startupi

SocialSmart and Amanaie were present at the Digiday:APPS conference in NYC on August 12th. SocialSmart is based in NY and SP, and includes Startupi in its Brazilian investments. Read more…

In his visit to Brazil this week, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured at left) announced a Brazilian Applications Challenge. Aiming at the development of third party applications within Facebook’s own site, as well as integration with external sites, the challenge will offer prize money to Brazilian developers.

Mark has involved the press, bloggers and students in his first visit to Brazil. He arrived Sunday night and stayed in São Paulo, where on the following day he gave interviews and participated in a chat with invited bloggers (including myself).

Read on to learn more about this meeting, see photos, and watch videos of the workshop with developers, which addressed strategies like that which the portal Terra just implemented. Read more…

There are a couple of upcoming events in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro on the subject of social media: this month there will be an expert presenting on social networks at a college in Rio, and in the beginning of August a group of advertisers talking about blogs in São Paulo. Read more…

I spoke a little with Marco Gomes, founder of boo-box, and was among the first to find out about a new service he’s going to launch in the next few days, during Campus Party. I’m talking about BLINblin, a mashup of boo-box and Posterous that will let you post to a blog via email and include contextual ads using boo-box. Read more…

Hotwords is already an established and lucrative business, but it spent time as a startup. The story of it’s growth is quite interesting. On Friday I spoke to the guys at Hotwords (Gustavo Morales, Thiago Cassini, and Rafael Alves) so I could recount the “epic” here.

Gustavo Morales, one of four partners, was already an entrepreneur when he was a student, creating his first business, White Cat, which did flash design and other digital media. Read more…

I just checked out this post on the blog Idéia 2.0 from IDGNow! It’s about a recently created Brazilian startup called TvMoob that is focused on methods for monetizing internet video. No less a company than YouTube has been struggling with this problem and clearly there is a need for experimentation and innovation here.

TVMoob is experimenting with various ad formats ranging from sponsored links (image above, link below) to redirects to other ad-bugs superimposed on the video. The idea is to demonstrate the possibilities in such a compelling way that companies like Videolog and other video services will come calling.

Read more…