Stephan Schwab

From my last trip to the US I brought home a brand new Apple TV and connected it to our big screen. It instantly found my WiFi network and started sync’ing to the Mac Mini that was connected to the TV before and now has moved to the home office. The Apple TV fulfills its duties as a big video iPod quite well and my wife loves it to not only watch movies and TV shows we download from iTunes, but also to fill our living room with Salsa rhythms. Sure it’s a bit unusual to switch on the big plasma TV when all you want is listen to music. But on the other hand the cover animation used as a screensaver is nice and makes us switch to another track because we remember it by seeing the cover of the album it is on. So all in all the Apple TV is a nice addition and it just works.

Now reading my feeds I came across this:

Alasdair Allan in The Daily ACK: The new iMac:
Want to make a bet that that that refresh for the Apple TV that Steve hinted about during the Q&A yesterday means that you can use this new lap-friendly lightweight keyboard to do a lot more than you used to be able to do with the Apple TV than you can now?

Here is an image comparing the two keyboards:

The prospect of using a wireless keyboard with Apple TV is compelling. Maybe that “video iPod” gets extended to include at the very least Safari to browser web pages on the big screen. Then such a small keyboard and a wireless both would make great sense. Unfortunately the technical specifications for the current Apple TV doesn’t list Bluetooth and I doubt a bit that it’s already integrated, but deactivated. We’ll see ;-)

It is interesting to see that more and more people are thinking about serving the needs of Spanish speaking people within the U.S. and in Latin America.

François Schiettecatte in GigaOM Introducing, Boston Start-Ups with Hispanito «:
Derely says that the Spanish speaking community is very under served and most of the social networking sites are targeted to English speakers. The popularity of Fotolog, Google’s Orkut and Hi5 in some parts of Latin America indicate that targeted consumer services focused on the Latin American market can become thriving businesses, even though only 20% of Latin America has access to the internet. The internet connections are growing at a rate of 30% a year. At present there is about 8.2 million broadband connections in the Latin America. Derely feels there is a lot of room to grow but it will take 2-3 years to really pan out.

As readers of this blog probably have noticed I live in Panama and run a software development business there. Panama and other Latin American countries have a lot of talent interested in this line of work. And of course there are a lot of potential customers. The only problem I see at the present time is that on one hand people don’t have the money to buy a lot of services and when they do they can’t pay by credit card. So there is a need for other payment mechanisms and services have to be cheap. Further one should keep in mind that the majority access the Internet from public computers in Internet Cafe’s for about 50 cents per 30 minutes.

It will take quite some time to come to the point that a significant number of people – first of all – own a computer and then can afford broadband Internet. For example here in Panama a 256 Kbit/s (yes, it’s that slow, but still called broadband) connection costs about USD 25 monthly. For the same price you can have dinner for two at a nice restaurant. To put that even more into perspective: most people earn a monthly salary around USD 600. It really is not that easy to afford a computer with Internet access when you need the money to make ends meet.

The opinion, as expressed in the cited article, that it make take 2-3 years to make a service grow successfully, which means generate enough revenue, might be a bit too optimistic. The amount of disposable money won’t come up that fast in Latin America.

Yesterday night I attended a meeting of SDForum with a focus on Latin America. The meeting was held in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University.

People talked about the opportunities for selling software based services to Latin American consumers and about providing outsourcing services from Latina America to US corporate customers.

Most attendees agreed that the protection of intelectual property is usually weak in Latin America, as it is in most developing countries including China. Unlike people in wealthier countries nobody wants to pay more than a months salary for the right to use software when it’s available on the street for the cost of a CD-ROM media. So selling copies of software was seen as a difficult venture. Instead attendees thought about selling software as a service via the Internet or even via cell phones. Some believe that the cell phone might be the better platform than the computer as it’s cheaper to purchase and maintain. Others remarked that in Latin America most computer users are actually using them in Internet Cafes for the cost of about USD 0.50 per 30 minutes.

What seems to work well is the business of providing outsourcing services to US companies. There is no problem protecting intelectual property, because the outsourcing company will respect its client’s rights in order to stay in business. And most of Latin American countries have laws in place that protect IP. Theoretically a company can get sued and shut down. The same laws apply to consumers as well, but probably noone will try to enforce such rules against poor people.

My personal impression is that most attendees have very weak knowledge about what the situation in Latin America really is. They have some vage ideas about the level of education and the economic realities. Most think of beautiful landscapes. But they are interested and are looking for places closer to home (for North Americans) to purchase services. It seems that more and more people are realizing that the most prominent outsourcing destination India is not without difficulties. Latin America is mostly within US timezones and flights are reasonably cheap and travel time is only a couple of hours without jet lag.