As part of the upcoming ESOMAR conference in Mexico, we placed an ad on April’s issue of research world which will be given out in the conference. This is a little preview of the ad:

Hope you like it!

Latin Business Chronicle reports on a study from ZenithOptimedia that argues that online ad spending in the region is growing at a faster pace than the world average. The reasons cited for this are the following:

• Growing Internet Penetration
• Increased Internet Usage per person

“Brazil’s online ad market grew by 66.6 percent last year to $278 million. By comparison, the overall Brazilian ad market grew by 25.1 percent. Argentina, Chile and Uruguay showed similar trends.”

In the midst of recession talk and other catastrophes, Latin America keeps showing a decisive growth trend.

The article, here:

Latin Internet Ads Jump [Latin Business Chronicle]

We came across an interesting press release from Hi Media Group this morning:

• Latin Americans spend  375 minutes per user per month on social networking sites (as opposed to 249 minutes in USA)

• Visitors to social networks grew by 16% from November 2006-June 2007.

• With 75% of all unique visitors going to social networks, Brazilians lead Americans (64 percent) and have earned a reputation as early adopters of global online trends

• While big social networks like Facebook and Fotolog are still built and financed in San Francisco and New York, increasingly the consumers who make or break global digital networks are found in Latin America.

This is why we are betting big on a social networking platform as our next recruitment vehicle. We think this is te way to go.

The press release can be found here:

Latin Americans are World’s Most-Engaged Social Networkers [Hispanic PR Wire]

John Tierney, from the New York Times’ Tierney Lab blog, posts an interesting article on the reliability of a survey done by volunteers.

Here are a couple of interesting excerpts:

“Respondents and non-respondents, no doubt, differ on a variety of dimensions, such as how much free time they have, their ability or motivation to introspect, and their desire to learn more about themselves.”

“…it is worth noting that almost any single paper in the social science literature is vulnerable to generalizability critiques, whether they use Internet-based surveys like ours or not. Surveys in which a randomly selected, nationally representative sample is invited to participate face the same critique if less than 100% of invited respondents participate.”

“I see online surveys as a great new tool for social science because they can gather so much information. Sure, the individual pieces information aren’t as precise as traditional surveys, but when aggregated they can be valuable.”

The whole article, which I strongly recommend, can be found here:

Can you trust someone like you? [TierneyLab Blog | NY Times]

We are very excited to announce the opening of our Brazilian office. We also congratulate Joana Lacerda on her new appointment, she is now Regional Director for Latin America and is relocating from our London office to our headquarters in Buenos Aires.

Please read the press release here:

Livra Panels Opens Office in Brazil as Online Research Adoption Grows Among Local Agencies [WebWire]

We are noticing a clear trend where agencies in Latin America are starting to switch to online research (about time!), we welcome the move and will do everything in our power to make this transition the smoothest possible.

Congratulations and welcome to our Brazilian team!

According to the Mercury Times, Google’s Eric Schmidt has indicated that he plans to invest significantly (via acquisitions and growing their own offices) in Latin America.

The article mentions that Google expects Latin American sales to more than double this year. That’s awesome (he didn’t mention anything about this though…).

We are very optimistic about the region as well, and welcome technology investments (as long as they don’t steal our developers!).

Sometimes we get the feeling that in the last few years Asia gets all the spotlight but hey, Latin America is booming too. As this Forbes’ article states:

“There is a market of 500 million people–about 8.6% of the world’s population–that the business media all too often neglects as it serves up story after story about China and India. That would be Latin America.”

Media seems to be more focused in everything that’s wrong about the region.

The article continues to give some interesting Internet usage stats:

“Between 2000 and 2007, the number of Internet users in Latin America grew from 18.1 million to 122.4 million, a compounded annual growth rate of 32% compared with only 12% in North America during the same period. Chile has the highest penetration of 43.2%, with Argentina at 39.7%, Brazil at 22.4%. Average penetration across Latin America is approximately 21.5%, as compared with 71.4% for the U.S. Overall, Latin America’s Internet population represents close to 10% of the world’s Internet users.”

