Por Bruno GALO

O Brasil passa por um boom de start-ups como nunca antes visto por aqui. Apenas no ano passado, mais de duas mil empresas na área de tecnologia e internet foram abertas no País, mais de três vezes o número computado em 2009, segundo dados do Instituto Inovação, entidade de fomento ao empreendedorismo, de Belo Horizonte. Dinheiro e capital humano também não faltam. Ainda assim, falta uma start-up brasileira de alcance global. Essa nova e promissora geração de empreendedores pontocom do País também quer mudar essa história. E assim pavimentar o caminho para um IPO bilionário ou a venda para uma grande empresa. Em meio a esse ótimo momento do mercado pontocom brasileiro, pelo menos 30 start-ups nacionais, como Buscapé, Peixe Urbano, Dafiti, Viajenet, Ci&T, Best Cool & Fun e Netshoes miram mercados internacionais para crescer e se fortalecer. Confira a lista completa:

*Disponible solo para Brasil.

- Cobro
- Endomarketing
- SMS Político
- Mobile Marketing
- Quiz
- Encuesta
- Confirmación de Eventos.
- Alertas em general
- Publicidad
- Entre otros

*Disponible para los clientes Claro (Brasil)

*Disponible para los clientes Claro (Brasil)

We have been waiting most of the year to hear news from Facebook about an HTML5-based Web app store that would circumvent the native application ecosystems of the Android Market and the Apple App Store. Yet, according to Facebook’s CTO, there is not going to be a central repository of HTML5 Web apps coming to the platform any time soon.
In the meantime, a Brazilian company called Movile has launched a new version of its Web app store, Zeewe 2.0, which incorporates some key HTML5 features and could provide a roadmap for U.S. developers, like Facebook, in creation of a Web app store.

Offline Caching

One of the features of HTML5 is the ability to use offline caching to create Web apps that work when you do not have an Internet connection. This is essentially what Movile has done with Zeewe 2.0. The app store will function just fine, even if your smartphone is in airplane mode.
Offline caching means that Web app downloads up to 10-times faster than the original version of the store. We have seen various U.S. developers, like Amazon and Mozilla, start implementing offline caching in their apps. The browser does not need to go back to the server for data retrieval. Currently, four main Movile partners have games that will function with the data caching aspect as well: Block Dream, Blast Effect, Checklist and Card Flip.
The faster an app store is, the more likely that users will click through to buy and app. Once a user has an app, Movile hopes that they will then use their new payments API to push users towards in-app purchases.

Carrier Billing Partnership With Zong

Movile has teamed with Zong, a payments solution that was bought by eBay to bolster PayPal earlier this year. Zong specializes in carrier billing and will be available in the United States and Brazil to start but Canada, Mexico, most of western Europe and India are planned in the next few months. U.S. users have a distinct distaste for carrier billing but remember that Movile is a Brazilian company and worldwide attitudes towards carrier billing are not so harsh as they are stateside.
Movile has created a roadmap that a company like Facebook should take note of. HTML5-based applications tied through carrier billing and the mobile browser. It is about as easy a formula to follow for a consumer than almost anything else in the mobile realm.
Movile head of innovation Eduardo Lins Henrique told ReadWriteWeb that almost 60% of the apps available through Zeewe are from game developers. That would mesh with what we have seen from domestic developers – the gamers are on the forefront of the HTML5 push. Henrique also said that there is an adult content section to the Zeewe store, something that most U.S. HTML5 developers will probably shy away from. Yet, do not discount the ability of the massive adult content ecosystem to push the envelope of HTML5 development.
Does Movile have the right model? How long before something similar comes from a prominent developer in the United States? Let us know in the comments.

Fonte: www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zeewe_20_the_road_map_for_html5-based_web_app_stor.php

What do you think developers need the most? According to the Brazilian entrepreneur Bob Wollheim, the answer is simple: “business capabilities.” It’s from this belief that his latest initiative was born. Appies, as it is called, is an accelerator of a new kind; instead of boosting startups, it focuses on app developers. So what is it about and why are apps a growing trend in Brazil?

