If you are a developer or programmer, chances are you've at least heard about Drupal. (If you haven't, its the third largest content management system available.) Well, New Orleans, we have the honor and privilege of hosting this year's Drupal summit, Drupal on the Bayou.

"It's a Drupal Summit, At a Casino, In New Orleans"

On December 8 and 9, developers from around the country will gather at Harrah's in the Central Business District, and Drupal is not playing down New Orleans' assets a single bit. For our of town visitors staying at Harrah's Hotel or surrounding accommodations, you are on the very edge of the French Quarter and the Mississippi River. There is no need to describe the French Quarter; to anyone, it is a place of legend. However, if you are looking for local shows and eats and avoiding touristy traps, the Historic Warehouse District boasts great bars and appetizing offerings at some of the best restaurants in the city. Github is even holding an event opening night at the Howlin' Wolf.

Visitors will also enjoy direct access to the streetcar and metro transit that can bring you to Frenchmen Street, Magazine Street, and more. The only sad thing I have to tell visitors is that the Apple Store is not located in New Orleans; this news surprises many, so come prepared or ready to take a cab to Metairie if you have Apple products in your arsenal.

The Details

Drupal and local developer communities have organized two days jam packed with tons to encourage participation. Keynote speaker, Angie "Webchick" Byron, kicks off the event on the morning of December 8. Byron is described as "a rock star in the Drupal World… Director of Community Development at Acquia, core co-maintainer for Drupal 7, recipient of the Google-O'Reilly Open 2008 Source Award for Best Contributor, co-author of the O'Reilly book Using Drupal, and an open source evangelist who lives and breathes Drupal." Not only does she boast amazing credentials in the world of development, but she also defies the stereotypical male developer role. It is rumored that she is an extremely helpful lioness.

Registrants can choose between different categories of sessions, or mix and match, based on what interests them: build, design, and business. The summit also offers a range of difficulty levels in sessions, from the newly trained to the wizened veteran. Offerings include Training Your Drupal Clients with Steve Burge, A Real Time Demonstration of Scaling Drupal 7 with Nathan Goulding, and many more sessions to fill your craving for Drupal studies.

Registration for both days is a measly $125.00, but summit participants are out for their own lunch. Student and funds are low? Register for free! Looking to learn Drupal or feeling like you need a refresher? LevelTen Interactive is offering preliminary training days before the event for a fee. On Monday, December 5, LevelTen will instruct novices in Drupal in a Day. Tuesday and Wednesday, December 6 and 7, delves deeper into Drupal 7 with a complete course on site building and best practices in developing with Drupal.

This year's Drupal on the Bayou promises to be an enlightening and promising summit for developers, local and from afar. For those of you who have not heard of Drupal or have had limited experience, you should consider taking this opportunity and attending Drupal on the Bayou to introduce yourself to new horizons. With Drupal's market share rising and boasting over 13,000 developers, Drupal offers a wide frontier of opportunities open for developers of any level to explore.

Screenshot from InvoiceASAP

Invoicing: the one thing that will make a small business owner sigh like a deflated balloon or a company’s accounting department run some poor financial software into the ground. Let’s face it: invoicing is not sexy. There is nothing ground-breaking about it, and there hasn’t been much change. Until now. InvoiceASAP, a new startup in New Orleans, is bringing easy mobile invoicing to the masses. The service is centered around generating invoices on mobile devices, such as a cellphones or tablets to send off to clients. Nothing fancy about this, right? Don’t tell that to Paul Hoeper, CEO of InvoiceASAP, who wants to bring a change to the invoicing area. Hoeper spent four years in business development at a high level in the invoicing industry with some of the largest invoicing providers. Hoeper has also worked with a New Orleans-based company, Receivables Exchange, which is a monetization engine for invoices and receivables. Hoeper gained a lot of expertise in invoicing, but also received a chance to witness some of the solutions that were currently being offered; and felt like the first mobile invoice platform was needed. “We wanted businesses to be able to generate invoices for any mobile device and also expect payments,” Hoeper said.

Who Would Use This Service?

The idea sounds great, but the first question that comes to mind is: Who would use this? Hoeper said that the perfect audience would be anyone that has a small business, does freelance work, or has a sales team out in the field that needs to quickly generate invoices to send back to the office. The company isn’t shying away from big businesses either.

