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.

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.

The dustup between the Demo conference and the TechCrunch 50 conference has spilled over to the NY Times today with some of the  press-friendly accusations coming to the forefront:

To Michael Arrington, the elbow-throwing, supercilious founder of the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, Demo’s business model amounts to “payola.”

This coming on the heals of the accusation by someone loosely associated with the Demo conference writing to Alex Muse accusing Jason Calacanis of plagiarism.  I happened to think that Calacanis’s demo tips for a startup were incredibly valuable, and I’m enjoying his conversion from blogger to emailer as a whole. The startup tips rang true for me, because a couple weeks ago we demoed our pitch for the TC50 to Heather Harde.

Well, the news is, out of the 1038 startups that applied, we didn’t get to the final round of 50 that will demo on stage, but we did get invited to participate in the “Demo Pit.” In the demo pit we’ll get to showcase the new Flatsourcing Dashboard to all conference attendees, and we’ll be vying with a bunch of other startups trying to do the same thing.  It’ll be chaotic, fun, exhilarating, and a great launch pad for the Flatsourcing Dashboard.

So, what is the Flatsourcing Dashboard?  We’ll I could tell you, but then I’d be violating our pledge to the TC50 conference.  So for now we must keep it under wraps, although we may offer a few sneak peaks as things get closer.

What I can tell you is we plan to shake up the collaboration space by offering a tool that truly provides “Outsourcing Insight”.

We are thrilled to be DEMO-ing at TC50! Follow Will & me on Twitter for updates.  And if you will be in San Fran Sept 8-10, we want to meet up with you.  Drop us a line.

Stay tuned!

I just got back from visiting my partners in Flatsourcing in Kazan, Russia. This was my third trip to Kazan, and by far the most exciting. This stems from both the growth we are experiencing with Flatsourcing, but even more importantly the changes that are taking place right before my eyes in the city.

On arrival in Kazan, one of the first things you notice is that the whole city is under construction. Since last year a major road repair program has taken place and pot-hole lines streets have been replaced with paved, widened highways. Soviet-era block houses are being replaced by new apartment buildings. I was fortunate enough to stay in a new apartment that Oleg’s family has purchased. In the last three years mortgages have become commonplace in Russia, and cars and apartments are fast becoming part of the middle-class lifestyle. Speaking of cars, as we drove to work each morning, we passed dealerships for Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai as well as Mercedes and BMW. Word is that the Chinese auto manufacturers will be invading next year. They already have their fleets on the road in the form of big beautiful city busses. Just last year the city bus fleet was ragged, its been upgraded by Chinese manufacturers like Golden Dragon.

Shopping malls are all over the place. Kazan actually has more shopping malls per capita than Paris. We ate lunch at a shopping mall food court at a Russian fast food chain ironically named CCCP (translated as USSR). I asked the guys if this was offensive or threatening to anyone. Nope, they said, they Soviet era has been relegated to nostalgia by modern capitalism that is fueling the country’s growth. CCCP now is simply a fast food joint serving the world’s biggest brand, Coca-Cola.

You can’t help but notice how IT oriented the city is. One of the things I trumpet about Kazan is that there are more than 20 universities, most of them technical. This is a university town graduating the next generation of computer programmers annually. Kazan, and Russia as a whole has a culture of IT. The coolest job you can have is a computer programmer. Being high tech opens the doors of opportunity, including working at Google in St. Petersburg, or eventually working in the US if you are good enough.

Billboards around the city advertise HP desktops and laptops. The government has just invested in a beautiful IT startup “IDEA Park” to provide office space to startups complete with furnished desks and computers. The rent is discounted 50% for winners of an annual business plan competition.

Two years ago Fujitsu moved an entire office from the UK to Kazan through a partnership with a Russian based IT company, ICL. Since then, IBM has moved in and is partnering with Kazan State University and there were rumors when I was there that Microsoft is next and that top talent is starting to be recruited by Microsoft.

I can’t wait to see what Kazan looks like next year. One thing is for sure, the Flatsourcing office will have quadrupled in size and we’ll be hiring more!

