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.

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.

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

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.

Originally posted on blogalicio.us 8-21-06

Ebay is a fantastic worldwide marketplace where almost anything you can imagine is being bought and sold at any given moment. And for the entrepreneur, this now includes businesses.

Now this may not be the initial game plan in a entrepreneur or angel investors strategy, but it actually could make a lot of sense in terms of rapid development and deployment of a online business, and the fastest route to liquidity you’re going to get.

Kiko, a Web 2.0 calendar service just posted their business for sale by auction on eBay. Now in this case, it clearly was not their intention or hope to put the business up for sale on eBay so quickly, but based on competition from Google that sounds remarkably Microsoftian, Kiko’s founder decided to throw in the towel.

But let’s examine this even further. Is this really a failed business “diving into the deadpool” as Richard White a member of the Kiko team states? Or was it simply a nimble team that was reevaluating their opportunities and seeing the prospects for growth with Kiko as well as the competition it faced making a decision to pursue other opportunites and save some of their investors cash.

Now, back to the eBay auction, lets see what this goes for. There have been businesses like the Jux2 Search Engine that sold on eBay last year for over $100,000. This type of sale creates a liquidity event for everyone involved at a very early stage.

What if building a business to flip on eBay were the gameplan from the get go. A couple of web developers could put together a web application that might have a lot of promise, but they don’t have the marketing budget or wherewithall to get traction with users. Hack it together over a couple of months, put it for sale on eBay, flip it to someone who has the resources to grow it and invest in it, and move on. Selling a 2-3 month investment for mid 5 to 6 figures would make a lot of sense in some people’s mind.

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues. Who knows, selling a business on eBay may not be the sign of a failed Web 2.0 startup for long, soon it might be the endgame in the mind of young entrepreneurs eager to hit their first liquidity event.