There are a couple great events coming up for the entrepreneurship community in NOLA that you should take advantage of.  I’m excited about going.  Voodoo Ventures’ own Will Donaldson has been instrumental in organizing these in his role as president of the Tulane Entrepreneurship Association.

Tulane Entrepreneurs’ Fall Workshop

Tulane’s Uptown campus on Friday November 21st from 9am-12:30pm.

The event will focus on social enterprises and feature:

• Andrea Chen of Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans
• Stephen Shelton of the Louisiana CleanTech Network
• Jackie Richard of Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation
• Nadiyah Morris of the Office of Lt. Gov. for Social Entrepreneurship
• Carol Bebelle of the Ashe Cultural Arts Center

Followed by an interactive business planning workshop on Sambazon, a social enterprise, featuring John Elstrott, Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, Executive Director of the Levy-Rosenblum Institute for Entrepreneurship and Lead Director of Whole Foods Market.

RSVP at http://tea.tulane.edu. Coffee and bagels will be served at 9am and the program will begin at 9:30am. The program is limited to 60 participants.

Panel Discussion: “The New New Orleans for Entrepreneurs: Opportunities for Entrepreneurship”

Tulane’s Uptown campus on Monday, November 24th from 5:00 – 7:30pm.

• Stephen Moret – Secretary of Louisiana Economic Development
• John E Koerner III - Koerner Capital
• Pres Kabacoff – CEO & Chairman, HRI Properties
• Ashton Ryan, Jr. - CEO & Chairman, First NBC Bank
• Crichton Brown – Managing Director, Advantage Capital

To see more detail please go to the Speaker Series page.

I definitely plan to attend these events and highly recommend them to the NOLA startup community.

UPDATED: Due to high demand, we extended Startup School from eight to sixteen people.  4 tickets are available right now.

There is a lot of excitement around the upcoming 504ward and Tulane Entrepreneur Association business plan competitions. I have had many people contact me excited to enter and looking for direction with biz plans.  I think it would be really helpful for all of us in the New Orleans entrepreneurship community to have a workshop to review and strengthen the biz plans we all plan to enter in these competitions. So, let’s do it!

Part 1: Business Plans 101

• Thursday, November 13th – 5:30 – 7:30 pm
• Voodoo Ventures Offices
• Learn how to write a winning business plan. Chris Schultz and other coaches will lead a group discussion and share resources about the fundamentals of a sound business plans. Learn about the sections you should cover, how to prepare financial pro-forma’s, and pitfalls to avoid.
• Resources: We’ll provide a list of valuable resources online to help you craft that perfect plan.
• Prepare: Come ready to give your “elevator pitch” to everyone in the room.  It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just be ready to pitch.
• Bonus: Filmmaker Benjamin Reece will give a session on making a compelling video submission for 504ward.

Part 2: Workshop Your Business Plan

• Saturday, November 22nd – 9am – 12pm
• Voodoo Ventures Offices
• Workshop your plan with experts.  We will have a “speed dating” sessions with biz plan coaches who are local entrepreneurs and VC’s.  You will have a session with each of them to workshop your plan, review strengths/weaknesses and get feedback on your idea.  If you have a video submission storyboarded ready, you will get the opportunity to review that with filmmaker, Ben Reece.
• Prepare: Come ready with a draft of your executive summary or the whole plan if you’ve got it.  Entering a video? Bring any ideas or storyboarding.

Limited Space

Startup school is free and will be limited to eight ( 8 ) twelve (12) sixteen (16) people.  Sign up below, first come first served.  We are doing this in order to ensure that the enviroment is small enough that everyone who takes part really gets a lot of value out of the training.

Ready to get schooled?  Get more details and sign up for Startup School.

Another great tech event is coming to NOLA tomorrow and I hope that we can show up in force.  As is becoming common at tech events, there is a BarCampApache to go alongside the annual ApacheCon which is being held here this year.

Whether you are going to ApacheCon or not, you should go to the BarCamp, which is free.  Let’s support these type of tech events here in NOLA. Highlights will include:

• Inventor of OpenID to present
• New Orleans’ own Ryan Lane will give a session on configuring a web infrastructure for use in a PKI environment using mod_ssl and/or mod_nss. This is fairly big in DoD right now, due to their CAC (Common Access Card) infrastructure.
• Plenty of free t-shirts to all attendees

So, go vote and then stop by BarCamp Apache.

• BarCamp Apache – FREE
• Sheraton New Orleans – 500 Canal Street New Orleans, Louisiana 70130
• Tue, Nov 4th – 10am – until afternoon

Barcamp Apache

If you’re not freaking out a bit right now with the current economic crisis then you must have ice in your veins.  With the meltdown on Wall Street, a lot of us are thinking about how this is going to affect our own businesses.  In the web world, some have felt insulated from the downturn, but warning signs are coming in from VC’s loud and clear.

