Brave Tech World

January 18, 2007

THU 18 JAN 2007

Would you pay $1,308 for an iPod Nano? By Marcelo

 

    Here is an interesting article from CNET on the price of iPod Nano in 26 countries. Brazil tops the list with $327.71, while the same iPod can be bought in the US for $149.

 

    Now, let me say that this doesn't reflect reality. The cost of living in São Paulo (Brazil's biggest city) is about 4 times less than an average US city. Which means that paying $327 in Brazil is the equivalent of somebody paying $1,308 in the US. Would you pay that price? Brazilians do.

 

    Here is another one for you: XBox 360 in Brazil costs R$ 2,999 which means US$ 1,404 in the US according to today's exchange rate. Now, apply the 4x cost of living. Would you pay $5,616 for an XBox 360? Brazilians do.

 

    That is insane.

 

    Here are some of the factors contributing to that:

 

• Foremost, there is an 70% importation tax on eletronics (and other) goods. So, if it costs Microsoft $400 to produce an XBox, by the time it gets to a distributor in Brazil the cost is already $680.
  
• Brazil has a good size market (e.g., 20+ MM Internet users), but not big enough to justify an investment in manufacturing the products in the country or creating versions only to Brazil. So Apple and Microsoft mostly ignore it and let Importers do their work. Of course, Importers need to have profit as well, so they do as they can.
  
• The government still believes that protecting our frontiers from imported products is the best way to help develop a healthy national industry. I though we had already proved that this is a mistake in the 80s and 90s.

 

    Now Brazil has a strong-left president, that doesn't even have a high school degree, and cannot think for himself. He loves to visit countries where their presidents (or dictators) are as ignorant and crazy as he is. How is he suppose to understand the nuances of international trade and industry development and create a policy to advance the country?

 

    Well, China and India will take (are taking!) Brazil's place on the INTL landscape and that will be very costly to the country.

 

 

   

THU 18 JAN 2007

Have you met Janis Machala? By Marcelo

    Janis Machala is the founder and partner of Paladin Partners. We just came back from a meeting with her to understand the possibility of working together.

 

    If you have a startup in Seattle you probably should meet her. She is by far the most connected person on the Puget Sound area. From investors to consultants, from engineers to executives, she has an impressive rolodex.

 

    The meeting was well above my expectations. Paul (Sampa's Chairman) and I came out with a dozen work items (mostly contact people).

 

    We have three things on our high-level to-do list: Hire a VP of Marketing, hire a User Experience guru to help us with the service usability/learning-curve, and hire another developer to help us get features done quicker.

 

    All of those boil down to one thing: money. Believe it or not, but we have strong candidates for all those positions. The only reason impeding them from joing is a salary. Most people cannot afford to live without a salary and we understand that.

 

    So, we are on the quest that most startups face on their existance which is to raise money. We have about a dozen or so investors on the loop. We know for sure Sampa is not for some of them at this moment. And we know a few others that are very intrigued by what we are doing.

 

    How will that pan out? If I knew I would be playing the lottery.

THU 18 JAN 2007

Which pages generate most Google Adsense clicks? By Marcelo

 

    Google Adsense is one of the best innovations on the Internet. If you don't know what it is just skip this post because I won't have time to explain.

 

    In the last 4 months, we have doubled our Adsense revenue month-over-month. That is a 100% MoM growth. But...

 

    Why?

 

    It is great to make money, but if you don't know how you are making money that stream might end and you won't see it coming.

 

    There are two keys for Sampa to be having that kind of growth on our Adsense revenue. First, the sites that are created by Sampa are getting old, and old is good because it gets crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines. A good chunk of traffic to Sampa sites is coming from Google, MSN and Yahoo. The second reason is that we finally have some heavy users of Sampa sites. These are people that add content almost on a daily basis and have dozens to hundreds of readers, thus generating a lot of traffic.

 

    But which sites are generating the revenue? More specifically, which pages generates the most Adsense clicks? Well, Google doesn't tell you that, so you are left on your own to figure it out.

 

    After looking for a solution, we decided to implement an in-house Google Adsense Click-Tracking solution. It wasn't easy. Most of the scripts out there were bad and poorly written. Had too many false positives or it would miss some clicks.

 

    We wrote our own client+server solution and it is amazing. It is fantastic to know which pages and sites are generating most revenue. We've been tracking just about 10 days now and we are overwhelmed by that information. We need at least 30 days of data to take some conclusions, but the options are very promising.