Paul Hoeper, CEO of Invoice ASAP speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt (Courtesy of TechCrunch)

“The great thing about InvoiceASAP is that if your company already has an invoicing system, our mobile platform will integrate with that system,” Hoeper said. This will allow the company to continue to use their current invoicing software and InvoiceASAP can be viewed as an extension of that.

What Makes It So Sexy?

InvoiceASAP integrates with major accounting software platforms like QuickBooks and Xero. Any order, estimate, or invoice created on your mobile device will automatically go to your accounting software. The service will also allow for invoice customization so elements such as company logo and color scheme can be added. One of the biggest features within the software is how it handles media. When creating an invoice, you can add pictures, audio recordings, and also geo-tag the document. For example, if you are at a car repair shop and you’ve fixed a customer’s car, you can take a picture of the repaired vehicle and attach it to the invoice that you send off. InvoiceASAP also allows you to back up your invoice to the cloud. Documents and media can be saved or archived for later retrieval.

InvoiceASAP has more plans for the future as it looks to increase the functionality of its platform. The software will have full read/write capabilities and more POS integration with other services such as Square, Intuit GoPay, and Google Money.

Monday, hundreds of startup founders and investors descended upon the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, one of the world’s premiere startup events. Attendees heard from some of the leaders of today’s technological and media industries like Paul Graham of Y Combinator, David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr, Alexander Ljung, founder and CEO of SoundCloud and nearly 70 other speakers from companies such as InstaGram, bit.ly and Quora.

New Orleans seed accelerator program LP Ignition and their freshman class of startups were given the opportunity to attend the conference after the success of their very recent LaunchFest and demo day that took place during the last weekend of Jazzfest.

Ignition Class of 2011

Launchfest and Demo Day were the culmination of a seven-week program held in New Orleans that started early this year. Six startups were given an investment that allowed them to begin aligning interests with investors and operating their businesses at the lowest possible costs (buzzword alert: ramen soup capital). The mission of the Ignition program is to help develop early-stage high-potential tech ventures in an accelerated and highly focused environment. LP Ignition is using a mentorship-driven approach to developing these startups by helping build their products, discover their customer base and strategize their fundraising efforts. The six companies range from a peer-to-peer micro tutoring site to a digital platform for live concert events for web and mobile. Demo Day gave the startups the opportunity to pitch before a large audience of investors. Program participants were also pitching and presenting in Disrupt’s Startup Alley this past week.

But, this accelerated program is just the beginning for these startups. From here, some continue to focus more on refining their product and others will focus on funding. According to Chris Schultz, LP Ignition mentor, “[E]veryone is responsible for their own success. Taking ownership of that right now is critical.”

Ross Hinkle, from Liveset, said they’ve “just kicked off fundraising for our Series A round. We’re also continuing to roll-out product enhancements and expanding the core team.” Liveset is based in New Orleans and plans to stay. Ben Lavender, of Dydra, a cloud-based RDF database-as-a-service, is also raising money and plans to expand to New Orleans because “the low cost of living combined with the tax credits give us a powerful incentive to stay.” Lavendar did some “cost basis thinking about the Valley or New York” and it “doubled the company’s cost”.

But, even for the startups that moved back to their point of origin (Badger returned to New York City and Rayku returned to Toronto), New Orleans is a place they are thinking about expanding to and not breaking ties with. Rayku founder Donny Ouyang said he would “love to head back down to connect with mentors and friends.” GameBuilder Studio founder Lavon Woods says, "We plan to come back to New Orleans. [I]t really depends on whether the investors in Louisiana put their money where their mouth is and fund GameBuilder Studio. New Orleans is home for use and the support for emerging high-growth tech businesses seems to be the focus."

New Orleans has become an increasingly viable option for startups to sprout from or move to. The 35% tax credits are a big draw, but so is leveraging what New Orleans already offers. Schultz lists the natural resources as “culture, food, music, art, digital media" and adds "just take anything that exists and wrap bits around it. [E]verything is a tech company.” Lavendar adds that the greatest benefit to the program was “It showed me that there’s enough resources in New Orleans that there’s little reason to leave. For almost anything you’d want to do, you can get it done here.”