Our business was affected by the credit crisis starting about a year and a half ago.  It has been challenging, but actually has led to a refocusing on low-cost services model through Flatsourcing which I believe is poised to thrive in the current enviroment.  We got credit when we didn’t need it, which I’m glad we have now, and we have trimmed our cost structure to weather the storm.

This is what other start-ups clearly need to be doing.  Launching a product in this market is going to be tough, if you don’t have cash for a long runway, you better have a revenue model that gets you to cash-flow positive quickly.  If you are solely dependent on advertising revenue, buckle up, its going to be a wild ride.

The embedded presentation that TechCrunch posted is what Sequoia Capital made to the CEO’s of its startups is interesting for its clear and (relatively) consise explanation of where we are, and how we got here.  It’s one of the most comprehensive analyses of the current crisis that I’ve seen and I recommend you take time to understand it and the impact the current enviroment is going to have on your business.

CEO_ALL_HANDS_10-7-08_FINAL – Free Legal Forms

Campfiber is going on in Lafayette today.  If you weren’t able to make it, they are streaming live and the quality if very good.  Check it out.

Woohoo!  I got some great news on Wednesday that the panel I submitted called Outsourcing 2.0 – Is the World Flat or Not? was approved and will be a session at SXSW Interactive 2009 in Austin.

I’m so excited about this. It will be my first time speaking at SXSW. I’ve been as an attendee the last three years and it is a great conference.  I always learn a ton and have a lot of fun.

Ben Reece, Brian Oberkirch and I had lunch together yesterday and talked about the positive reinforcement and encouragement that our social networks provide us.  Lifting up the community is something we all try to do, and we all have benefited from greatly.  I felt this yesterday firsthand when I tweeted out my excitement and within an hour was flooded by warm emails, plenty of congratulatory tweets and a great blog post.  It is powerful and was personally very touching to have a community that supports each other this way, as Brian said at lunch, “a rising tide lifts all boats” and that is exactly what we are doing with the NOLA tech scene.

So, thank you to all who voted for the panel, the feedback I received from SXSW really considered this highly.  I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to make the trip to SXSW Interactive March 13-18, 2009.  It is a great conference.

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.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the New Orleans 100 list that AllDayBuffet.org launched on 8/25 with the ambitious goal of garnering 1 million pageviews over the next year.  The list was a great compilation of all of the great businesses, social organizations, and movements happening in New Orleans right now, post-Katrina.

The folks behind the list are putting on a social innovation conference in New York in October called The Feast.  It’s got a great roster of speakers including Robbie Vitrano from Trumpet.

Mike Karnjanaprakorn dropped the news in an email yesterday that he is bringing the conference to New Orleans next year.

He is planning to bring the conference to New Orleans, on or around February 5th, 2009.  This is a fantastic opportunity for New Orleans to continue to position ourselves as the social entrepreneurship capital of the world.  With all the activity right now, we have the opportunity to show that we “get it” with regards to the importance of business being socially responsible.

Put The Feast on your calendar for February and stay tuned for more details. You heard it here first folks!

UPDATED 9/29/08: I’ve moved this blog post over to our wiki.  Please continue to add companies here.

I was having the conversation on Friday night about if we are getting close to a tipping point here in New Orleans and in Louisiana with regards to technology and startup culture.  As I’ve been talking about for a while, we need an ecosystem. Entrepreneurs need to know one-another and they need to know whats going on.  We need organizations and a government that support startups.

Its happening right now.

Jessica Rohloff has been instrumental in getting Net2NO off the ground, and she has talked about getting a blog together that highlights the good things that are going on around here.  The “Good News” blog it could be called.  I’m a big fan of distributed systems: all of us blogging rather than one blog we all read, free unconferences instead of traditional conferences, meetups rather than meetings, groups with participants not committees.

I’m also a fan of just getting started, so here goes on the highlight reel of New Orleans tech & entrepreneurs for the last several weeks in no particular order.

