just a month to build it, they fully committed to the project and got to work. The whole team communicated with us every step of the way, and made sure they shared our vision for the project. We’re thrilled to launch the beta version of the Talent Exchange at our new conference, Sync Up: The Jazz & Heritage Music and Media Market. Thanks to the great team at Flatsourcing for helping us get the job done!

Look forward to celebrating this great time of year with all our local friends and everyone else who’s in town. Happy Fest!

I’ve got 99 friends on Facebook but I hear from Jason Calacanis more than anyone. He has turned Facebook into a marketing platform for his human-powered search engine, Mahalo. And he doesn’t pay Facebook a dime for this primo branding opportunity.

Every morning I log in to Facebook and there is a link is posted through Mahalo with the Mahalo logo right next to it. As you can see by the screenshot of my news feed, yesterday (and most days) he had 5 items all with the Mahalo logo right next to it.

So how does he do it?

Well, the next generation of optimization is taking shape. First it was search engine optimization (SEO), next came social media optimization (SMO), and now we’ve got news feed optimization (NFO).

Dave McClure thinks “its effin’ brilliant.” and I’m sure other marketers are taking note. Inside Facebook has a very comprehensive post on how you too can optimize your submissions for Facebook’s news feed. Some of their tips:

• The most important thing you can do as a Facebook application marketer is to publish engaging, authentic Feed items.
• Be sure you optimize your Feed items for all of the Feed item elements made available to you by Facebook: title, body, and images.

Now here’s an amazing tidbit from Inside Facebook “News Feed publishes just a little more than 0.2% of the stories it considers.” Meaning Calacanis must truly be the master of NFO.

Now interestingly, Calacanis has taken on the search engine optimization industry before.

The SEO folks got really pissed off at me for saying “SEO is bulls@#t.” last year, but the truth is that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman.

Do you consider having your Facebook newsfeed dominated by headlines posted to Mahalo (and using the Mahalo logo as the image rather than an image related to the story) to be Facebook SPAM? At the very least, is the rationale behind posting it “optimizing” links for Facebook, hence marketing those links (Mahalo)?

(Now I know I could unfriend Calacanis or block him from my feed, but thats not the point. How is he getting so much content in there in the first place?)

The point is, is it OK to use what others are using for conversation and updates for marketing. And don’t tell me he’s not, because that is exactly what those 5 Mahalo logos every day are doing there. What do you think?

We had a great weekend for BarCamp NOLA. We had about 45 participants and everyone contributed to make it a great weekend. Saturday was BarCamp with two sessions going on concurrently all day and Sunday was Hack Day where we worked on two different non-profit profit projects.

BarCamp NOLA – Weekend Video from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.

There are more detailed summaries by Brian & Alan. Thanks to everyone who participated, it was a great weekend. Let’s do it again soon.

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.

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.