Daily Headlines: April 30, 2012

* Dominican Republic: Will the May 20th presidential election be decided by the over 220,000 registered Dominican voters living in the U.S.?

* Cuba: "Una Noche" actors Javier Nuñez Florian and Anailin de la Rua de la Torre reappeared publicly on Friday and told the press in Miami that they would seek political asylum in the U.S.

* Venezuela: The state-run oil companies of Venezuela and China are linking in order to build an oil refinery in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

* Argentina: According to Google, Argentina’s main antitrust agency has opened an investigation into “certain business practices” by the tech giant.

Video Source – YouTube via DaniloMedinaPLD (Official campaign ad for presidential candidate and poll frontrunner Danilo Medina.)

Online Sources- Huffington Post, The Latin Americanist, Bloomberg, BBC News, MSNBC

World Watch: Losing by boozing

* Britain: According to a study published in the medical journal Lancet alcohol is a more dangerous drug than heroin or crack.

* Indonesia: Mount Merapi continues to rumble and spew hot ash days after several islands were ravaged by a tsunami caused by an earthquake.

* U.S.: Google filed a lawsuit last week against the U.S. government alleging that they were inappropriately excluded from a messaging contract in favor of Microsoft.

* Ivory Coast: The country’s presidential election designed to “end years of crisis” may go to a second round.

Image – New York Daily News (via Getty Images)
Online Sources- Xinhua, BBC News, MSNBC, PC Magazine

The Latin American Tech Bust

For all of the hubbub about exploding growth in Latin America this year, the region remains a challenging place for knowledge companies to do business.

The uncertain legal climate faced by internet companies is highlighted in cases that Yahoo! and Google are battling in Argentina. An Argentina entertainer, Virginia Da Cunha, sued Google because searches of her name turned up links to third-party pornography sites. Da Cunha had sued Google claiming that they were responsible for the third-party content that came up in Google's search results.

Naturally, Google feels they aren't - after all, Google simply indexes information on the web and displays it based on their search algorithms without any claim to police or monitor it preemptively. To do so would be a form of censorship. And because the internet is, well, the internet, it's also pretty impossible. Google and Yahoo! recently won an appeal overturning an original ruling that held them liable for controlling such content.

Yahoo!, also sued in the case, had a novel solution when faced with a similar lawsuit from Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Yesica Toscanini: since they say it's impossible to filter out what Toscanini doesn't want her name associated with, they simply blocked virtually all results to searches and deliver a link to the judicial order.

In a sign of the challenges facing tech firms in the region, the NY Times reports that "Google currently faces at least 600 lawsuits in Brazil."

As the Times rightly points out, this type of legal environment makes it very difficult for firms to innovate. The big guys have the cash to fight off every legal challenge - petty and legit - but small start-up firms (like Google, Yahoo! and Twitter were once) struggle to take risks and innovate in such an environment.

New firms are still sprouting up in the region, but as Sarah Lacey at TechCrunch chronicled here and here, the success stories tend to come from a very creative adaptation to the environment rather as a result of it (this despite the fact that in the 1990s Argentina ranked fifth in the world in registered web domains).

Another TechCrunch contributor, business professor Vivek Wadwa, recently pointed out that emerging markets can take advantage of a legal loophole to re-purpose technology that's patented in the US and other Western countries but not emerging ones. That and moving towards "fair use" laws that make every news aggregator (from Huffington Post to Drudge to THIS SITE) possible could do wonders to making Latin America as open as it should be to fostering web-based businesses.

Image Source: eldelosmonos.blogspot.com

Online Sources: New York Times, Sports Illustrated, TechCrunch

Happy Birthday Frida!

Google celebrated the 103rd birthday of Frida Kahlo on Tuesday by adding some changes to a self-portrait of Frida and using it for the day's search engine logo. Google artists enhanced a 1940 self-portrait by taking out the horns on her head and giving her a bone necklace similar to the one she wears in another self-portrait (minus the blood dripping down her neck). Frida Kahlo has painted many portraits of personal suffering.

The tradition of creating Google "doodles" on its search engine page dates back to 1999. Since then, special occasions, holidays, important events, and notable people have been celebrated on its page through art.

Image Source: Google

Online Source: Los Angeles Times, Google

World Watch: Information Society

* China: Google may soon shutdown its Chinese site due to government censorship and strict government controls of the Internet.

* Nigeria: Violence continued today in the Niger delta area of Nigeria with the detonation of a pair of car bombs.

* Germany: Church officials suspended a German priest in the middle of a child sex abuse scandal that has affected Pope Benedict XVI.

* Thailand: Protestors backing ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra have threatened with “pouring 1,000 liters of their own blood” in front of the Thai parliament.

Image – MSNBC
Online Sources- InformationWeek, Al Jazeera English, New York Times, ABC Online

Brazilians boost Google

Brazil’s technology sector has been gradually catching the world’s attention in recent years. As we mentioned in June, Indian tech firms have increasingly outsourced their work to Brazil partly due to adopting a "western" business culture.

Brazil’s tech growth has also expanded to an increase in computer and internet users. One estimate claims that one in five Brazilians has internet access though that number is expected to grow as “an expanding economy lifting millions into a middle class for whom computers are no longer beyond reach.” According to Ibope Nielsen Online, over 36 million Brazilians were active internet users in July alone.

Thus, it should be no surprise then that Brazil is the top country where sites on the Google network are visited. Much like India, credit for that can be given to the local popularity for Orkut-Google’s social network- despite it being a failure everywhere else. Yet it’s more than just Orkut wrote Miguel Helft of the New York Times’ Bits blog:

Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis for comScore, said that Google’s dominance in those countries has historical reasons. While on opposite sides of the world, when it comes to the Internet, India and Brazil developed in parallel, he said.

“Part of the explanation was that Google emerged onto the scene at the time these markets were developing,” Mr. Lispman said. “As Google became the default search engine, the brand extended to these other services” …

India and Brazil are ranked 7th and 9th in terms Internet usage globally. They are also two of the fastest-growing markets.

Image- New York Times (“Isis Cordeiro, pointing, and Jennifer Patrochinio, right, attending a class on computers in Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilian government has plans to help millions of low-income people buy their first computers.”)
Online Sources- Bits, pr-inside.com, TMCnet, The Latin Americanist

Heath Ledger's Death Doesn't Tranlate

If you're looking to translate news about the tragic death of actor Heath Ledger from English to Spanish don't use Google's Translator. If you type in Heath Ledger and ask for an English to Spanish translation, the name is translated as Tom Cruise. I couldn't believe it but I tried it out myself and it's true! It could be a bug. It could be that a programmer is having some fun (or wishful thinking). I guess in Spanish all those gringo actors are all the same.

Sources : CNET News, VivirLatino

Daily Headlines: April 30, 2007

* A belated rest-in-peace to author David Halberstam (image) who died last Monday. Here is a piece he wrote for ESPN.com where he ruminated about American football while vacationing in Argentina.

* Brazilian slum residents view with mixed emotions the use of vigilante groups to provide security.

* Colombia's chief prosecutor plans to emphasize the links between paramilitary groups and U.S companies during his visit to Washington, DC this week.

* Chile’s government has requested Google Earth to correct the wrongful mapping of a southern Chilean town in Argentina.

* Wal-Mart agreed to settle a dispute with Puerto Rican environmental authorities due to problems with a store in Caguas.

Links- International Herald Tribune, USA TODAY, Houston Chronicle, The Latin Americanist

Image- SUNY- University at Albany