1. Brent McCrossen was in town last week and has secured office space open a branch of his startup, Audiosocket, right here in NOLA.
2. Kenneth Purcell moved his company, iSeatz back to New Orleans from New York after Katrina.  In August iSeatz was named to the Inc 500 and is the only Louisiana firm ranked in the top 500.
3. Nic Perkins of The Receivables Exchange and the rest of the team at StartupNewOrleans have started to reach out to expat New Orleanian entrepreneurs in an effort to get them to relocate their business back here.
4. Will Donaldson and the Tulane Entrepreneurs Association have put together a fantastic speaker series featuring some incredible entreprenuers that is open to the public.
5. The Idea Village is launching the 504Ward initiative to to connect entreprenuers with talent and peers with some exciting things to come.
6. Zach Kupperman recently launched PolicyPitch, a community powered platform for sharing public policy ideas.  It’s in the running for a $10,000 grant from Advanta, so go vote for it now.
7. Jessica Roloff (and many more) have gotten Net2NO launched.  We had a first meetup last week and another is coming up in October.  There’s a lot of energy in the group, so you should join.
8. Jonathan Joseph, a Tulane grad, launched the Ultimate Football Network, a social media resource for fantasy football, at TechCrunch50 last week.  Loren Feldman selected him as best of show.
9. Eric Marcoullier, another Tulane grad and founder of MyBlogLog and GNIP has generously offered to come speak to the New Orleans tech community next April.  We’ll be putting a BarCamp together around it.  Details to come.
10. Blake Burris, a Shreveport native has raised funding for a new Facebook app called Challenge which helps users create a support system for training.  He’s also considering a move back to Shreveport to take advantage of the angel investor tax credits.
11. Ben Reece, an techie and filmaker produced a short called Fifty People One Question that went viral on Vimeo.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you should.  Even Barrack Obama’s campaign dug it.
12. Blake Killian now has 4 brands under his BlakeMakes empire.  His videoblogging effort is taking off over at BlakeTakes.
13. Jeffrey Lyons and his team are putting the finishing touches on IdeaBreaker, their Louisiana-born project management app that will be launching soon.
14. Yours truly, Chris Schultz, was invited to the TechCrunch 50 conference to launch the new Flatsourcing Dashboard in the demo pit out there.  It was an incredible experience.
15. Tom Martin of Zehnder Communications and Brandmarken has launched NOLAdeals connecting locals with local businesses through a insiders membership discount program with no coupons.
16. Neel Sus is in talks with several hospitals to implement his mobile patient data platform, eLYMPUS.  His company’s website, Susco, was recently relaunched by Matt Wang of Good Work Marketing, a rockin local marketing and branding firm.
17. Michael Karnjanaprakorn of AllDayBuffett in New York compiled a list of 100 great things going on in New Orleans and took the web by storm with the New Orleans 100.
18. Catherine Markel alerted me to a great looking new hiring management web app called HireFly that she and her Metairie-based firm EmployApp has launched.  It’s in beta right now and really looks impressive.
19. Blake Haney and his crew have a new home called The Canary Collective on Julia street.  It’s is an open gallery / workspace / screening room / party space.  He’s also gathering some of the best and brightest above for a new effort he’s launching through Humid Beings.
20. Dukky is a New Orleans startup that is going to revolutionize the direct mail industry by making it as easy to buy space on a demographically targeted mailer as it is a Google Adwords ad.  Founded by Trumpet and other local partners.

I’ve moved this blog post over to our wiki.  Please continue to add companies here.

Wow, 14 17 18 19 great things going on right here in Louisiana.  Congrats to all. Congrats to us! We are hitting a tipping point and there’s no looking back.

Photo credit c@rljones

We’re thrilled to be launching the new Flatsourcing Dashboard at the TC50 DemoPit.  We’ll be in the DemoPit tomorrow, and are will be doing it up New Orleans-style with Mardi Gras beads and bottles of Tabasco.
It’s been a lot of work getting the new Flatsourcing Dashboard ready for launch.  Oleg, Alex and Timur have been working really hard to get everything prepped.  We’ll be releasing it to all clients next week.

Hurricane Gustav threw us a curveball this week and unfortunately Will Donaldson isn’t able to come along, but my good friend Gerard Ramos has stepped up and will be helping me out.  I’m excited to spend time with the former local New Orleans developer who’s stepped up to the big leagues now in San Francisco.

Everyone has worked really hard to get the Flatsourcing Dashboard ready, and it is something that we’ve been thinking about for a while now.  We felt a need for a central location for our clients to collaborate with us.  But, we didn’t want to lock clients into a proprietary project management tool, we pride ourselves on working within existing project management protocol.

The Flatsourcing Dashboard (login:voodoo password:123456) accomplishes some of the things we feel are important when collaborating globally:

• Get to know your team with avatars
• Keep up on your project with a “news feed” of all communications in Basecamp or any other project management tools.
• Keep track of your contract and invoices all in once place.
• Get in touch with us in an emergency instantly and easily.
• Learn the best way to work with us with FAQ’s and a client manual.

All of this is in the Flatsourcing Dashboard, providing “outsourcing insight” to our clients and taking our services to a whole new level.

I’m so excited to be out here at TC50.  If you’re in town and want to meet up, email me at cschultz@flatsourcing.com.  Follow me on Twitter for updates.