All posts tagged digital innovation

  • March 1, 2011

    The Multifaceted Ricardo Guerrero

    TropicalGringo and Ricardo GuerreroToday, I had the pleasure of meeting Ricardo Guerrero during his brief visit to Bogota, Colombia.  We’ll be seeing more of each other during South by Southwest (SxSW) next week, but it was great meeting in person.  We had an enjoyable breakfast and, afterwards, as I smoked my stogie and annoyed him with my cigar smoke, he talked about how he got into Social Media.  After creating a radio show in Texas and working at that for a while, among other things, he started working for Dell Computer.  Then, in 2007 after a visit to SxSW, he got introduced to Twiiter and found a way to use it to sell refurbished PCs for Dell Outlet. Now that’s digital innovation.

    Ricardo has a new company called Stwittergy which is developing a tool to help businesses better use Twitter to achieve business objectives.  He also has his own agency aptly named Social Media Dynamo.  Nevertheless, he’s not completely disconnected from his Latin American roots and is working with colleague and friend Fernando LaBastida in setting up the first Americas IT Forum the day before SxSW (next week) in Austin.

    I was able to record a small portion of our chat and here it is:

    No Comments / Case Studies, English /

  • January 11, 2011

    Latinos as Social Media Experts

    The other day, I was reading an interesting article in the Huffington Post about how well Latinos (Spanish-speakers residing in Latin America) and Hispanics (residents of the US) use social media. The article talks about a new book on this topic by Joe Kutchera entitled, Latino Link: Building Brands Online with Hispanic Communities and Content.

    According to Kutchera, who has interviewed marketing executives from Ford, Best Buy and other companies, the Latino/Hispanic culture tends to be much more social and less individualistic than other cultures such as that in the states.  The article goes on to cite someone who mentions that Hispanics and Latinos are the fastest growing group on the Internet and will command $1.3 trillion in purchasing power by 2014.

    How can Latin Americans take advantage of the understanding of social media and develop new digital innovations? Just as the chinese market has generated numerous home-grown startups that understand the nuances of that local market, I believe the same opportunity certainly exists in Latin America (albeit, taking different size markets into account).

    Recently, Simon Olson, a partner at FIR Capital Partners in Brazil, during a recent talk at Standford University, spoke precisely about the available opportunities within that market.  Please click on his name (above) and subscribe to his blog as he’s certainly someone to follow.

    In the video below, Simon also mentions how Brazilians, great social media adopters, are working to relay that into innovative startups that leverage social media.In Brazil, the growth in number and quality of startups is incredible.  This should make other countries in Latin America sit up and take notice as Chile, Argentina and Mexico have.

    Below is the video from Simon’s talk. It’s excellent and eye-opening for investors unaware of the opportunities in Brazil.

    3 Comments / English, General /

  • January 9, 2011

    Skype’s Impact

    skype growthAccording to research from TeleGeography, Skype added twice as many long distance minutes than all of the other long distance providers combined! Although long distance is now only a small part of telecommunications company revenues, Skype keeps on innovating by coming out with video chat for mobile and TV.  GigaOm analysts feel that video calls and video chat will make up 30 billion calls by 2015.

    This is just one additional instance of established companies feeling competitive pressure from a relatively new comer.  The same has happened in music, video and other industries.  Competitive dynamics of business continues to be heavily impact by new technology tools making it imperative that all businesses “rethink” everything and focus on digital innovation.

    1 Comment / English, General /

  • January 9, 2011

    Group Buying

    OffermaticPreviously, I’ve written about companies such as Brazil’s Compra3 (in VentureBeat and the New York Times), which group people together to purchase goods and services with some additional value (such as deep discounts).  There’s much potential in this formula.

    Now, there’s a new player called Ofermatic that utilizes a point system (accepting many varieties of credit cards) and gaming mechanics to increase the level of engagement for consumers.  According to the company, they provide between 10 and 100 times better repeat conversion rates than other sites.  During my last Digital Innovation Workshop, I spoke about this company and about the fact that, if companies were more focused on digital innovation, perhaps an established player could have developed this idea.

    No Comments / English, General /
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