If you’re in the digital media industry in Louisiana, this bill has the potential to positively impact your business.  Want to support it? Here’s what you can do:

1. First, I encourage you to read the bill in its current form with the revisions that have been made.
2. Find the state representative for your district on the Louisiana House of Representatives website and click to send them an email.
3. Send them a quick email saying you support the SB 277 and encouraging them to pass it.

Here’s what I wrote to Neil Abramson. (Feel free to copy/paste):

Dear Representative Abramson -

I am writing you to voice my support for the Senator Ann Duplessis’s SB 277, which is on the agenda for the House Ways and Means committee for Monday, June 15th.  I believe the extension of the Digital Interactive Media Produces Tax Credit is good for the state of Louisiana.  I am an active member of the technology and entreprenuership community in New Orleans and develop internet projects through my company Voodoo Ventures.  There is currently a tremendous amount of energy in the digital media industry locally, and I believe passage of this bill will enable the state to build a thriving industry that provides economic development in a cutting edge industry.  I encourage you to support this bill, and I’d be happy to discuss my support further.  Thanks.

Best, Chris Schultz

Just a few emails of support for the bill could mean a lot to its passage, and I think the outcome could have a huge for us.

In one fell swoop, after hours of wrangling on Monday at the Louisiana State Legistature, Moret was patched in on a crackling cell phone connection. After listening to all sides, he said that the most important thing to him for a company to qualify for the Digital Media Tax Credit is that 80%-90% of it’s revenue come from out of state.

It’s interesting and revealing to note, this has nothing to do with who does the work, where the work is done, or what the work is.  Now, I’m not saying he doesn’t hold opinions about these things, and they will be codified in the bill, but his primary focus was that this work is export work.

Why?

Because, building websites and applications by Louisiana businesses for Louisiana business is going to happen anyway.  It’s already happening now, people need this stuff, but it doesn’t expand the fiscal pie.  So why incentivize it? On the flip side, if we can build businesses here that have clients in New York, San Francisco, London, LA then it gets interesting.  Sound familiar?

Let me submit what I recognize is a controversial argument, but is in line with Moret’s 90% rule: My company, Flatsourcing, is good for the state of Louisiana.

Now, many readers know, but for those who don’t, Flatsourcing is a software development firm, based here in New Orleans, with production offices in Kazan, Russia.  I just returned from a trip there last week with Peter Bodenheimer and two clients.  We have a team of 21 people over there, and the business is growing.

I talked about Flatsourcing when I testified before committee at the State Senate this week.  Of the six or seven of us, I was the only one asked a question, and it was clear that “shipping jobs to Russia” went over like a lead balloon.  I was asked whether Flatsourcing would qualify for the Digital Media Tax Credit and I said no. I know the company would have more of an economic development impact if those 21 jobs were here in New Orleans, but for a variety of factors (too many for this post), they are not.

The economy of the 21st century is based on knowledge work, the creation of stuff that can be broken down to 1’s and 0’s and therefore done anywhere.  Because of this, borders are pourus and its close to impossible to understand, much less regulate, where the work is done.  The value chain is long and distributed, often globally.  The most important factor of who wins this race is where the value is captured.  Value capture = wealth creation = profit.  If a company is based in Louisiana, and those profits are captured here, they will be taxed here and spent here.  This is certainly the case in terms of Flatsourcing.

The fact that more than 90% of our revenue comes from outside Louisiana, flows into a company that is based here, is distributed here as profit, and gets spent locally very clearly economic development for the state.

When I speak to people about the stigma of outsourcing, I often bring up what the rest of the world calls it: competing.  While I certainly agree that in an ideal world, all the people we employ would work in the same office here in New Orleans, this simply isn’t the way the world works anymore.

When I work with entrepreneurs who are starting businesses, one of the first questions I ask is: are you locally or globally focused?  I believe you must be looking worldwide for customers.

It was refreshing to hear Moret focus on this idea of expanding the economic pie with the simple metric: does 90% of your revenue flow from out of state.  We see it happening right now, right here.

