TropicalGringo.com » digital innovation

Smart Money Diving into Colombian Internet Companies

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:12:22 +0000

When my friend, Jorge Pulido, from PriceWaterHouse invited me to a launch party, I never expected it to be such an impressive launch of an Internet company for the Colombian market. The company is called BrandsBag and it’s entering full speed ahead into the Colombian market with a flash sales site targeting women who love fashion.

What’s most interesting about this new endeavor is that it is a mix of impressive entrepreneurs from Brazil, Argentina and Colombia that have decided to start their Latin American strategy from Colombia. As I mentioned previously in a NYTimes article, the Brazilian Internet market is on fire and more and more US VC’s are investing in that country. Nevertheless, witnessing the impressive launch tonight of BrandsBag confirms our confidence in Colombia as a country from which to launch Latin American-wide Internet initiatives and funding these initiatives through our new Micro VC fund, Tayrona Ventures.

I had the chance to meet the leaders of BrandsBag such as Diego Rodriguez and Delio Epaminondas (with me in the photo on the left). These are sharp business people who are extremely serious about transforming the shopping experience in the region and see Colombia as an excellent lauchpad to achieve this objective throughout Latin America. The country boasts a growing middle class, internet penetration and ecommerce increasing at above 40% and a market with overpriced fashion items (sometimes more than 100% markup above prices in other countries).

As Marc Andreessen mentioned in a previous WSJ article, software is indeed eating up industry after industry as digital innovation takes hold. In countries such as Colombia, the potential is even greater since competition in markets such as retail is much less ferocious allowing incumbents to charge an arm and a leg. These types of companies are ripe for disruption and make Colombia an ideal market to provide new (digital) offerings that can be incredibly profitable and still undercut the established players. BrandsBag is betting big on Colombia and in the process has a chance to showcase the potential of this country as a profitable gateway/launchpad to the rest of Latin America.

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Social Media Week Bogota Presentation

admin — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:14:38 +0000

The other day, I had the distinct pleasure of addressing a capacity crowd at Social Media Week Bogota. I had been working hard on, among other things, launching an seed fund called Tayrona Ventures as well as helping launch a new flash sales startup called SuperTrendi and didn’t expect to have such a good time presenting on Friday.

I really enjoyed the audience and found them incredibly receptive to my message about how social media (among other digital tools) is changing the way companies do business and the general business environment. This environment is great for startups and for accelerators such as the Founder Institute of which I am Director in Colombia. I call this whole phenomenon Digital Innovation and explained it at length during my presentation.

Today, I was gratified to read Diana Luque’s impressions of my speech and the message I was trying to get out there. I also put my presentation slides on Slideshare and was amazed to see how popular the slide deck became. It was great to see this because, as I wrote in a post on the day of the presentation, I had been working hard on that deck the night before and for the first time used my new corporate image and brand of TG Coach although the website is still under construction. Among the points I made during the presentation, was the fact that the advertising agency industry is coming under attack as mentioned in an article yesterday in Adweek. Finally, I was quite flabbergasted to get two separate emails from Slideshare informing me that my presentation was one of their hottest pieces of content on Twitter and Linkedin and am showing a shot of the homepage at that moment here.

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Presentación en Social Media Week Bogota

admin — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:13:02 +0000

Tengo muchos amigos que han estado yendo a Social Media Week acá en Bogotá y me da una lastima que no he podido asistir. Como escribí anteriormente, tuve excelente viaje a Medellin y otras coas que no me han permitido sacar tiempo para asistir. Sin embargo, hoy voy a presentar a las 4pm sobre la transformación de los negocios, en parte, gracias al auge de los medios sociales, y atraves de lo que yo llamo innovación digital.

Mi impresión (de los tweets) es que Social Media Week al fin consigió una organización que ha podido sacarle provecho a esta iniciativa acá en Colombia: Zemoga. Felicitaciones a ambas partes ya que conozco al creador de Social Media Week, Toby, y estoy seguro que debe estar muy feliz en este momento.

Fuera de todo, hoy tambien voy a regalar un cupo para el taller de Innovación Digital que se dictará el 4 de octubre. Todavia no he pensado como voy a decidir quien es el ganador o la ganadora, pero algo se me ocurirá. Van a estar muchos amigos ahí en la audiencia (lo cual es bueno porque luego hay cervezas!) y por primera vez va venir mi esposa a escuchar una de mis presentaciones. Ella es instructora de yoga y le ayude a crear su blog llamada YogaMiel y su pagina en Facebook hace un año entonces ha tenido contacto con los medios sociales gracias a su espposo nerdo.

