Peter and I had the privilege of visiting a new startup incubator in Kazan while we were visiting our office in Russia this week.  They invited us to do a presentation and we did a talk called “How to compete with Silicon Valley from Russia” with a focus on early stage startups and perspective from the incubator/accelerator ecosystem in the US.  We started by answering the red herring title of the talk… don’t try to be Silicon Valley, build a great startup culture in Kazan.  And we drew a lot of parallels to what we’ve been focused on building in New Orleans.  Here’s my favorite “quote” from the talk:

«Мы любим стартапы! У вас, в России, есть прекрасные инженеры, прекрасные программисты, и мы рады тренировать начинающих бизнесменов, рады им помогать», – считает  Крис Шульц.

” We love startups! Do you, in Russia, there are excellent engineers, excellent programmers, and we are happy to train novice businessmen are happy to help them “- says Chris Schultz.

It has been fascinating to watch the startup ecosystem emerge in Kazan.  The IT Park is a beautiful facility that has opened with a lot of government support.  Of course, the energy is in the grass roots, and the collaboration thats emerging on the ground between Flatstack and the many spinoffs created by former employees is really exciting.

Slides and video of our talk below. We borrowed a lot of ideas from Dave McClure, Paul Graham, and Brad Feld, so thanks to them.

Howdy folks - We’ve been working for the last year on hiring top-notch iOS programmers and we’ve developed several apps that we’re really proud of.  So we’re excited to announce that Flatsourcing is officially in the iPhone & iPad application development business.

We’re doing iPhone & iPad apps, and want to share several of the apps we’ve been working on below:

• iOptimizer - an app monitoring the performance of your iPhone/iTouch/iPad. It shows information on running processes, battery usage, user location, network, media, operating system, CPU usage.

• DropSend - an app that allows users to send, upload, store and download large files.

Got an iPhone app idea?  Get in touch with us.

Check out the screen casts of other iPhone apps we’ve built.

It’s a bit stunning to me that South by Southwest is already upon us. It seems, that the days, weeks, and months of 2011 are flying by as we all have been keeping busy on a number of engaging projects. Each year our U.S. contingent (yours truly and Chris Schultz) head off to Austin for the interactive portion of South by Southwest (SXSW), affectionately known as “geek spring break”. We hope that 2012 will allow us to bring some of the team from Kazan with us to Austin for a long weekend of panels, parties, and general geekiness.

Here are some of the highlights for us at this year’s event and we hope if you are going to be in Austin that you drop us a line so that we can catch up.

• Conference Startups: Grassroots Innovation Rocking the Event World - Our own Chris Schultz is moderating this core conversation about startup conferences and how small budgets can produce big results when pulling together events. If you’re not familiar with some of the events that Flatsourcing has been a part of in the past, check out TribeCon and LaunchFest!
  • Play at Work - Agile Games for Productive Teams
  • The Lean Startup - 10 Reasons Most Startups Fail
  • Agile Self Development
• The 3rd Annual Downtown NOLA SXSW Party - Another year, another strong event by the New Orleans contingent at SXSW. Chris and I will both be there, looking to wrap up the week of work with some true flavor of New Orleans. We’re bringing a little of the leftover Mardi Gras to Austin!
  • SXSWi - Freshbooks 2,000,000 Users Party - As long time users of Freshbooks, we look forward to catching up with the folks behind one of the most important tools in the Flatsourcing Toolbox.

That’s just a tiny sampling of what’s going to be on our plate while in Austin, but there is much much more. If you have some other favorite events (both official and not) that you plan to attend at SXSW, feel free to post a comment below, and as always we would love to catch up with you face to face. If you’ll be at SXSW and want to catch-up, drop us a line or just email me directly.

I’ve been a big fan of Smashing Magazine, the online web design and development blog, for a number of years now. While there overall content is really solid on a day to day basis, occasionally they have a post like the one below that provides so much value that I’d be remiss in not passing it along. I hope some of the tools and services they list are as useful to you as they are to us.

Useful Web Services, Tools, and Resources for Web Designers (or in my opinion web developers, UI specialists, copywriters, etc…)

What are your favorites in the list? Are there any others you think should be included? As always, I would love to hear what everyone out in the ether thinks.