Benjamin Reece with Deltree has national level clients through Deltree, has a partnership in New York that drives this business to him, and yet bases his company in New Orleans.  Kyle Berner may manufacture his flip flops in Thailand, but he markets them all over the country, not simply in a local New Orleans boutique.  Naked Pizza may be a local pizza shop right now, but the vision is much grander, and I know Jeff Leach won’t rest until they’ve got franchises all over the country.  I am confident that all of these businesses will soon meet Secretary Moret’s 90% rule if they don’t already.  These are the businesses that will expand the economic pie for Louisiana.

Turning back to Digital Media, it is unlikely that this 90% rule can be codified in the law, and that’s probably a good thing.  We don’t want the state having to audit accounting statements.  But it was great to see this understanding at the State level.

We’ll see how the Digital Media tax incentive works out, but I am very enthusiastic to see this high level understanding of what economic development is all about from Secretary Moret.

Peter and I have known each other for a while and its been a pleasure working with him thusfar.  He brings very technical project management experience to the team.  Peter will be adding a layer of client strategy & support for our Flatsourcing clients and assisting with product development for Voodoo Ventures projects.

I’m thrilled to have him aboard and look forward to continued growth for Voodoo & Flatsourcing.

Peter Bodenheimer, Interactive Director, Voodoo Ventures, LLC
A native of New Orleans, Peter has over 15 years working in interactive development in markets across the country. From working in product development for software companies to providing leadership in interactive projects for Fortune 500 companies, local governments, and everything in between, Peter has been involved with software and web development since the infancy of the Internet age. Whether in Boston, Silicon Valley, or New Orleans, Peter has focused on using technology to solve problems for clients such as Olympus, Business Week, Visa, Hasbro, and Tabasco.

Prior to Voodoo Ventures, Peter served as Interactive Director at Trumpet Advertising. Prior to that he played a leading role in the strategy and execution that resulted in the dramatic rise of the City of New Orleans website from a ranking of 70 out of 70 in 2003 to being awarded the Center for Digital Government’s award for the Best City Portal in 2005. Aside from the project to overhaul the city website, he drove numerous other projects for the city’s Office of Technology, including bring the permitting system for the City of New Orleans online after Hurricane Katrina, working night and day his team built a system from the ground up that used the Internet and physical kiosk implementations to handle over 600 permits per day, up from roughly 40 per day before the storm. When he’s not building or exploring the online world, Peter spends his time honing his poker game, reliving his days as a professional chef, and trying to tire his dog out riding around Bayou St. John and City Park.

Eric’s done a lot, and I’m really looking forward to hearing him speak.  He was one of the founders of MyBlogLog (see the pics to the right of this post, thats it) which Yahoo bought two years ago.  Now he’s got a cool startup called GNIP which is making sure the tubes carrying all your tweets and stuff don’t get clogged.

Let’s show him some NOLA love and all go see him speak on Monday at Tulane.  The event is free and open to the public.

Eric Marcoullier

CEO, Gnip Inc

When : April 20th, 2009 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm

Place: Graduate Business Building (Goldring/Woldenberg Hall 2) Room 2110

Eric Marcoullier is CEO and co-founder of the online data services company Gnip, Inc.  Previously, Eric co-founded MyBlogLog, a distributed social network for bloggers that sold to Yahoo in 2007.  Eric’s other ventures have included CEO and co-founder of training games provider Minerva Software and co-founder of IGN.com, which sold to Fox Interactive Media in 2005.  He advises several companies, including recent Automattic acquisition Intense Debate, as well as Future US, Zynga Games, Zemanta and Zentact and Megamesium, both of which he also co-founded.

While I was tapped to present the results from the SXSW road trip, I have to say that it was a total team collaborative effort. The leadership of Damien Lamanna, Jessica Rohloff, Adele Tiblier, Tiffany Starnes & Andrew Larimer was what made this trip possible. And of course the support from GNO, DDD, City of NO, and all our sponsors. We’ll be posting a case study that is being put together very shortly with success metrics, but I wanted to convey how impactful the support of the trip was in terms of raising awareness about the New Orleans tech scene.

On the way home from SXSW, Tiffany Starnes, Adele Tiblier & I spent eight hours brainstorming on a bus about what we wanted to do next, how we were going to capture and build on this momentum. We kept coming back to community. We got home and tore through Seth Godin’s Tribes, and started bouncing the idea off people we respected, forming a Tribal Council. Today, we’re pleased to present our conference idea that heretofore has been under wraps.