From Hackathon to Appies

It was during a mini-Hackathon in Sao Paulo that the idea for Appies sparked in Bob’s mind. He and the angel investor Pierre Schürmann had already been talking about launching a new venture together for a few months. Indeed, the pair had partnered on an incubator called Ideia.com in 2000, and the recent boom of accelerators in Brazil got them thinking. They wanted to be part of it, but how?
While observing developers at the Hackathon he was co-organizing a few months ago, Bob had a eureka moment. He realized there was no lack of good ideas nor of development resources. By pairing them with business knowledge, it was possible to make a huge difference, Bob thought. He decided his next venture would be dedicated to adding these skills to app developers’. Five minutes later, Pierre was already on board, Bob remembers with a smile.

What is Appies?

Appies’ selling line for developers? “Run the business while they’re busy developing great apps and APIs.” Indeed, not every one of them want to start their own business or knows how to, Appies’ introduction video points out. What Bob wants is to address this latent demand. Based on its experience and contact book, he’s confident that Appies can help developers improve their business skills and increase their income in exchange for a revenue share. Yet, it doesn’t call itself an accelerator, mainly because it works with individuals, rather than startups. However, developers may incorporate their ventures further down the line if necessary.
Appies will be initially based in Sao Paulo, where it will provide a co-working space for its developers. Different types of events will also take place in its offices, from small networking gatherings to training sessions. It will also host larger events such as Hackathons, Dev Days and an “Annual App/API Event.”

From a soft launch to global expansion?

Although Appies has officially launched already, its site informs that “it has only started operations in a soft mode. The full-time operations will only start on February 2nd 2012.” Bob acknowledges that Appies was conceived as a structure that won’t require much initial investment – both in terms of capital and of time.
Indeed, Bob is the CEO of the Brazilian digital media and event company SixPix. A busy job as you can imagine, albeit a bit less since a recent strategic partnership with the Brazilian media group Grupo RBS. For the time being, Bob plans to dedicate half of his time to SixPix and half to Appies – and the fact that both will be based in the same building will definitely help. As for Pierre, though he’s a quite hands-on investor, he won’t have any formal operational role at Appies.
Yet, it doesn’t mean that Appies has no ambitions – on the contrary. “As a digital platform, it has a global potential,” Bob thinks. He doesn’t rule out future conversations with investors, nor the possibility to launch operations in other locations. As for partnerships, Appies has already confirmed names such as Telefonica, the operator Vivo and the affiliate program Lomadee. Still, Bob makes it clear that Appies won’t focus on acquiring clients on behalf of the developers it partners with. It’s not a content producer, nor does it want to become one. However, Bob doesn’t seem worried about demand: in Brazil too, brands and corporations are increasingly awakening to what he likes to call “the Geek Economy.”

Why apps matter

What more and more players are starting to notice is that mobile represents a tremendous opportunity in Brazil. Indeed, the market goes well beyond the smartphone-owning elite, as millions of Brazilians own more affordable feature phones, but nonetheless Internet-connected (see our previous story.) According to recent figures released by the national telecom agency Anatel, there are currently 224 million cell phones in Brazil, while the country ‘only’ counts 190 million inhabitants.
With that data in hand, it becomes obvious how much Appies’ focus on apps makes sense. So does its multi-platform approach and its plans to partner with several different online app stores, as iOS is only one system among others in the local market. In fact, Bob even has a feeling that Brazil may “take shortcuts” again and adopt HTML5 faster than other territories, just as it adopted mobile phones without having fully developed landlines yet.
Eduardo Lins Henrique couldn’t agree more. He’s the Head of Innovations at Movile, the Brazilian company we recently highlighted as one of the ‘Ten Latin American Startups You Should Watch Out For.’ Movile is the force behind Zeewe, an HTML5 app store which “has more than 1.5 million users worldwide,” according to the company. Today, it launched Zeewe 2.0, a new version of the store which is heavily using cache features for the site to load faster. According to Dario Sciacca, CEO of the Italian development house DS Effects, which has many apps on Zeewe, “the user experience is much better.”
Although Appies and Zeewe are not in business together yet, both Eduardo and Bob agree on HTML5′s huge potential, which is only starting to show. According to Eduardo, it’s particularly true in emerging markets – he’s convinced countries like Brazil will soon be flooded with inexpensive Android-based feature phones, as well as low-cost tablets (albeit in a lesser measure.)

