The Brazilian delegation attending the WWW2010 Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA has just been informed that Rio de Janeiro has been selected to host the 2013 conference. W3C is the leading global conference about the Web. Read more…
W3C is an international consortium with the mission to lead the web to its full potential, creating standards and guidelines that will guarantee constant development. More than 80 standards have already been published, among them HTML, XML, XHTML and CSS.
Following the deliberations by the Internet Management Committee in Brazil and the requirements of W3C, the Center for Information and Coordination of dot BR opened a W3C office in Brazil - the first in South America. W3C in Brazil promotes lectures at universities and supports public and private-sector entities. In late November it is promoting a large event in São Paulo. Read more…
ReadWriteWeb is a blog that provides analysis and covers trends relating to the internet and web technologies. It was created in 2003 by New Zealander Richard MacManus. This month RWW is promoting an event about real-time internet and is kicking off blogs in five countries, including Brazil. The blogs are written in the local languages and speak to the local realities. The Brazilian version, in Portuguese, launched today. Read more…
In June 1998, colleagues Romero Rodrigues, Rodrigo Borges, Ronaldo Takahashi and Mario Letelier had a dream: to create a brand that would be part of people’s lives. Night after night, the four students slept in the office, working hard on what they called Buscapé. But it was not working. It failed. Several times. Still, they continued undoing nightmares and redoing the dream.
They were awarded national and international investment (a rare thing, at that time, and still difficult), bought up competitors, became a corporation (BuscaPé.com Inc.) and took the lead in several countries (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela). Last week, after ten years in business, they sold 91% of Buscapé to multinational media company Naspers Limited for US$ 342 million.
How did this happen? Want to know how you can do it too? And what is the future of their dream? I interviewed Romero a day after the sale - the day before his 32nd birthday - to learn more. Also watch for our upcoming chat with Brazil’s leading young “internerd” to be CEO of a meteoric startup. Read more…
In 1999, when BuscaPé launched, it saw 55,000 users per month. After two years, it received an investment of approximately R$60 million, and since then it has purchased various other businesses. This year, the forecast was it would close the year with an average of 62 million users per month (12 million more than the average of the previous year).
From this excellent position, Grupo BuscaPé had the greater part (how much is not revealed) of the electronic commerce activity in Brazil (for a total of R$ 3.8 billion in the first quarter of the year, but predicted to close out 2009 with R$10 billion).
I found some more information about the history of BuscaPé, e-commerce in Brazil, and Naspers - the multinational media group which announced today that it had purchased BuscaPé for US$342 million. Read more…
Developers, researchers, activists, journalists, lobbyists and other interested parties are invited to attend a special event this weekend in São Paulo. The Transparecy HackDay will be a collaborative task force to develop small applications based on open technologies, government information and public data. Read more…
