PC sales explosion in Brazil

Recently we are experimenting an explosion in sales of branded PCs (like Dell, HP, Toshiba, Positivo, etc) in Brazil, for the first time, the expected PC sales during 2007 is threatening sell as much as TV sets. Industry estimates 11,7 million TVs will be sold, and nearly 11 million PCs. In 2006 some 8,6 million PCs were sold.

“Between 2005 and 2006, 8 million people went from poor to low-middle class. That’s an astonishing amount,” Positivo Chief Executive Helio Rotenberg said in an interview to Reuters. “And the middle class has more money and more credit. This is an explosive formula.” Positivo is the leading Brazilian computer manufacturer and estimates overall PC sales will grow 35.5 percent a year through 2010.

The government program called “Computador para todos” (Computers for all), that offers tax exemptions for low cost computers running GNU/Linux, to be paid in up to 36 months, will have an upgrade on its configurations delivering PCs with LCD monitors, the amount of money is about 600 million BRL (almost 300 million USD). Last year, approximately ~150k computers where sold and now they expect to double it, including cheaper laptops as well.

Flickr and YouTube in Portuguese finally

This month some of the most iconic web 2.0 sites had their pages translated to Portuguese, You Tube and Flickr. This is a great move for then and very important for the Brazilian market. What I am experimenting these days is the Facebook and I am curious to know how many Brazilians are registered and which international nation is the most significant (after the UK and Canada, etc).

Anyway let’s hope that more social web applications translate their sites to Portuguese, this is really good for the country and for the sites itself

Mozilla in Brazil

This week and in the next, we are having a visit from some Mozilla guys down here in Brazil, Asa Dotzler and J T Batson, They have a very tight schedule and we are trying to get a closer involvement with them. My entire team uses Firefox to develop, it’s easier and faster to develop web applications than any other browser, I’ve being using Firefox since version 0.7 and am anxious about the third version, Gran Paradiso.

At Globo, the numbers of Firefox audience is growing consistently, of course IE7, already surpassed Firefox, but it’s not fair to compare the ways IE7 use to spread itself. At our products, Firefox 2.0.0.4 and 2.0.0.3 are the most popular versions of FF (75%) then it comes 1.5.0.11(6%), IE still is the dominant browser with almost 92%.

I think Firefox has a lot of opportunity in Brazil, despite recent boom of PC sales, the majority of Brazilian PCs are very limited in resources and installing an IE can be very painful, in adding to that certainly most of the Windows instalations are pirate. Firefox is a great option for this users because is free, small and more secure than IE.

Eric Schimidt at World Economic Forum showing off his iPhone

I got this video at Digg, and besides the interview with Eric, which is great to watch, the iPhone in his pocket is what calls my attention

Go forward to around 24:30, its very brief so, pay attention!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mmISIWNcVY[/youtube]

You Tube Mobile goes live using H.263 streaming

I was reading the Multimedia Blog at S60.com and found this interesting post from Jukka. He was the first to report the oficial mobile version of YouTube, Nokia and YouTube announced the partnership earlier this year at 3GSM in Barcelona to put the videos on Nokia’s Nseries phones.

You can check it out by yourself at http://m.youtube.com, the specifications according to Jukka are:

• 3GP/RTSP streaming video (no downloads), when you click in any video it opens the RealPlayer.
• video codec H.263, audio codec AMR-NB
• video bitrate ~34kbps
• Streaming Server: Darwin Streaming Server v5.5.3 (Open Source) running on Linux

I’ve tested for a while on my E61 (using Wifi and EDGE) and worked pretty well, the audio and video quality is far from good, but you can definitely watch something and have a preview of the video on the go. Just one clue, don’t even bother to watch sports videos, they look terrible.

It’s interesting to see that the YouTube guys are using H.263, besides the fact that the new Symbian/Windows Mobile and other OS flavor phones already support MPEG-4, certainly the focus is on the mass. I hope they offer other options in the near future including the possibility to download the videos instead of streaming it.

Here are some screenshots: