Jason Day may have stolen the show at the Byron Nelson Championship, but it was Monsoon’s software that lit up faces in the digital playground at the tournament. Monsoon premiered an application that allowed visitors and participants to create their Golf alter-ego and customize it with the touch of a finger.
 
This year has already been a lot of fun for us – we continue to focus on touch and mobile experiences.   With projects from the NBA, PGA and ITF, we’re excited to combine the power of touch and social gaming to create fun and engaging sports applications. 
 
No one from our team may be able to pull off an eagle at the 18th hole (unless you’re talking Wii Sports), but we’re excited to make software that brings smiles to a sport that has lately been masked by controversies.

Last year, we launched the first touch Twitter application for Windows 7. Since then our obsession with touch, Twitter and 3D user interfaces has continued. Okay, maybe it has gotten a little worse, but it has allowed us to work on some really fun stuff!

We recently had the opportunity to create a Twitter mashup and are excited to bring you Touch Twitterworld in 3D.

The 3D Twitterworld app first premiered at Earth Day on a giant touch wall (courtesy HP). It will soon be offered on the web and as a download for all the fanboys.

Click the image below to see a teaser video showing real-time Earth Day tweets from around the world (3D glasses optional).

One of my favorite Monsoon projects of the year just went into Alpha.

Yea.

That’s all I can tell you right now.

Make no mistake: a well-qualified offshore IT team can save your startup thousands of dollars and speed up product launches.   All you have to do is find the right partner.

Easier said than done.  It’s hard enough to find good employees and vendors in your own country; how do you find a good team abroad?

It isn’t difficult to figure out where to look.  These days, websites like oDesk and eLance connect you to independent contractors around the world; simple Google searches and directory sites like IndianBusiness list thousands of IT companies in a wide variety of niches.

But knowing how to look is much more important.  So, here are five rules to keep in mind when searching for the ideal offshore IT partner.

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Video from my conversation with Lakshmi Pratury at the Aicon Gallery in Palo Alto last year.  We discuss how Monsoon Company got started, innovation in India, and Thomas Friedman.

It seems so obvious: if you want to develop software that’s useful to people, you’ve got to talk with them. But too many developers take the anti-social approach and consider customer support to be beneath their status…If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology. Don’t worry if your resume isn’t filled with the latest buzzwords. Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don’t care what programming language you use – they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication.

[Nick Bradbury via 37 Signals]

Don’t know why they didn’t just write the list down in text, but here is a video list of the top 25 Indian web companies.  I agree with about half of the choices…

The Economic Times reports that remittances to India have decreased by 25 to 30% already.

I want to apologize for the lack of recent updates to the Monsoon blog.  Ankush and I have implemented and begun posting to personal sites.  Now that they’re set up and running, there will hopefully be more time to post here.

Here is Sramana Mitra’s list of the top 10 Outsourcing stocks.  I’m surprised that her top 2 picks are American, but you can’t really argue with the logic.