What is happening in New Orleans right now is just a microcosm of what is happening all over the world. Traditional organizations with top down power structures are giving way to grass roots community-driven movements. Let’s call them tribes. These tribes self organize and galvanize to action. Let’s put a conference on to explore this phenomenon:

The Tribe Conference is a conference for people passionate about building communities. Over the last several years there has been an explosion of grass roots organizations that have been built through connecting people online with the mission of spurring action offline. These communities have developed organically and have consolidated national and international presence through websites, wikis, and branding. The communities are very grass roots and inherently local. As these communities evolve, there is a further need to facilitate a sharing of ideas, best practices, and development of a national community for the growth of all of these movements. The Voodoo Tribe conference mission will be to educate and connect communities, with a focus on the exchange of ideas about common ties of community-building, rather than a focus on what the communities do.

When we look at the ideal time for a conference like this in New Orleans, it fits well with the Voodoo Music Fest which is a great music festival around Halloween each year. The ethos of the music fest fits well with the idea for this conference too. I’d be interested in feedback on whether that timing is a draw or a drawback. We believe people like to come to New Orleans around great events like that to get some of the New Orleans cultural experience in addition to the conference.

The communities we would be interested in reaching out to are the ones that share these common threads:

• unconferences / unorganizations / movements / tribes
• web-based self organization through twitter, facebook, wikis, meetup.com, google groups, etc
• grass-roots but part of a larger national & international movement that people have simply picked up and run with
• Examples: Net Squared, BarCamps, WordCamps, Co-working, Ignite, Social Media Club

Want to learn more? Contact me, Tiffany or Adele. Want to be a part of the movement?  Join our Tribal Council.  Let’s make this happen together.

I want to thank John Ramirez and Computer CC for all the hard work they put into WordCamp. John has worked tirelessly for the last 8 months to put this together, and everything at the conference was first class. They really worked hard on and went the extra mile to make the conference as professional as possible.

Thanks to all the speakers who gave their time and in some cases traveled to New Orleans to be a part of this. But most of all, thank you to all the folks who came out and participated, you made this what it was!

There was very positive feedback on Twitter. @lizmoney said:

RT @w2scott: Seriously: RT @lizmoney: RT @champsuperstar: can we do #wordcampnola again next weekend? L$: can we can we?

Thanks to everyone for the support, it’s exciting to have great events like this happening in NOLA!

SXSW

• Net2NO <3 SXSW road trip rocked.  See pics and wrapup. Thanks to all sponsors. Video coming soon.
• Our Outsourcing 2.0 Panel went great.  Not as many fireworks as we expected, but good discussion.  Thanks to Sandeep, Andrea and Matt for all their hard work and to a great audience (200+) for turning out.  Read more on Twitter.
• Loved getting the VC dialogue going with Taylor Davidson.  He ran a great panel that I missed and is a thought leader on where funding is going. I’m paying attention.
• Had a blast getting the post-panel jitters out with Mike Bonifer. It was a game changer for my afternoon.
• Learned a ton about co-working and building earning whuffie. Connected w/ co-working space catalysts in Tony in NY, Chris in Phoenix, & Matt in Houston.
• Loved connecting with the LA & SF tech scenes at the LA BBQ and their panel.  Thanks to Gerard, Sloane (welcome to NOLA), Andrew & Paige.
• The NOLA party @ Lucky Lounge was hot. DJ Othertempo and Austin Knights Brass band killed and Larimer ran a tight show.

IDEACorps

• Idea Village just hosted six teams of MBA students working with local entrepreneurs on spring break.
• I was honored to be invited as a panelist and sat alongside some very invigorating folks.
• Had a great conversation with Robbie Vitrano about the need for a mentorship-driven seed capital fund. More to come.
• Congrats to Feelgoodz, Project 30-90, and Naked Pizza on all they accomplished.

Upcoming – WordCamp NOLA

• John Ramirez has been working night & day to put this conference together. He’s had quite a vision and is pulling it off.
• 11 days left and only 34 seats left to go. Get tickets now!
• We’ve lined up some great presenters and panelists, check out the lineup.
• Ben Huh from FAILblog and LOLcats will be here.  Nuf said.