Finally, the hottest gadget in Russia by far is the iPhone. I brought three of them over for Oleg, Alex, and Timur and they were promptly unlocked and filled with some of the most amazing software that we’ll learn about over here in the near future. I ended up leaving my personal one behind as well. Even though carriers don’t sell them yet, and they go for upwards of $800 on the black market, our last night there we were surprised to see the women at the two tables on either side of us to be taking pictures of each other with their iPhones. An apt metaphor for falling borders in this ever-flattening world!

So we’ve been working hard on the redesign for Flatsourcing.com and really thinking about what are goals are with the site. It is going to be a Wordpress-based platform, but it needs to function as more than just a blog. We asked ourselves what we are trying to accomplish with the site (I know, a rarity that we actually think about our goals before plunging headlong into design, I should have been doing this years ago):

1. First and foremost, we are soliciting business for Flatsourcing, so we need to both communicate what we do, and enable visitors to the site to easily contact us.
2. We are communicating both our skills, but more importantly, demisifying and personalizing outsourcing. We want to use social media (twitter, video, profiles on LinkedIn & Facebook) to enable clients and potential clients to really get to know our team in Kazan. We need to put a face on the business over there, and bridge the cultural, time, and geographical distances to bring our team as close as we can to our clients.
3. We want to make sure that our current clients have the tools they need to work with us. They will have an (eventually private) area to login to with access to all the tools we use. Basecamp for project management, Freshbooks for invoicing, Skype for voice chat, and Adobe Acrobat Connect for video conferencing.
4. We want to communicate our expertise in our field. We’ll do this through the blog, so that the site is a living breathing expression of what Flatsourcing is, not just a corporate presence placeholder.

So, with those goals in mind, we drew up mockups for the design of the site on both sides, New Orleans & Kazan. I’ve included the pictures below. Are we on the right track? What would you like to see from us on Flatsourcing.com?

VentureBeat reports that Draper Fisher Jurvetson is heading to Russia:

Besides Russia, the fund, called DFJ-VTB Aurora, will invest in the neighboring Commonwealth of Independent States, including Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine (home of another DFJ fund), and others. The fund plans to invest between $2 million and $16 million per company.

Initially, DFJ is not contributing directly to the fund. But, by helping pick companies, it will have the opportunity to co-invest in them down the line. Half of the money will come from the Russian government and twenty percent from the European Bank of Development and Reconstruction.

Thousands of highly-educated engineers and scientists in the region have the skill, talent and motivation to build big companies, said DFJ’s managing director in Russia, Don Wood, in an interview with VentureBeat — they just haven’t had the resources or role models to do so, he says.

This is great to see VC getting on board with the technology opportunities in Russia. Oleg, are you ready to start putting a business plan together for Flatsourcing?

I went to lunch today with Oleg and Alex here in Kazan, Russia. The whole experience reminded me of how flat this world has become. Oleg drove us to lunch in is Toyota, he said that Japanese cars are really considered to be much higher quality then the Russian Ladas. We went to a mall that is the first branded mall I have ever seen, called Mega Mall, a Russian company. It was right next to IKEA, a Swedish company. On the other side was the a do-it-youself megastore OBI, a German company.

Inside the mall, we went straight to the food court for lunch. Alex chose his favorite restaurant, McDonalds, and got his usual order of a Fresh Mac meal (a Big Mac modified with tomato’s and lettuce). Oleg got a chicken sandwich meal from KFC. I was the only one to actually have a meal from a Russian company, and it was a Greek gyro at that.

The world truly is flat.

Dobraye ootro from Kazan, Russia, home of Tatsoft.ru and Flatsourcing.com. It been a long trip over here, but I arrived Tuesday night after several flight delays and about 60 hrs of travel.

Its great to be over here with our entire development team and to be spending time with Oleg, Alex, & Timur, my partners in Flatsourcing.com. We all are getting a tremendous amount out of working together face-to-face. Even though we talk can daily via Skype, email, and phone, nothing supplants seeing each other in person.

