About two years I spoke with a friend of mine who was working with one of the big development/marketing companies in the US. He did some work in Curacao and saw a lot of potential; not only here, but also in the Latin American market. He pitched his idea of setting up an office in Curacao to explore and service the Latin American market to his boss but she shot his idea down. The reasoning was that they didn’t see a lot of value in that market. They did not want to go beyond the Caribbean Sea which they could service from Miami.
About two weeks ago the second Search Engine Strategies (SES) Latino happened and it looks like my friend was right on the money. The Latin American market is growing and has even been a #1 priority of Google for the last year. This specialized SES was the result of this growth and potential.
Apparently Brazil, Argentina and Mexico are the fastest growing markets in Latin America. More and more people are going online, companies are starting to do e-commerce and the talent pool is growing. Sure, they are lagging behind the US market, but apparently they’re catching up fast.
One of the most important factors which hampers growth of the Latin American online market is the fact that the governments are slow to catch up. Apparently there are very few programs to stimulate internet use and monetization. At the conference Gonzalo Alonso (Google’s GM for Spanish-Speaking Latin America) said that the industry (incl. Google) needs to stand up and advance internet growth in Latin America because the governments aren’t doing it.
Some of the points dealt with during the conference were: the actual opportunities that exist, the issues you have when translating to Spanish and Portuguese, whether or not you should translate or write new content and the difficulties that arise from accents (the word papa and papå are two entirely different words in Portuguese).
The conference’s keynote with Gonzalo Alonso can be found at Search Engine Roundtable and Liana Evans wrote a Wrap Up over at Search Engine Guide.
[...] we talked about the opportunities in Latin America (or better: the Latino market) for internet companies. Curacao is ideally positioned to do business [...]