Experience : North-by-South : northxsouth.com

Experience

North-by-South was founded by a handful of people in San Francisco, California and São Paulo, Brazil. Within this core group, together we have combined over three decades of software development management experience. And, our Developers Network includes over 30 open source programmers from Latin America who have participated in shaping the incredible free software movement happening there today. Our experience comes from years working on the most challenging and most essential elements of profitable, online businesses today:

Massively scalable architectures — as head of engineering for Tagged, our experience includes the design and architecture of websites which are built to handle intense traffic. Last year, TechCrunch estimated that Tagged could be the fastest-growing social network on the internet, with a remarkable 250 - 350,000 new users a day,
Viral user acquisition — as former Director of Engineering of Jumpstart Technologies, which launched Tagged.com and incubated Hi5.com, we participated at the center of a company which pioneered many of the user-to-user acquisition models used by nearly every Web 2.0 site today,
Geographically-distributed development — as the former Vice President of Engineering at a company helping to migrate Latin American governments to open source software, our experience in managing teams who are spread out over the globe is what has made NXS successful. Our story was compelling enough that an editor at O'Reilly's online magazine asked us to write about the technologies we use for remote engineering (slightly dated),
Rich design & branding — our experience includes product brand management for both large and small teams with budgets ranging from $50,000 to $12 million, and as principals at a prior venture (Mighty Assembly), Osborne/McGraw-Hill asked members of our core team to author and design a full color book called Macromedia Flash: Art, Design + Function,
Open source migration — our Developers Network has been a key part of the free software movement in Latin America, including participation in the 2006 mandate by the Brazilian government to migrate all public sector systems to open source software. Our core team has worked in the Brazilian "White House", the Palácio do Planalto in Brasilia, moving everything from the President's desktop computer to critical federal servers to free software,
Profitability — we are advised by senior executives who know how to make a company profitable, with prior successes at Evite.com, When.com and PF Magic, which were acquired by IAC, AOL and Mattel, respectively,
Wisdom of the commons — as our Developers Network continues to grow, so does our enormous pool of resources and experience to draw from when we come into contact with any given project. Our team includes industry veterans from all over the Americas.

OPEN SOURCE IN THE AMERICAS

Fórum Internacional Software Livre in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2006.

»	You can help out the open source census: Open source programmers from the NXS Developers Network are going to be working [...] (06.20.08 3:20pm)
»	Glyn Moody interview with NorthxSouth: Glyn Moody, one of open source’s most famous and meticulous historians, [...] (06.18.08 9:01am)
»	More tech creativity from Brazil is revealed at South Africa conference: Brazil is continuing to solidify its role as the leader of technology innovations [...] (06.14.08 9:55pm)