Although the companies own their next phase, the Ignition mentors aren’t merely sending these startups off into the world. They will continue to remain engaged, but will shift from being group-oriented to independent entities. Ignition plans to keep the program year round  and get more companies off the ground. Eventually, they will make the move to two classes a year, if the market supports it. The next round of applications opens up on November 24^th.

If your startup is thinking about applying, Ignition offers some guidelines to base your decision on. Mentor Peter Bodenheimer says: “[S]pend the summer and fall pulling together a team that is prepared to commit long-term to their startup. Building an MVP and doing customer and market research. [E]ngage with local meetup groups like GNO Code, Ruby Bayou, Net2NO, and making sure they have a strong technical team.”

Schultz adds, “Be ready to take 12 weeks to build your product, get traction, launch and raise capital.  To do this you need your team in place ready to work full time (the funding is so you can quit your job and commit), a team of hackers and hustlers who can make your vision a reality.”

Rayku's Ouyang offers this as a personal benefit of being part of Ignition: “I’ve had a taste of what the startup lifestyle is like and I LOVE it. I seriously walk around with a smile on my face like all the time now.”

Hopefully, because of the Ignition push, next year at Disrupt he’ll be walking around (in slow motion action) with that smile, the new kind of rockstar, being greeted by screams of surprise from throngs of swooning fans.

Why Were We The Lucky Ones?

Even non-techies will tell you that technology in city needs all the help it can get.  The city had to make a strong case as to why they needed help in this area.  The grant proposal was developed by Allen Square, Chief Information Officer, Director of the Office of Performance and Accountability Oliver Wise, and Advisor to the Mayor for Strategy and Development Ashleigh Gardere.  The proposal had to:

• Describe potential problems or opportunities to address with the grant
• Provide clear, compelling evidence that the city is well positioned to utilize the resources offered in the Smarter Cities Challenge
• Outline how a grant of IBM talent and technology has the potential to substantially enhance the city's capacity to act on key issues
• Highlight recent efforts to develop innovative solutions to public problems, including any initiatives to implement new technologies or open data policies
• Demonstrate the city is ready to match IBM's investment with its own commitment

How This Will Help New Orleans

New Orleans city government has already made a commitment behind data-driven decisions as it develops new programs such as NOLAStat and the new AskNOLA service.  Everyone seems to be on the same page: let’s make things easier and more efficient for people to use.  IBM consultants are scheduled to start working with the city in the third quarter of 2011.  “We have asked IBM to partner in our efforts to implement a comprehensive performance management system that improves quality and cost-effectiveness in the delivery of services and promotes accountability and transparency to our citizens.  An important role they will have is advising how we can improve data warehousing and database systems so that information is more readily available and reportable” said Allen Square.

According to IBM, cities will also have access to a wide array of IBM resources, potentially including: technological skills and expertise, assistance with strategic planning, insight into case studies and best practices, social networking tools, and City Forward, a powerful new tool which allows cities to analyze, compare and visualize data across systems. City Forward applies IBM's expertise in data analysis and visualization to public data sets, enabling citizens and policymakers to reveal new insights and relationships in city systems. As part of the grant, cities may receive assistance in preparing and analyzing data sets with City Forward.  "We selected New Orleans because of its commitment to the use of data to make better decisions, and for its desire to explore and act on smarter solutions to their most pressing concerns," said Jennifer Crozier, Director, IBM Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs.

A week ago, one of our readers spotted a Street View car in Metairie and managed to have some one on one time with the driver.  Here's what he had to say:

Google Street View car spotted in Metairie

Installing NOLA Updates 1 of 2

With the improvements to the city’s website, appointment of CIO Allen Square, Jr. and the of hiring of interim GIS manager, Denice Warren Ross New Orleans 1.0 should be online soon. The next logical step is upgrade; New Orleans 2.0. A city that makes demographic, crime, historical, and infrastructure data available to be molded into “apps” by the public for the public.

In 2008 and 2009 DC ran the “Apps For Democracy” contest and awarded prizes to the best programs. The contest energized D.C’s developer community and produced useful apps for the public. One application, DC Stumble Safely, used crime data, road data, and DC Metro station locations in conjunction with twitter to provide revelers with up-to-date information on the location of the best parties and the safest route home in one’s post-party assumed inebriated state. DC Historic Tours used historic landmark data and combined it with Google Maps and Flickr to make custom tour maps of DC historical monuments and buildings. Point About an iPhone app was a location aware program that provided real time crime alerts using the iPhone’s GPS.