More Upcoming

• Tritico is getting the steam behind an upcoming BarCamp.  Let’s make this happen.
• We’re going to do a pre- French Quarter Fest bloody mary geek breakfast with Eric Marcoullier when he is in town April 18th.  Stay tuned.
• Tiffany Starnes is getting Social Media Club New Orleans off the ground.  Interested? Hit her up.
• Shameless Plug – Launch Pad will be opening in May.  Sign up now for 50% off first month.

That’s it from Voodoo HQ. Lots brewing. Come back for a fresh cup soon.

How to Rock It and Get the Most Out of SXSW

• Work Hard / Play Hard – You’re going to be dead tired a week from today so get over it.  Don’t party so hard you can’t make the panels, and don’t panel so hard you miss the parties.  I learn so much each year going to really interesting panels, I love seeking out new and interesting speakers.  But the best connections I make are over a few beers at the parties.  You have to be able to do both.  So suck it up and don’t plan on getting a lot of sleep, you’ve got to hustle at SXSW.
• Planning Your Panels – There are several good panel planners online.  These are great to sift through the panels ahead of time.  Me? I take a yellow highlighter and go spend an hour going through the SXSW book on the day I get there.  I select my panels based on person, not topic.  Anyone who you find interesting on twitter, or who may run a company you respect or think is cool is probably worth seeing.  I highlight out a schedule for each day, then tear of the panel picker and stick it in my badge pass holder each morning.
• What to Wear – While this isn’t going to be a problem for us, since we all have t-shirts, I’ll offer my 2 cents.  You’ll see a lot of hipster cool, ie: Threadless Dirty Coast tees.  You’ll see very few ties unless they are skinny or ironic.  Jeans are de riguer.   Be comfortable and if the weathers iffy, bring a jacket, because you might not make it back home before the evenings activities.  Generally, I take the conference day directly into the party circuit evening.
• What to Carry – iPhone & Moleskine.  Maybe a camera.  That’s it.  I don’t carry my MacBook to the conference each day, b/c personally I don’t need to immediately blog my day.  But really its because I just don’t want to carry it around.  A bag to carry stuff is nice, but you have to carry it around all day.
• Who to Meet – Anyone and everyone.  SXSW is literally the friendliest conference I’ve ever been too.  You can walk right up to your favorite web-celeb and introduce yourself.  Don’t be shy, that’s what we are all here for.  Don’t do anything alone.  Find people to go to lunch with, go to dinner with, go out with.  You’ll meet so many new friends.  Relax and have fun.
• Parties to Hit – Personally, I tend to skip most of the official parties.  A general rule, the bigger the name (Google, Facebook, Digg) the bigger the crowd.  Most of these parties are so packed that people are waiting outside for hours.  Not me.  It’s not worth getting in and then not being able to get a drink.  Go to the smaller, more intimate events.  Follow twitter and you’ll find them. They usually have much cooler people anyway.  The Dorkbot party and all of the outdoor happy hours are great.  I always have fun at these and like the outside ones. (Don’t miss the NOLA Party on Monday and St. Patricks Last Stand on Tuesday)
• Awards Night – Sunday night is the web awards night.  I skip it.  But then I don’t really like the Oscars or Grammys either.  You’ll hear who won on Twitter anyway.
• BarCamp – BarCamp Austin is a great way to spend a day or an afternoon away from the convention center on Saturday.  I go every year and spend a 1/2 day.  I highly recommend you plan to stop by.  Register @ Facebook.
• Twitter – Definitely the official back-channel for SXSW.  I wrote a post in 2007 about what social software would emerge at SXSW.  Clearly it is Twitter.  So much so that Dodgeball is now down for the count.
• Rawk It – this post was inspired by the the panel How to Rawk SXSW.  So go to that too.

In addition to those general way to rock SXSW, I’m super excited about what New Orleans is doing to take Austin by storm….

