#flatsourcing

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I'm excited to be supporting these through Flatsourcing & Launch Pad, and most of all, I'm excited to take the class on Wednesday and start rocking the rails myself :)

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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.

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 [email protected]. Follow me on Twitter for updates.

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!

Some personal thoughts on this panel that I'd like to share: Submitting a panel topic about outsourcing web development work to a conference full of web developers feels a little like trying to sell ice cubes to eskimos. It definitely is a topic that may be somewhat taboo, certainly considering these economic times and what you hear in the media about jobs going overseas. Along the same lines, I sometimes feel challenged talking about our business structure, and our Flatsourcing team with colleagues in New Orleans. I am friends with talented web developers locally who are looking for work, is it parodoxical to be passionate about supporting the local community while taking my work and having it done in Russia? I think reconciling these feelings is a lot of why I believe this panel topic to be so important. There are real tensions and preconceptions about outsourcing, and the controversial nature of the topic is exactly why I believe we need to discuss it. I fully expect to have the question thrown at me "Why are you hiring guys 3000 miles away instead of guys in this room?" And that will be a tough question to answer. When I think about that question, it boils down my personal feeling that the world really is getting smaller. Imagine a world that truly was flat, so a business partner or employee on the other side of the world was as easy to work with as your neighbor across the street. Collaboration tools, broadband, and common language of software means you can work with whomever you choose. In 2001, I met three guys over eLance because I needed someone to build a website for me, and I couldn't do it, and I didn't know anyone personally who could. They did a great job, we continued to build our partnership, and a few trips to Russia and eight years later we're in business together. And asking me why I'm working with them over someone local simply boils down to the fact that this is the direction I have chosen, it is working, and the value of our relationships is not something that I measure in terms of how far away they are. This may be the case for you, Chris, but what about if I am evaluating outsourcing now, with no personal history. I'm working with a clean slate? Well, this is the discussion I have almost every day with clients. Outsourcing exists because there is global demand for talent and there is a global marketplace. Release the bonds of locale, and your hiring pool is global. Wouldn't you want to explore the opportunity to hire top talent, anywhere in the world? That is the reality of what you can do today. It's not about low cost, its about value. And value is driven more by quality than cost. Web development in particular is a marketplace that is fully globalized. It opens up a world of opportunity to build new "virtual" companies that transcend borders. So, that is a sneak peak at some of the thoughts I am looking forward to sharing on the panel. I'd love you hear some of yours in the comments. Ask me the tough questions, I hope to be able to answer them. I genuinely hope that we have the opportunity to discuss this at SXSW. You can help by voting for us here. Thanks.

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!