Hablando de la esposa. Ella acaba de llegar y vamos aprovechar para tomarnos un cafe. Abajo dejo los slides que voy a presentar hoy en la tarde. Estoy utilizando una nueva imagen para mi empresa llamada TG Coach. Ya puedo escuchar los criticismos sobre el hecho que la pagina de TG Coach todavia está bajo contrucción pero yo soy de la filosofia de los startups (asi me considero) de lanzar temprano y mejorar continuamente. Si entran a la pagina van a tener una idea leve de la direccion y me encantaría escuchar sugerencias sobre esto si pueden incluir esto en los comentarios abajo de este articulo (post). Hagamos crowdsourcing de la pagina de TG Coach.

Finalmente, acá están los slides que los acabo de subir a slideshare:

Social media week bogota – Alan Colmenares

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Lots of speeches lately

admin — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:36:41 +0000

It looks like I’ve been doing a lot of talking lately about Digital Innovation and Internet startups and the startup ecosystem. Last night, I had the opportunity to talk at an event called eCommerce Day Bogota along with impressive entrepreneur, Oscar Giraldo, founder of Arcaris. It was great to hear the interest from everyone in entrepreneurship and what we’ve been accomplishing with the Founder Institute in Colombia.

Additionally, last week, I had the opportunity to address a group of bankers at an event sponsored by the Bankers’ Association. I was able to give them a perspective on where the startup action is in terms of the financial services vertical and was happy with the feedback and the interest from the industry in these topics. I was accompanied by my Founder Institute Colombia team member, Juan Manuel Lopez as well by a co-founder of one of the Founder Institute graduating companies that is firing on all cylinders, financial product comparator site: Comparamejor.

Last but not least, I had tremendous pleasure of staying in some swanky accommodations in Cartagena and took advantage of this by smoking 4 of my favorite cigars during that two day period. I’m sure hardly anyone kicks back like that, but to each his own.

eCommerce Day Bogota – Alan Colmenares

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The Multifaceted Ricardo Guerrero

admin — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:03:03 +0000

Today, 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:

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Latinos as Social Media Experts

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:17:23 +0000

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.

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Skype’s Impact

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 11:43:30 +0000

According 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.

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Group Buying

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 11:12:52 +0000

Previously, 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.

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The Digital and the Physical

admin — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:08:26 +0000

I was just reading the reports from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas about the new tablets that are coming out as well as BusinessWeek’s article on the future of tablets. In my opinion, the way to look at this is not the future of “tablets”, but the future of making the division between the virtual and physical worlds more transparent.
This could be a good thing or a bad thing, or both, but it’s definitely something that’s happening. In the business world, organizations that continually view the digital world as a quaint space where they inhabit by outsourcing specific activities (online marketing, etc.), increase their risk of being disrupted. The way to view the current state, IMHO, is to completely rethink how to deliver value to your customers taking into account the new posibilities enabled by the digital: Digital Innovation.

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Thinking about 2011

admin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:17:39 +0000

I’m not going to write a full-fledged predictions post, but have been thinking about what’s on the horizon in terms of big changes. First off, who knows what’s coming on the economic front, but when you have guys like GE CEO Jeff Immelt saying that we’re in a reset period, you know big things are happening on the digital innovation front.

In technology, it’s interesting to see the tablet movement as the virtual and physical worlds continue to meet (accessing digital information is becoming more transparent). Forrester just revised their tablet forecast and says that tablets should overtake laptops by 2015.

Finally, the whole cloud computing thing continues to accelerate. The disruptive power of this technology which levels the playing field for smaller companies that want to “act” biggger and bigger companies that want to “act” more agile, continues to play out. As BusinessWeek published a couple of days ago, the M&A activity in cloud computing will really heat up in the coming year as HP and others look to buy their way into innovation.

Finally, I’m pretty psyched about the kick-off of the Foundation Institute initiative here in Colombia and expect a good turn out of people attending the launch event. Last night, I finished my next Kienyke article about this launch and hope to get interesting feedback from it.

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