At 24, Marco Vanossi is a confident young man who knows how to sell himself. More importantly, he knows how to sell his ideas, specifically, a picture recognition application called Clickpic which, while it has yet to be launched, has earned him a guest spot on one of Brazil’s biggest television chat shows, o Progama do Jô, or Jô’s Show.
He drew gasps from his wise-cracking host Jô Soares and the studio audience when he snapped a picture of a newspaper photo of a soccer player scoring a goal and instantly called up a YouYube video of the same goal on his tablet. But Clickpic, is set to attract more than an initial R$500,000 (US $284,000) angel investment.
Fiercely intelligent, self-starting, and as at home in America as he is in Brazil, Vanossi is typical of a new generation of Brazilian tech innovators that is making Silicon Valley sit up and take notice. Diego Remus, who launched the Brazilian blog startupi in 2008, says the buzz is building. “Everyone is asking about what the Brazilians are doing… could I get to do it with them? It’s very innovative.” The region’s tech sector even has a catchy, if ungainly, moniker: “Brasilicon Valley.”
The new class “C”
In the last decade, about 30 million Brazilian left poverty for a new lower middle class known as Class “C.” Armed with their families’ first computers, they are pouring onto the Internet. As a result, ecommerce is booming in Brazil: approximately 32 million Brazilians made an expected 54 million purchases, spending R$2.6 billion, in 2011, according Brazilian e-commerce research company e-bit. This was up from 40 million purchases in 2010.
Brazil is also one of the world’s biggest global markets for social networks: Facebook has tripled the number of users in the last year to 36.1 million, while Twitter claims 12.5 million users, up 40 percent over last year, according to Comscore.
Yet critics say that too many Brazilian startups are commerce sites that merely adapt existing technology to the domestic market. But in an emerging market that combines fast-changing ecommerce with unwieldy bureaucracy and high interest rates, that in itself involves creativity and innovation. “To open a company and keep employees in Brazil is something very different to other countries,” argues Remus.
So tech entrepreneurs will do whatever it takes. Hence Vanossi’s appearance on Jô Soares. Vanossi knows the money is out there. Brazilian review and search site Kekanto and the daily deal company Peixe Urbano both received money from global firms. And as of October 2011, Brazil internet investment house Monashees has $70 million invested in the domestic sector, according to The New York Times.
“The Look”
Monashees has money in a unique Brazilian startup that uses innovative technology to sell clothes – the bespoke fashion site olook, or “The Look.” Though olook’s co-founder André Beisert, 32, declines to say how much.
Beisert worked at the Brazilian site WebMotors, did an MBA at Harvard, returned to Brazil to work for the consultancy McKinsey, then left to start olook in July 2011. The site launched in November 2011 and already has 400,000 users signed up. “We have women from all classes, principally people from 20-30,” Beisert says.
The site uses a pictorial questionnaire to build up a profile of a client who chooses her color and style preferences from pictures of fashion items and celebrities. The proprietary software consolidates the information to build a style profile, says Beisert.
The data – effectively, a fashion algorithm – is then combined with input from olook’s fashion director and partner Helen Linhares to create a personalized shopping list for each client, who is then sent recommendations for bags, jewelry and shoes.
“We are going from hard data, what this means about taste, to the decision to buy,” says Beisert. The company has sold 1,000 items so far and it has Remus’ endorsement: “I see this as one of the most innovative businesses I’ve seen in Brazil.”
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Brazil Innovators
Marcos Vanossi grew up in a small town in the interior of São Paulo and began selling carnival decorations as a child in his father’s bakery. He developed his own search engine at 14 and tried to make it work with images. While studying computer science at Unicamp, one of Brazil’s best technical universities, he developed his own picture recognition application.
He was introduced to Silicon Valley by Bedy Yang, a California-based Brazilian who runs a networking group for Brazilian tech entrepreneurs called Brazil Innovators. Yang took group of young Brazilian internet entrepreneurs, Vanossi included, to Silicon Valley hotspots like Facebook and Google. “That’s one of the most important things in Silicon Valley, all the networking events,” Vanossi says. “People with a similar mindset are difficult to find in São Paulo.” Now he moves between Silicon Valley and São Paulo.
His application, fine-tuned in an academic paper for the University of Vienna, constructs histograms of the shapes of images, using thousands of points to create a unique graph. But in order for his application to make money, he needs content: pictures for it to compare and recognize, so if a user sees a still image of a soccer player, it can relate that player’s image shape to pictures or video in a database.
“How can we solve that problem? A TV channel, they have all those TV shows,” says Vanossi. “A magazine, they have a lot of content.” Consequently he is negotiating with big Brazilian media companies and, he says, about to sign a contract with a major broadcaster. If a broadcaster picks up Clickpic, users clicking on an image will be directed to further content connected to that image. “It’s something that’s very useful for people,” he says. “I would use it.”
Optimism despite challenges
Of course, entrepreneurs face unique challenges in Brazil. Some market segments have not yet developed and startups have struggled to raise money. The recommendation website Tuilix, founded by Helder Knidel, 34, a computer engineer with a masters from Unicamp and his partner Leandro de Castrol, 37, a doctor in data analysis, is still looking for funding 18 months after starting the venture.
But Knidel shares the quintessentially Brazilian optimism that characterizes the country’s burgeoning tech boom. “There is a big population wanting to buy who is now getting access to internet now, on their first computers,” he says. “There is a big space to be explored.”
http://www.txchnologist.com/2012/the-startup-samba-internet-ventures-boom-in-brazilicon-valley