The federal government has also realized the utility of mobile application. The General Service Administration has USA Search the governments official search engine available on the iTunes for iOS devices. Department of Homeland Security has PatriotApp, also known as the snitch app. The snitch PatriotApp “deputizes you iPhone or iPad!” and aids in reporting suspicious activity relevant to government agencies.

New Orleans finally has competent data stewards and a pool of talented developers and with a little co-operation New Orleans could move into the current evolution of the digital world, 2.0.

What An Angry City Employee Might Look Like

With all the technology problems that New Orleans city government has had to endure lately, they now have another one.  According to Ariella Cohen, from The Lens NOLA, a city computer server crashed, resulting in the lost of e-mails and documents for many city employees.  The Microsoft Windows-based server was being utilized to store documents and e-mail across various city departments.  Because of the crash, the city lost approximately 20%, or 5,000 to 6,000 e-mail accounts and documents.

Chief Information Officer, Allen Square was quoted as saying that “the crash was akin to the collapse of a physical shelf storing folders of e-mails and city documents”.  Even though city employees complained about problems accessing e-mail and documents a month ago, the city’s IT department has been up to its neck in problems and didn’t have time to address it because of a budget crisis, other failing IT systems, and computer problems at Civil District Court.

Mr. Square stated that one of his goals in 2011 is to make sure there are no major crashes. “Money has been set aside to pay for modernizing computer systems with early warning detection systems”, he said.  Hopefully, the city’s IT department has a plan to remedy these failing systems as computer problems and server crashes aren’t their only problems.  But as Mayor Mitch Landrieu said on Wednesday “We’re learning how to do things quicker and make sure systems are in place to deliver results, but nothing is going to change overnight”.

Audio Systems - Inside The Haunted House

We have 24 discrete ambient tracks. The live on a 24 channel Fostex HDD recorder. The recorder feeds a 24ch behringer mixer. 8 of the channels are patched out through subgroups, and the remaining 16 are pushed through the direct outs of their respective channels. This is to allow for an emergency message to be played during an emergency inside the house. The 8 subgrouped channels are spread throughout the house when the message is playing it can be heard anywhere. The trigger for this message also kills all ambient audio playback, as well as turns on our work lights. The 24 tracks come out of the mixer to 10-1500 watt, 4 2000 watt, and 2-2450 watt qsc amplifiers. The amps drive 48 speakers which are a mix of Peavey PR-15s, and Impulse 15's.

Audio Systems - For Their Stages

Our main stage consists of 4 bi-amped mid/high 15in peavey boxes, along with 4 double 18 sub boxes. We also have two delay positions per side consisting of 2 impulse 15's per delay position. Our second stage has 2 flown impulse 15's along with a double 18 sub box acting as the main.

Lighting – Inside the Haunted House

We have a variety of par cans, pin spots, and any kind of light you can buy at home depot throughout the house. In the past several years we have worked very hard to make the lighting blend into the scenes as much as possible. Nothing will kill a mood faster than seeing a goofy can light as a blemish cutting into the scenery we worked so hard to build. Where it makes sense we try and use fixtures you would see in this type of scene. For example in our French Quarter scene we have incorporated architectural fixtures into the facades from which most of the light imitates in the scene. Several of the second stories of some of the buildings are illuminated by can lights, but they are obscured by the balconies. In our voodoo room we have a chandelier and ceiling fixtures, and in our sewer we are using mostly bulkhead fixtures as just a few examples.

Lighting – Outside

Our main stage has 24 source 4 pars, 16 of which have color scrollers attached. The 16 lights with the color scrollers are on the main stage, and the 8 lights without cover the 2 secondary stages. The pars are connected to a 24ch dimmer. The dimmer as well as scrollers are controlled via a dmx system. Once again we are using Enttec light factory. We also have a 1000 watt spotlight.

