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!

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.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back after almost two weeks of being away from Voodoo. Not just the working-vacation kind of being away where you check emails and keep updated, but the cut-off-communication kind, where you set your voicemail to “I won’t be checking” and you’ve got thousands of emails piled up when you get back.

• So, what did I learn? That I should do this more often.

As I was getting back into the swing yesterday I came across the great blog post by Steve at Startup Spark about Founderitis. I read the symptoms and self-diagnosed that I had a case coming on before my recent break. The treatment for founderitis is simple: step away from your company, watch what happens.

If you’ve done your job and have a great team (we do):

• People fill your void and things more forward
• New channels of communication emerge that used to have to run through you
• Creativity is unleashed that you may have been stifling
• People step up to the challenge and take on new responsibilities

So, first, a big shout out to Blake, Oleg, and our entire Flatsourcing team. I really appreciate everyone taking their games to the next level. I’m energized to get back and excited to see how my absence has changed things for everyone, and what permanent improvements this will yield.

Next time Founderitis sets in, put me on a plane to some far off destination with no cell phones or internet and you guys take over again. It does wonders for all of us.