NOLA <3 SXSW – Road Trip Details – Lots of people have been asking me exactly what we are doing, so here is the down low:

• Who – 30 Louisianians will be jumping on a bus and cruising to Austin for SXSW.
• What – We’re going to promote New Orleans and Louisiana as a fantasic location for digital media & tech professionals.  We’ve got fantastic culture, quality of life, and a creative climate. Since Hurricane Katrina the city has literally reinvented itself and we’ve had an influx of passionate, talented young people who want to make an impact.  Our local chapter of Net2 has been instrumental in harnessing this energy and building a community of techies, now 175 strong in only 8 months.  The Downtown Development District , GNO, Inc and City of New Orleans Film Commission have been instrumental in our ability to pull this trip off.  We’ll be spreading the gospel of New Orleans at SXSW!
• Shirts – We’ll be easy to spot because we’ll all be wearing the same shirts.
• Booth – Stop by our booth 811 at the SXSW trade show to meet us, grab some schwag and tell us your story.  We’ll be giving away a free weekend in NOLA each day at 5:04pm.
• Panel – Shameless plug: Come to my panel Outsourcing 2.0 – Is the World Flat or Not? on Monday at 11:30 am in room 8.
• Party Bus – Look for the NOLA <3 SXSW party bus cruising around the convention center and the parties each night.  We’re providing free shuttle services between all the parties.
• Party – Don’t miss the New Orleans Party on Monday night 10pm-2am at the Lucky Lounge.  DJ Othertempo and the Austin Knights Brass band will perform.  It’s going to be a NOLA style throwdown. RSVP here.
• Twitter – follow @net2no for official details on the trip. And our hashtag is #nosxsw so you can search for that too.
• Google Group – all messages and discussion for everyone going on the trip.
• Blog – We’ll be posting everything on the Net2NO site.  Stay tuned!

I’m excited to see old friends and new at SXSW.  Here are my digits, let’s connect:

• Email me @ cschultz@voodooventures.com
• Follow me @ twitter.com/cschultz
• Call me @ 504-931-6099

• Impostor Syndrome – An entrepreneur’s crisis of self confidence.  You’ve got to believe in yourself to make anyone else believe in you. So you just quit your job 2 weeks ago and started a company… that’s what you do now, go for it with confidence.
• Sprinklers & Golf – That’s where I started my career after college.  From sprinkler salesman to business development of golf course management contracts. The only problem, I don’t like golf.  You must do what you are passionate about.
• TRS80 & Vegas – What am I passionate about? I’ve loved computers since the days of BASIC on a Trash-80 and I love going to Vegas.  My best friend Matt and I were in biz school and traveling back and forth to Vegas.  So we decided to start a company that combined the things we love.  Internet + Vegas = Internet-based Bachelor Party Planners
• Biz Cards – I have a biz card fetish. 1) we printed at Kinko’s with the logo design by Bill Gates (MS Word Clipart).  2) BachelorBlowOut got a little more professional 3) changed the name to Destination VIP because no-one takes you seriously with a name like BBO 4) Got aquired.  Notice title change.  Realized 8 months into it that 25% owner means youre not in charge any more, so 5) started Voodoo Ventures
• Charts - big changes over the last 10 years.  Cost of starting a startup is falling to zero.  Witness Y Combinator, TechStars, etc.  Meaning, the number of startups is skyrocketing.  Result? Best bet is to bootstrap until you have something “real”. 3 stages of a startup.  1) Ramen soup phase – you should be able to scrape together something and get a few customers to get yourself to 50k in rev. 2) Then the bootstrapping starts and you grow your company to 500k.  3) Growth capital is available beyond that because you have a real business.  This is where I believe more capital will be entering the market.
• You’ve got a Website, Now What – You need traffic.  Best source for traffic = Google.  How to get free traffic from Google?  Dan Finnery gave me my “The Graduate” moment in 2001 when he whispered in my ear “Search Engine Optimization“.  Check your current website, if your page title says “Frontpage” you ain’t got it.  Learn this and do it.  It’s free and easy and powerful.
• Customer #1 – Relentless focus on getting in business.  Get that first customer.  Until someone writes a check, you aren’t in business.  Mine was Dave Mullen who wrote us a check for $5000.
• Friction - Now that things are getting serious, you are going to get distracted from your business by all the other “stuff” you have to do.  Legal stuff, IRS, opening bank accounts, permits, insurance, etc.  You will figure this stuff out.  Don’t pay a lot of money to do this, you can do this yourself.  Find an attorney who will give you a break and help you grow with them.  Don’t fall victim to paralysis by analysis.  If you mess something up, someone will tell you. Just keep moving forward.
• Funding - Several options: 1) credit cards 2) rich uncle, friends & family 3) wife (mines not available) 4) cash flow.  This is why cash flow is king.  Focus on driving revenue.  Cash flow = sustainability.
• How Do You Make Money? – figure it out.  You don’t have the luxury of not focusing on it.  Google Adsense ain’t it.  And you’re not getting bought by Google.  How do you add value, and what will people pay you for?
• Markets - I started my first company in Vegas in 2001.  Vegas boomed, and so did we.  A rising tide lifts all boats.  New Orleans is seeing the same energy, and rumblings right now
• Be Local but Act Global – Don’t focus just on your city.  Have a global strategy for your supply chain and collaboration.  Also focus on global customers, not just local ones.  But have a personality and leverage whats special about you being in New Orleans. Culture, music, social change.
• Be Disruptive – If someone is telling you to slow down, you’re doing something right. If you’re making people mad or nervous, thats a good thing.  My first idea was GrooveOn.com and I called a bunch of record labels in LA and asked for their digital music rights. In 1999.  They were mad. And scared.  Understand?
• Launch Early and Often & Fail Fast – We built and launched Huckabuck.com, a meta search engine for $50,000.  We did some crazy things like signing Rebirth Brass Band to a ringtone contract and flying a plane around Jazz Fest.  Then we got a check for $2.42 for our first month revenue. Spending $25,000 to make $2.42 doesn’t compute so we sold it.  Launch to sale in 9 months.  Not a home run, but a single and it was fun.
• Failure - You learn a lot from failure.  You have to erase fear of failure from your mind.  Be fearless.  You will fail, but you are not a failure.  Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and do it again.
• Ideas Are a Renewable Resource – They are also worthless unless acted upon.  Keep following your dreams and making your ideas a reality.
• Give Without Expectation – This builds social capital.  The old term for it is Karma.