The article also talks about Mercado Libre, the fellow Argentine startup who went public recently, as an example of local companies exploiting this boom.

Latin America is taking off, and we are proud to be part of it.

These are the articles we quoted:

Google plans big investments in Latin America [The Mercury News]

Latin America’s E-Commerce Leader [Forbes]

Yes, after many many many (many) months of work, we are releasing a closed BETA of the new Livra (Code name Cereza).

The new Livra is the first social networking website of its kind, totally focused on product reviews and surveys.

We think it’s awesome, yes we are kind of biased but first report from testers is that they love it.

Interested in testing?

Sign up here and you’ll get an invitation soon:

http://www.gimmecereza.com/

That’s what Steve Jobs said in an interview with  Fortune Magazine. I’m sure they do some research, especially to test advertising. But who can blame him? It’s tough to ask people about products that doesn’t exist. Like the camera phone example, no one said they would want one because they didn’t understand the ways it could be used.

Here’s the excerpt…

Steve Jobs Speaks Out [CNN Money]

Last week Martín and I (Diego) attended the latest edition of the Future of Web Applications conference in Miami. Having been to the one in London last year we thought we couldn’t miss this one.

Martin’s Badge was wrongly labelled as “academic”

FOWA is the conference for Web 2.0 projects, focused on both the entrepreneurial and technical aspects of them. All the latest and most popular web apps are represented in the conference. We heard speakers from companies like:

• Flickr
• Twitter
• Wordpress
• Digg
• Pownce
• Etc.

“But guys… you do online research, what does that have to do with the Internet?” We were absolutely amazed to see nobody from the online research world attending the conference. No wonder, these people are still talking about Second Life. This is exactly what’s wrong with online research, no one seems to know what is exactly going on in the web.

At Livra Panels we think that the key to sustainable panel management and recruitment is the creation of web applications that are fun, entertaining and most importantly useful to our users. And as a bonus, to be able to interview them for research. We discussed a little bit about our vision in this post.

We couldn’t be in a better time to take advantage of this trends. If you look at what’s going on right now on the web you have:

• People wanting to generate their own content
• People wanting to share this content with everybody
• People wanting to connect to each other to really leverage the power of the Internet
• Companies creating tools and applications to make all of the above happen.

The successful applications are the ones who are enabling the above in a fun and/or original way (Flickr, Facebook, Digg, Twitter and so many others).

Panel discussion with people from Digg, Twitter, Flickr, etc.

Now, how is this different to what we need in the online research industry? We want people to express their views, give us their opinions, discuss with others, etc.

Many of the lessons from FOWA can be applied to the online research world, in particular:

• Make everything social.
• Not only listen to your users, but also look at them.
• Be open, by using widgets, APIs, etc.
• Explain people what they can do with your apps and not how they can do it.
• Figure out the pleasure model before the business model.

We are taking all of these into consideration (and others) for the next version of Livra.com (coming soon!).

On a separate note, it was very exciting to see many Latin American projects in FOWA, Popego (beta coming soon) is an example of people who get it. Here’s a very good summary of FOWA at their blog.

The Internet is a great place to be right now

According to the Brazilian Quarterly PC tracker study, in 2007 Brasil was the 5th biggest PC market in the world. This is the chart:

1. USA (64 million sold)
2. China (36 million sold)
3. Japan (13 million sold)
4. United Kingdom (11.2 million sold)
5. Brasil (10.7 million sold)

The study also projects that Brasil will be the  third biggest market before 2010.

Now if we look at Latin America only, Brasil is obviously the biggest, with Mexico coming second.

I wonder how many of those are connected to the Internet, one would assume most of them. More evidence of how huge and unique the Brazilian market is.

More here:

Brasil é o quinto maior mercado de PCs no mundo [Terra]