On the road in Brazil: bogus Blackberries and changing hemispheres at half-time
SuperPower in Brazil by Mark Gregory, BBC Technology Correspondent
Day 1: I am in Sao Paulo finding out how Brazilians make money from using the internet. It's my first trip to Brazil. First impression of Sao Paulo: it's huge and sprawling but surprisingly lush.
Most Brazilians don't have internet access at home so they go to internet cafes - known locally as Lan Houses. Lan Houses are everywhere, mostly filled with kids using the social networking site Orkut (which is more popular than Facebook here) and playing games.
The City Council has set up a network of centres known as Telecentros where anyone can drop in and have one hour of internet access free of charge.
I went to one in the corner of a public library in the centre of town.
The atmosphere is studious. I meet an unemployed man living in a shelter who speaks remarkably good English.
He tells me he uses the internet to hunt for jobs. It saves him a lot of time and hassle as he used to have to travel all over the city to go to different employment agencies. He tells me he often doesn't have enough money to buy food let alone pay for a bus fare to get to an employment agency.
Mind you, his online job hunting doesn't seem that successful - he's only ever found one part time job and that was a couple of years ago.
A woman tells me she's applying for a passport online. She says it's much easier than the old system where you had to queue for hours at a government office.
Is there a message from these two random conversations? Yes there is: internet access opens up opportunities for making money and saving time by making it easier to do simple things like hunting for work or dealing with red tape.
Later in the day I meet a lady from Dell, the computer firm, who tells me the average Brazilian internet user is online for 70 hours a week - more than any other country in the world. The figures sounds too high - I am not sure I believe her.
Day 2: I'm still chasing how to make money on the web. I met one person who certainly seems to have worked out how to do it: Gilberto Mautner, founder of Brazil's first and largest webhosting company Locaweb.
The company was founded at a corner desk in a textile factory 12 years ago.
Now it hosts the websites of 200,000 Brazilian companies.
Gilberto waxed lyrical about how the web is helping small firms reach new markets.
Highlight of the visit was venturing into the company's data centre - a high security room full of servers, incongruously with a toilet in one corner.
Later I visited an area of the city, which is billed as Latin America's largest open air electronics market - a grand name for a few streets stuffed with gadget sellers and street hawkers peddling pirate software.
At one point a police car appeared and many of the sellers immediately ran for cover.
Some of the kit on sale was clearly fake - my favourite was a mobile phone looking exactly like a Blackberry. Closer in section revealed the brand name was actually Blackbory.
Day 3: visited what is described as a business incubator, an organisation dedicated to nurturing small technology firms in the grounds of the University of Sao Paulo.
I met a remarkable entrepreneur Patrick Choate who seems to have perfected the art of making money out of very little, using the power of the internet.
He buys carbon fibre tubes normally used in the exhaust pipes of high performance motorcycles, slices them up into wristband sized rings, and sells them over the internet as jewellery.
Each tube makes 30 wristbands, each wristband is sold for the same price as the whole tube cost him to acquire. Cost of production: almost zero; cost of distribution: not much; profit: huge.
Petrol heads snap them as the result of a clever marketing wheeze.
Patrick has contacts in Formula One motor racing and he has persuaded several top drivers to be photographed wearing his carbon fibre wristbands. The photos are prominently displayed on his website making his products into objects of desire.
It shows what you can do with a clever idea and the reach of the web.
Later in the day, I drove past a road sign marking the Tropic of Capricorn - the southern boundary of the tropics - and it definitely wins the coolest sign of the week award.
In a similar vein, a friend told me there's a football stadium in Brazil that is exactly on the equator. At half time the teams change hemispheres.
The day ended with a visit to a project in a favela that encourages slum dwellers to learn computing skills. The district is known locally as the "crack favela" as a result of its drug problems. I heard uplifting tales of how training in making effective use of the internet has helped some people find jobs and improve their lives.
Comments
Sign in or register to comment.