Near-shoring open-source development to Latin America with North-by-South
Working with India in increasingly expensive and has always been a bit inconvenient. North-by-South offers a way to do open-source software development with a talented team of developers within or close to US time zones.
Tristan Rhodes from the Ubuntu community sent me a link to a cool company called North-by-South. North-by-South is essentially an open-source software off-shoring firm with a twist: Instead of outsourcing to India or Eastern Europe (with the time zone problems that can arise), North-by-South instead works with talented open-source engineers in Latin America:
- NXS gives businesses access to the top talent of Latin American open source programmers. Our network has all the skill sets needed to launch a software project into production from start to finish, located only 1-4 hours ahead of Pacific Standard time.
- Given the differences in cost-of-living in Latin America, we can provide top development services at extremely competitive pricing.
As the rates for Indian and Eastern European developers continues to climb, it may be wise to look south to Latin America. There are some exceptional open-source developers in or from Mexico and Latin America (Miguel de Icaza being the most famous of them), and Latin American governments' adoption of open-source software is only going to increase this.
North-by-South just raised an angel round of funding, and has a strong management team. The team includes as former Director of Engineering of Jumpstart Technologies, which launched Tagged.com (estimated in 2007 by Techcrunch to be one of the fastest-growing social network on the web) and incubated Hi5.com.
Perhaps most importantly, this is a team that groks the spirit and code of open source. I may just be optimistic on North-by-South because of my family's affection for Latin America, but whatever the reason, I'd encourage you to take a look.