One of the biggest mistakes that I have made, and I coach others on is not following the “if you build it they will come” strategy of launching a project. (There is always an exception to the rule, in this case Brian Bordainick’s 9th Ward Field of Dreams Project. But I digress…)  In the fight for mind share on the web, you will always be the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound.  You’ve got to make some noise!

Blake has had his head down building out the site, and he was open about the challenges he’s faced with funding it through client work, and distractions from his other business Dirty Coast.  It’s clearly been a 2+ years labor of love, and he’s getting close.

But, let me dispel the notion that he is launching this month.  He launched last night in front of 40 people, and he has been launching for the last six months.

Here are some lessons that I am taking from his launch:

• Following the “launch early and often” mantra, he’s has had teaser site up for over six months and he’s collected over 2000 email addresses for interested beta users.
• He’s been very visible publicly and is engaging his target market, the New Orleans community, in the development of Humid Beings, and will continue to even after he opens the doors.  He makes it feel as if its being built for us, a gift to the community, and I believe it.
• Running a targeted banner ad campaign to build brand awareness even before he opens the doors.  The audience for Humid Beings hangs out on sites like Gambit’s Best of New Orleans right now, so he’s running ads there.
• Leveraging Dirty Coast by getting stickers out there.
• Partnering in different ways with local talent like Ben Reece and Supasaint.  He’s building content and building a halo for his brand around cool content producers.
• Identified 85 local blogs that are going to provide content to Humid.  They get to blog on their own sites, and the content gets pulled in through RSS to a place where it will hopefully have more conversation around it.
• Identifying “the villian” NOLA.com so that we can root for him against a identified competitor.

Of course, I have some additional thoughts on what I think he could be doing:

• Follow Guy Kawasaki’s success with Alltop of feeding blogger ego’s by giving them a badge to identify themselves as “featured bloggers” or “founding partners” on their own blog.  Make this invite only, with an perception of exclusivity.  (Blake, what I am trying to say is give me a HumidBeings badge to put on Voodoo saying I’ve been “selected” to provide content… free advertising.)
• Get on Twitter.  You should be all over this already, tweeting out content, building followers.  Twitter is the best medium for launching a brand in a personal, transparent way.  You need a Twitter strategy if you don’t have one already… let’s talk.

PS: Blake, I’m cybersquatting for you.  In my research of discovering you aren’t on Twitter, I found that you handn’t registered @humidbeings.  Twitter handles are the new domain names.  So, I thoughtfully registered it for you as FakeBlakeHaney, and I will happily turn it over when you read this post and hit me up in the comments below.  Unless some other commenter can convince me to turn it over to them.