I came across a great post on the blog of Jason Baptiste that got me thinking about our clients and how we can help them beyond development. Our core business is in providing development resources, but as think about where we want to go (and grow) as a company it becomes clearer that helping our clients be successful any way we can is a necessity.

Clearly, building a scalable, easy to use, and useful app is the first step towards a successful startup, but this post on 16 Ways Your Startup Needs to be Getting Customers should be a reminder that once the app is launched, the real work begins, acquiring customers.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments or point us at other articles you think illustrate the best way to get your app to your customer base.

New Orleans is home to many exciting happenings in the world of Ruby on Rails this week as RubyConf comes to New Orleans for the first time.  We’re excited to be hosting events at Launch Pad and sponsoring events through Flatsourcing.  I wanted to take a minute to share everything that is going on this week.

• RoR Training Fundraiser - 11/10 9am-4pm - Jumpstart Lab is hosting an all-day training session at Launch Pad on Wed.  This class is an excellent TDD/Rails3 primer.  I’m personally looking forward to taking this class and challenging Anton to a code-off next time I’m in Kazan. All proceeds from the class are going to a Teach For America classroom. Sign up here.
• RubyConf - 11/11-13 - RubyConf will be held at the Hilton Riverside and features three days of fantastic content.
• RubyHappy Happy Hour - 11/11 5-7pm - Join us at the IP building for happy hour in the IP building and at Capdeville hosted by iSeatz, Audiosocket, Flatsourcing & Launch Pad. Sign up here.
• Ruby Bayou Meetup - 11/11 7pm - Following the happy hour, take part in New Orleans’ own Ruby Bayou monthly meeting at Launch Pad. Register now.

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

In what I hope will be the first of many posts on the various tools we use both internally and with our clients, I wanted to share some thoughts on Skype. At this point it seems that Skype is ubiquitous, but for those who aren’t familiar, it’s core benefit is it’s very simple and stable software for voice over IP communication. It does a lot more than that, including text chats (both one to one and group), screen sharing, and incredibly inexpensive international calling. At this point, saying that I live on Skype isn’t too much of an exaggeration. We maintain bookmarked group chats for the times that we overlap with our office and use it to augment our primary communication tools of Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker. I use it to have feedback calls with clients in tandem with Audio Hijack, so that I can record and share feedback directly with our development teams. This allows our developers and client managers to hear exactly how our clients feel (both the good and the occasional bad) while helping them build stronger english language skills.

In addition to their primary software, they have a great iPhone application that allows you to make and receive calls, have text chats, and essentially use your phone as you normally would when travelling abroad.

Here are a few articles about Skype that I’ve found useful in increasing the value I get from it.

• Skype Etiquette
• Hacking Skype: 25 Tips to Improve Your Skype Experience
• Skype Screensharing

Have any other ways that you use Skype? Is there anything you like or dislike about it? We’re always on the lookout for ways to improve the processes and tools that we use, so let us know how you feel.

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.