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.

I just finished reading over a post from Six Revisions about “The Benefits of Wireframing“. It’s a great review of why taking the time to do wireframes before jumping into design mockups and development prototypes saves time, money, and headaches over the long haul. I highly recommend you take a minute to read it if you are in the process of creating a spec or writing stories for a new web app.

When we do internal projects we always take time to work up wireframes before we get into the meat of the project and it just about always ends up being a step that we look back on as beneficial to the overall project. Here are some of the tools and resources we use ourselves, hopefully they will help you on your next project.

• Balsamiq - One of the premier tools for wireframing to be released.
• Wirify - A great tool that allows you to take any site and turn it into a wireframe (or at least the foundation of a wireframe).
• Mockflow - A web-based app that offers similar functionality to Balsamiq
• The Pencil Project - An open source GUI tool.
• OmniGraffle for iPad - The iPad version of the very popular Mac software.

Other reference material:

• Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing
• Wireframes Magazine
• I ♥ Wireframes Gallery

I have an admission to make. I’ve been a complete hypocrite about something and it’s time to come clean about it.

For years, I have spouted that having a blog for a business or project and not updating it is far worse than not having one at all. Well, as is evident from the fact that my last blog post was in the middle of November I have not been following my own advice. It may not be the biggest deal in the world, but it sticks in my belly that I’m not holding up my end of the bargain after chastising many a boss, co-worker, or client over the years for talking the talk without walking the walk.

Things change now. While it’s incredibly egocentric to think that people are concerned by whether I post my thoughts, links, or other drivel on a regular basis, I commit now to regular updates to the Flatsourcing blog. Whether it’s a quick link, an example of something we are working on, or even a silly video that caused me to chuckle, anyone visiting will be given the opportunity to get to know me (and by extension Flatsourcing) a  little bit better.

Of course, to do this, the help of the readers is going to be necessary. Let me know what you want to know about the team at Flatsourcing, about what and how we work, about anything at all. Just post a comment below or email me directly and I’ll do the best I can to provide information that you will find valuable, insightful, and hopefully entertaining as well.

Hello everybody,

While I want to thanks all our clients whose name I can’t disclose openly and project I can’t put in our portfolio
And also people behind the scene who run the company and whose stories we’ll be telling in 2011 more so that you know who to say thanks too in return

I wanted to thank:

1) Apple for inspiring me continuously by it’s facinating hardware
2) IKEA for building even nicer env around us in office
3) Then also VoodooVentures and FlatSoft for supporting it’s Flatsourcing project so diligently
4) PivotalLabs for PivotalTracker that we use for bug and features development tracking
5) GitHUB for hosting all our early and late code deliveries in our fs GitHUB account
6) Heroku and Slicehost for being our favourite hosting providers
7) All community behind RubyOnRails by 37signals, and thanks again to 38signals for Basecamp that is the tool that made us expand the communication and scope of projects dramatically!
Scrum and Agile coaches that helps us manage all the projects.

Thanks!

Oleg

Who doesn’t love a nice inforgraphic? Surely I do, so here’s one I came across recently that’s near and dear to my heart, apps. Whether they be web based, mobile, or desktop, there’s an app out there that can help you in your work and if there isn’t we’re always happy to build it!

Flowtown - Social Media Marketing Application

Hey everybody!

Let me show you what we have in our github account for prototyping Rails applications.

Here is skeleton for Rails 3 based applications filled with:

• Basic auth: Devise app/models/user.rb
• Navigation: SimpleNavigation config/navigations
• DRY controllers: Inherited Resources
• Form builder: Formtastic config/initializers/formtastic.rb
• List builder: Tabletastic config/initializers/tabletastic.rb
• Default styles for Formtastic: Flutie
• Application config: Configatron config/config.yml
• JS Framework: Jquery-rails
• Tests: RSpec, Shoulda, RR, Cucumber, Factory Girl, Autotest
• Code metrics: rails_best_practices and rcov

We know there are a lot of other templates like Suspenders and brand new Prologue .

But we want concentrate on scaffolding and that’s is why we have a little bit customized templates for scaffold views, controllers and cucumber features.

If you intrested, please checkout Rails3 Base github repo , feel free to fork, send pull requests.

Thanks,
Timur

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.