Air System

Because of our large amount of pneumatic props, air cannons, pumps, etc... We have a very high demand for compressed air. Our air delivery system consists of a 180cfm rotary screw diesel air compressor. The compressor feeds into 2in line which is connected to 2 large wheel valves. These valves each have an 80gallon reserve tank connected by 2 – 1in lines. From the wheel valves 1in lines run throughout the house. The lines terminate into 8 outlet manifolds from there we use 1/4in air lines to run to the individual gags. For the gags that are more sensitive to pressure changed we typically have small 5 to 8 gallon reserve tanks with check valves this way they can maintain a small reserve in case there is a momentary pressure drop in the system. Because we are in a very humid area, and the compressor heats of the air significantly we fight a constant battle with water in the air lines. To combat this we have a filer at the compressor, a filter on each 1in line as it breaks out from the wheel valves, and a filter at each gag. Emptying the filters several times a night is a job in and of to itself.

Pyro

For a single stage show we use approximately 150 pieces of product. These vary the gauntlet of indoor theatrical elements, from gerbs to comets, to concussions, and cannon simulators.

We use a pyro digital consults PD firing system. Our system consists of a field controller and 20 firing modules. Each module can handle 16 separate channels and each channel can nominally handle up to three devices.

Flames

We use 2 separate flame systems.

The first is the stage and effects engineering arena system. Our setup involves 4 – 30gallon accumulators with 8 burners. 6 of the burners are cubes, producing a 20 to 25ft column of flame, and the other 2 are line burners, which produce between a 6 and 8ft wall of flame. The system can use propane or methane as fuel. This system was designed with the touring market in mind and has an elaborate set of safety systems involved pressure switches, blow off valves, burner controls, and solenoid valves. The outlets for each burner is 3/4in and optimal pressure is about 50psi.

The second is the stage and effects engineering stadium gun system. This is basically the same as the arena system, except instead of using a 30gallong tank it uses a 120 gallon tank, instead of a 3/4in outlet it uses a 1.5in outlet and operates nominally at 100psi. This creates a column of flame between 50 and 75ft depending on wind conditions.

People

We have a tech crew that is about 12 people strong. This includes several engineers, college students, fabricators, machinists, and others that are just glutton for punishment. The nature of how hard we push our systems means that the need constant attention while we are open and it is this dedicated crew that can turn this huge mess into a well oiled machine for 17 nights every year.

Who knew it took all of that technology for to make people scream!  Check out the House of Shock on Twitter and Facebook or get more info from their website.

The half day event that will take place on May 26^th, 2010 from 7AM  to 1PM at 3838 N. Causeway Blvd. Metairie, LA will highlight software such as SharePoint 2010, Dynamics DP 2010, and a preview of the popular suite: Office 2010.  We caught up with Terry Levasseur, Director for Commercial, State & Local Government Sector at Geocent, LLC whose company is one of the partners highlighting software at Launch Fest.  Terry tells us why organizations need to get out Launch Fest, a handful of software products to look out for, and new enhancements that techies should be aware of:

Q:  What benefits will an organization or individual get out of coming to Launch Fest?

A:  Both business decision makers and technologists will get a look at some of the new Microsoft technologies that are being launched in 2010. Microsoft has a large number of product releases this year all of which can help organizations realize cost savings in either productivity or hardware. Organizations will also see ways to leverage their existing IT investments using these new technologies. I think anyone who attends will come away with a greater understanding of how these new tools can help organizations realize some of their business objectives.

Q:  Is Geocent giving any workshops on any particular software products?

A:  Yes, Geocent will be giving presentations on both Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) and on the Microsoft System

Preview of Power Pivot in Excel 2010

Center suite of products. The BI demonstration will focus on the new release of SharePoint 2010 coupled with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010. The new features in both SharePoint and SQL Server allow information consumers to receive a relatively low-cost, highly flexible and integrated solution to their BI needs. The System Center presentation will demonstrate many of the capabilities of that suite including configuration management, compliance, monitoring, data protection, and IT service management.

Q:  What are a couple of the new enhancements, updates, or features that you are excited about coming from Microsoft products this year?

A:  The new PowerPivot functionality in Excel 2010 and the further refinement of Microsoft SharePoint as a true development platform are the two things that excite us as a company in 2010. PowerPivot is going to allow end users to have greater control over how they can manipulate their data to ultimately turn it into actionable business information. The new features of SharePoint give organizations a great deal of flexibility on how they can implement a SharePoint solution in their organization. Some organizations will choose to simply use it as an intranet, while others may decide to build their corporate web presence in it or use it to develop custom line of business applications.

For more information about the event, check out their registration page and also view the different breakout sessions that will be going on.