Just wanted to send a quick hello from Kazan to everyone!  I’m in the hotel bar getting ready for a day at the office.  It’s getting to be a lot of fun to come over here and see the growth every year.  I’m traveling w/ my partner Peter Bodenheimer, and we are visiting the whole crew, almost 30 people in the office over here now.  We’ve grown from just one office of 3 guys to literally taking over the whole office building.  Amazing.

Last night was the city’s 1005th anniversary and there was a fireworks celebration and lots of revelry in the streets.  In fact, until about 20 min ago, I was sharing the bar with a group finishing up a late night dinner (its now 7am).  Every year we come over here the city changes.  Last night I ran into the first American I’ve ever met over here (on a tour no less).  And on the flight over, there was a crew from a European wireless provider coming over to launch a new 4G network, just the second in the world, here.  We truly feel like New Orleans and Kazan are sister cities this year: we have the world-champion football team, the Saints, and they have the current Russian champion soccer and hockey teams.

While Chris and Peter are here in Kazan we’ve been talking about everything and it was very exciting to see Chris Schultz on the CNN:

It’s good to have you all here!

Recently I’ve become a big fan of the RSA Animate videos on YouTube. I thought this one was particularly relevant to web app development and the type of people drawn to it. Hope you enjoy this animation of a talk by Dan Pink, author of Drive.

We spend a lot of time scouring the web for resources to assist us in improving our business. With the number of web application prototypes we have been working on lately, we think the following resources can be as valuable to you as they have been to us.

Smashing Magazine - Design Better & Faster with Rapid Prototyping

Adaptive Path - Spreadsheet of Rapid Prototyping Tools

Venture Hacks - What is the Minimum Viable Product

Venture Hacks - 10 Examples of Minimum Viable Products

OnStartups - From Minimally Viable to Maximally Buyable Product