Beyond Brazil

Despite seeing market opportunities in Brazil, Zeewe’s vision, like Appies’, goes well beyond its home country. Indeed, the billing APIs it announced today alongside its new version will initially be available in the U.S. only, though Latin America and Europe will soon follow. If the U.S. is the first country where Zeewe will roll out carrier billing, using PayPal’s service Zong, it’s not a coincidence: 80% of Zeewe’s users are based in the U.S. and Europe, according to Eduardo.
In other words, Zeewe is a global venture as much as a Brazilian one – and Appies could very well follow its path in the near future. For now, Bob Wollheim already has an imminent international event in his schedule: the first San Francisco edition of the “online culture festival” he organizes, youPIX, which will take place on October 24th.
What about you, would you bet on the app market?

Fonte: thenextweb.com/la/2011/09/27/could-app-developers-have-their-accelerator-appies-says-yes/

Lorem ipsum dulado sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Curabitur metus elit, vulputate et fermentum a, ullamcorper ornare neque. Vivamus dignissim pulvinar odio vitae fringilla. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;

Maecenas vel orci quis mi scelerisque molestie. Aliquam erat volutpat. Donec egestas convallis rutrum. Morbi in elit nec sapien tristique posuere. Vestibulum luctus posuere feugiat.

Cases:

Lorem ipsum dulado sit amet.
Lorem ipsum dulado sit amet.
Lorem ipsum dulado sit amet.

That’s where Brazilian mobile services company Movile finds itself: with a thriving business of mobile users throughout Latin America, who are heavily engaged in purchasing SMS services and virtual goods, but with the knowledge that there’s far more to be done than sell those existing products. Movile has a corporate vision of leapfrogging over the App Store 1.0 experience so dominated by Apple among smart phone owners in the United States. How does the company aim to build the app store of the future? By combining cross-platform mobile HTML5 with ecommerce and now social APIs.

Movile’s future-facing project Zeewe announced today the availability of its new FriendZee API, which makes it easy for web app developers to add leaderboards and social features to their mobile web apps. It’s like OpenFeint (acquired this Spring by Japanese gaming company GREE for $100m), but for all kinds of apps beyond games and specifically for HTML5 mobile web apps instead of native apps.

The technology itself is interesting, but it’s made even more so because it’s coming out of Brazil. “We believe that the future of mobile apps is based on the open web standards of HTML5 and driving cross-platform mobile experiences that leverage the social graph,” says Flávio Stecca, CTO of Movile and Zeewe Lead. “We think [our platform] will boost discovery and usage of HTML5. We expect that in the future, most users will find the best mobile apps, not by going to a traditional app store but through social discovery – just like they do with web content today.”

Right now Zeewe has some good content on it. It’s got the open web’s most popular kind of content (which, unfortunately, is porn), it’s got lots of games and it’s got some other good mobile web apps. I added an unofficial app for This Week in Tech to my phone’s home screen via Zeewe and it looks like a nice easy way to listen to the show. The company says its international launch strategy lead to 1.5 million downloads in Zeewe’s first 4 months, 400,000 active users within the past 30 days, and 20,000 users returning each day. Those numbers are tied to any launch of a mobile web app that users bookmarked to their iPhone home screens through the Zeewe app directory – the Zeewe framework launches first when those bookmarks are clicked and then offers web app publishers features like analytics and push notifications.

If I had any Facebook friends using Zeewe, then they’d all know now that I added the apps I found. I rated several apps, played a Tetris rip-off and generally had a good time using the platform this morning. Zeewe now offers easy hooks for developers to make those experiences social and with leaderboards where appropriate. The company says it’s got an Android version and an in-app payment API well underway and both will be launched soon.
Movile believes that the future of apps will be based on the cross-platform mobile web, but also on tablets and web-enabled TVs. In order to take a leap at leading that market, the Brazilian company is focused on international markets outside its home territory of Latin America.