We’ve laid out aggressive plans for ourselves for the next few days, and started today with hashing through the details of the siteMighty Advanced Analytics module. This is an incredibly sophisticated tool that will enable us to fully optimize PPC campaigns by pulling in cost & conversion data. It’s quite a task, but 6 hrs today enabled us to finalize the specs and really move forward on it.

We are all really looking forward to Russia’s inaugural BarCamp this weekend. We’ve got a lot of excited attendees, and many software development firms in the region will be in attendance. I’ll be blogging about the event and the rest of our adventures together, so stay tuned.

We are very pleased to announce the very first BarCamp to be held in Russia. BarCamp Kazan (Russian here) will be held on August 4th, 2007, in Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan.

This BarCamp conference will coincide with my trip to Russia to visit my colleagues at Flatsourcing, Inc. we are all very excited to bring the “unconference“-style conference to Russia.

Kazan is a city with multiple excellent technical University programs. There are many highly qualified computer scientists and web programmers, and we look forward to this opportunity to bring them together, and share some of our experiences through our last six years of developing our global partnership.

I’m personally excited to host a conference session with my colleague Oleg Kurnosov in which we will share concepts from Thomas Friedman’s excellent book The World is Flat. This book has had a tremendous impact on us both personally, and provided a blueprint (and name inspiration) for our current joint venture, Flatsourcing Inc.

We want to extend the invitation to anyone and everyone to join us in Kazan August 4 for this BarCamp. The airfare might be a little steep, but we will make sure the conference is free. Thanks to everyone who is helping to put this on. Be sure to read the announcement on the Tatsoft Blog too, (English version here.)

Last week at SXSW, I often found myself in conversations, and being asked about our Russian development team, Flatsourcing.com. I’d like to take in this post to tell the story behind our partnership with the team at Flatsourcing.

I’ve been working with Oleg for almost 5 years now. He was the a project manager on the creation our first website, BachelorBlowOut.com, and we’ve been working together ever since. We met through eLance, the same way that many outsourcing relationships get started. And over the last five years we’ve grown to be business partners in every sense of the word. The growth of both our businesses has been directly correlated, and we’ve developed an interdependent and symbiotic business partnership.

At this time last year I took a trip to Kazan, Russia, to meet Oleg and his partners Timur and Alex for the first time. This was incredibly enlightening experience for me. in addition to the wonderful cultural exchange that took place, we were able to solidify the partnership between our companies. Since that time our business is taken off together and we’ve become a fully integrated team, albeit separated by thousands of miles.

I’ve always felt that we’ve had a very fortunate experience with our outsourcing partners, but over the years we worked very hard to build a partnership that works. I’d like to share some of the things that make our outsourcing partnership so successful:

1. Trust - it takes time to develop the level of trust with your outsourcing partner that I’m describing above. But it’s important to take steps in that direction right from the start. This means putting systems in place to provide checks and balances for both parties for everything involved: financial transactions, deadlines, specifications, quality assurance, and communication flow. The more you put systems and best practices in place the better the level of trust you be able to establish. Our goal has always been to completely trust and empower our team in Russia, so that we don’t need to track their hours or remind them of deadlines. As we build trust on both sides of the outsourcing relationship the performance and execution has risen dramatically.
2. Respect - Another primary factor in the evolution of our partnership has been the respect with which we treat one another. A lot of people get in outsourcing relationships looking for the lowest cost provider. I believe low expectations result from looking for low-cost, and with low expectations comes poor quality results. We set high standards for the quality of our outsourced work and we have full faith that our team is capable of doing everything we ask of them. And we are treated with the highest respect by our team in Russia, deadlines are met, communications are answered, and our expectations are always exceeded.
3. Team - I believe getting outsourcing to work well is simple: do everything you would do if your outsourcing team was sitting in the office with you. Treat them as employees, empower them as business partners. Always treat them as if they were part of the team. That’s been the number one key to our success.

In addition to being prompted to write this post by the questions I received at SXSW, we also wanted to celebrate a shared success with our Flatsourcing team. Posted below is a Russian TV interview with the guys from Flatsourcing.com. enjoy getting our team and if you add any questions about outsourcing or Flatsourcing, give us a shout.