Pleased to say that this blog has been updated to WordPress 3 – ‘Thelonius”.  So far so good.  We’re going to get the Annunciation Interactive site updated soon as well.  From what I’m seeing, WP3 continues the evolution of WordPress toward a more general content manager versus its blog-centric roots…

Our friend Travis in Breaux Bridge has released CSS Fu – a batch CSS Gallery submitter. It’s still in beta, and submissions are currently free – check it out!

Interesting article on Time.com titled The New Internet Start-Up Boom: Get Rich Slow that makes some good observations about new breed small businesses. I particularly like the concept of Noodleconomics. The term ramen profitable was coined by Paul Graham, a Silicon Valley start-up investor, essayist and muse to LILO (little in; lots out) entrepreneurs. It means that your start-up is self-sustaining and can eke out enough profit to keep you alive on instant noodles while your business gains traction.

Our friend Erik ‘the k is black‘ Kiesewetter has launched an updated portfolio here, and it’s (as he’d say) ‘bangin’. He’s a great talent and we work with him often. Ask him about his Bike® Shorts.

We’re excited at Annunciation Interactive to have launched the Sucré website today. Sucré is a spectacular New Orleans-based chocolatier, bakery and confectionary shop, and we’re really pleased with the richly visual and deeply functional e-commerce site. The site’s Magento-powered commerce engine is highly feature rich, with an amazingly powerful client admin panel reminiscent of Google Analytics. As of this morning, we’re debugging the merchant account setup, but should be rolling by EOD – whoo-hoooo!

Whoa. Ben turned me on to Pandora, a iPhone streaming radio app that allows you to punch in artists or songs that you like and it then streams tunes it thinks you’ll like based on a ton of parameters. It’s based on the Music Genome Project. Pretty cool stuff, and free, which is nice.

BarCampNOLA Conference Set to Gather Gulf Coast Technology Experts for a Good Cause

BarCampNOLA, a technology conference that aspires to bring Gulf Coast digerati, entrepreneurs and those interested in them together in order to connect with the local community, socialize and learn, will be held on February 16th and 17th at the Voodoo Ventures, LLC offices at 757 St. Charles Avenue, Suite 301 in New Orleans.

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences that was born from the desire of people to share and learn in an open, participatory environment. BarCamp conference content is provided by participants and often focuses on early-stage web applications and other open source technologies. Participants interact in the form of discussion, demos, and collaborative projects. The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California in 2005. Since then, the BarCamp movement has gained momentum as hundreds of BarCamp conferences have been held in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Australia and Asia over the past few years. BarCampNOLA is one of over 30 BarCamp conferences that have already been scheduled to take place in the United States this year.

The main focus of BarCampNOLA organizers is to help a struggling Gulf Coast-based small business or nonprofit by participating in a “hack day” style project over the course of the conference in order to produce or modify a needed technological service such as a new website or enhanced Web services. Organizers anticipate the attendance of participants with expertise in relation to code, design, creative concept production, and a variety other technology-related specializations.

BarCampNOLA is free to attend, and active participation is all that is asked of attendees. Wireless internet access will be provided by the conference. Also, individuals who attend are simply asked to share information regarding knowledge gained and overall experiences of the event via public web channels such as blogging, photo sharing and wiki-ing.

Like previous BarCamp conferences, BarCampNOLA will rely on securing sponsorship and donations ranging from food, beverages, and media advertising to monetary contributions of $250 to $400. BarCampNOLA organizers are actively soliciting sponsorship from local businesses interested in supporting the local tech community. Sponsors will have their organization’s logo printed on the back of the official BarCampNOLA T-shirt and are more than welcome to participate in the conference itself.

Local press will also be invited to the event, and are encouraged to assist in the promotion of BarCampNOLA. New Orleans-based organizations and groups that are able to spread the word about BarCampNOLA to their membership are greatly encouraged to do so.

For more information regarding attendance or sponsorship of BarCampNOLA, please contact Chris Schutz, CEO of Voodoo Ventures, LLC by phone at (504)581-6446 or via e-mail at cschultz@voodooventures.com. Also, visit BarCampNOLA’s official website at http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampNOLA.

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

The name “BarCamp” is a playful allusion to the event’s origins, with reference to the hacker slang term, foobar: BarCamp arose as a spin-off of Foo Camp, an annual invitation-only participant driven conference hosted by open source publishing luminary Tim O’Reilly.

The first BarCamp was held in Palo Alto, California, from August 19-21, 2005, in the offices of Socialtext. It was organized in less than one week, from concept to event, with 200 attendees. Since then, BarCamps have been held in over 31 cities around the world, in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Australasia and Asia. To mark the one-year anniversary of BarCamp, BarCampEarth was held in multiple locations world wide on August 25-27, 2006.

UPDATE: I believe the date is narrowing to the 5th and 6th of January. Please visit the wiki that has been set up for up-to-date info!

We had a launch party last weekend for the creative group we formed about a year ago here in New Orleans. Lots of fun, see some of the pix going up here. Thanks to all who came out and signed in to keep the independent creative community talking. Special thanks to Andy at Barrister’s Gallery for hosting the event space on St. Claude. The weather was perfect, the DJs were rockin, and the hazy recollections suggest people had some fun…