Global Mobile Innovation, Born in Brazil

Movile is a big company already. It has 10 offices around Latin America and employs nearly 300 people, 70 of whom are technologists. The company’s bread and butter is premium SMS services and payment for virtual goods. Brazilians are very into both. A deeply social culture, a fast-rising lower to middle class and a frenzy of economic activity after decades of military dictatorship and subsequent hyper-inflation have all added up to making Brazil one of the most dynamic economies on earth when it comes to social and mobile technology. Only Malaysians spend more time on Twitter per capita than Brazilians do, for example.

Movile parlayed its early success serving this market into a deal that sold 60% of its shares to international media conglomerate Naspers. Naspers is from South Africa and is a silent giant that many US tech watchers may be unfamiliar with. It’s one of the world’s few old media companies that have succeeded in shifting into the new online media economy – largely through a wave of acquisitions of startups around the developing world. Naspers handles its startups in a way I wish US companies would: they hardly change anything. They keep successful executive teams in place and provide support for early winners in the developing world to just get bigger.

Some of those startups take a similar strategy themselves. Naspers-owned Brazilian e-commerce company Buscape, which was acquired for nearly $400 million USD in the most-watched deal in Brazilian web tech, has followed its parent’s lead, for example. Buscape acquired 10 companies last year, including a meta-site indexing multiple daily deals offerings, and lets those startups continue operating semi-independently under its corporate umbrella as departments of Buscape.

All of these companies and companies inside of companies are allowed to maintain a high degree of independence in order to innovate. They are focusing outside their own markets, they are building for a world of even more mobile use than they see today and they are alligning themselves with the open and international web.

Is the web a US-centric phenomenon dominated by Apple and Facebook? Not in Brazil, it’s not. Facebook may be coming on fast and will likely soon overcome Google’s social network Orkut – but Apple devices will likely remain an exclusive status symbol for the very elite well into the future. Not just because the population in Brazil is poorer than in the United States – but because iPhones and iPads cost twice as much there as they do in the US thanks to heavy taxation.

In Brazil the technologists I spoke with were much more interested in low-cost, affordable, accessible and open web and mobile platforms. Add social and in-app payment APIs and mobile web apps look stronger and stronger. Will it all add up to make mobile web apps a viable competitor to native mobile apps some day? Only time will tell, but it should be a good contest.

Disclosure: Movile and Buscape were among the companies that paid my travel expenses to visit Brazil and report on the tech scene there.

Can a Mobile Web App Store Compete?

Right now the Zeewe app store is not as impressive as iTunes, that’s for sure. The apps selection is of lower quality and the apps themselves are too. But that might not be true forever. The quality of native and mobile web app experiences are fast converging, with innovators like Joe Hewittand others building technology that cuts down the performance gap between the two. Executives at Movile say they’ve seen demos at Google of prelaunched Android web performance that give them confidence HTML5 will reach parity in roughly the next generation of mobile devices.

They also say they are working hard to educate developers about the importance of making proper use of HTML5 itself, the spec’s capacity for local storage, for example, so that mobile web apps will perform better for users. I’ve spoken to other companies that are seeking to educate mobile developers about how to properly limit the number of network calls that an app has to make. Those things might seem like a hassle to some developers, but all of these factors together are what mobile web app industry leaders hope will come together to make mobile web apps such a compelling experience for users that the platforms can compete with native app stores in the future.

One thing is for sure: independent app stores are expected by industry analysts to explode. Peggy Anne Salz summarized some leading research on the topic last Summer on MSearchGroove:

According to Sizing Up The Global Apps Market, the recent milestone report from Chetan Sharma Consulting (commissioned by independent app store GetJar), app downloads are expected to rise from over 7 billion in 2009 (Asia accounted for a whopping 37 percent of the total) to almost 50 billion by 2012. Revenue is forecast to increase from $4.1 billion in 2009 to $17.5 billion by 2012. Predictably, a variety of models — ranging from paid apps and apps bundled with subscription offers, to ad-funded schemes and loyalty programs that raise brand awareness – will drive distribution and monetization.
If those predictions prove correct, it’s hard to imagine HTML5 mobile web app stores not being a part of that story.

Fuente: www.readwriteweb.com/archives/brazilan_mobile_10_leader_launches_html5_mobile_we.php