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]

eMarketer just released new global Internet penetration numbers. Although still behind the other regions, Latin America keeps growing steadily. These are the latest numbers:

According to eMarketer: “Countries such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and Mexico are relatively immature Internet markets and will be the primary drivers for worldwide Internet user growth over the next five year“.

Here are some of the numbers by country:

Is someone still not convinced about doing online research in Latin America?

More here:

500 Million Internet Users in Asia - Pacific [eMarketer]

Since yesterday Facebook is available in Spanish. It’s interesting for us how from all the languages they could choose to launch first, Spanish was the chosen one. This shows how increasingly important the Spanish speaking world is becoming for the Internet giants (MySpace launched their Spanish version a few months ago).

We released some results in november where we said Facebook was lagging behind in Latin America…  well, we think that’s about to change. We’ll run the same survey in a couple of months to see what the new results are.

Facebook already has around 2.8 million users in Latin America and Spain, oh, and by the way - the translation of the site was done by users.

We think Facebook is a great platform for many things, including online research. So the move is more than welcome.

Facebook Launches in Spanish [Mashable]

Today TNS is announcing a preferred partnership relationship with Livra Panels. We are very excited at the prospect of working together with one of the industry leaders!

Here’s the press release:

TNS Partners with Livra Panels to Deliver Online Access Panel Services in Latin America [TNS Global]

Just to give you a little picture of how certain things are in South America, a Brazilian federal judge has “banned” two very popular video games (Counter-strike and EverQuest) because he is apparently sure that they provoke violence. Apparently moments after the ban came into place thousands of teenagers descended from the favelas and gave up their weapons (not!). Of course drugs, poverty and corruption don’t “provoke” violence. I guess it’s a bit more difficult to enforce a ban against them

Please read the blog posting below to gain a bit more insight about this ridiculous ruling:

Brazilian Government Bans Counter-Strike, EverQuest, Fun [Kotaku]

This WSJ article talks about how online community sites are being used for research purposes. The sites, which apparently resemble “social networking sites” are set up specifically by brands in order to create a community of users/clients. Yes, the trend I guess is increasing but haven’t people been doing this for years? I remember P&G and other companies setting up community websites for their clients, maybe the difference is that at the time they were using it more for direct marketing than for research. And I can also see how the new “web 2.0″ social networking features are helping.

Maybe we are arrogant, but when reading articles like this we can only express a big “DUH!“. We have been trying to convince people to do this kind of thing since ages ago but most clients and brands are not willing to try new stuff, maybe now they will start listening…

The New Focus Group: Online Networks [WSJ]