My time in Sao Paulo is winding down quickly and I’m starting to feel like a local. Well, that’s almost a complete exaggeration, except that I can walk home to my place Jardins from over a mile inn three of four cardinal directions. I know the subway system (though I sometimes get on a train going the wrong direction) and communicating in Spanish is proving to be more useful than I could have imagined

I went to the Museu de Futbol today, a world class tribute to the world’s game. I also had an awesome meeting with Marco Vanossi, at the headquarters of Buscape in Vila Olimpia, Sao Paulo’s answer Silicon Valley. In the course of our conversation, I learned a great deal more about the difficulty startups have in getting government money. It seems that the people in charge of giving out the money want extensives guarantees that the companies will be successful based on past performance. One problem however is that a startup business may be testing an unproven technology that, if it works, can create astronomical profits, but it may also fail. I hope to get some time with someone who can speak from the government’s perspective in the near future, so both sides of the story are heard.

After our meeting I walked around Vila Olimpia, which used to be the Silicon Valley of Sao Paulo. I’m unsure how many tech companies still have their headquarters in the area, but the area has an impersonal, post-apocalyptic feel to it similar to James Cameron’s vision of Los Angeles in Terminator 2. There were no factories belching sulfurous smoke into the air (or cyborgs falling into vats of molten steel), but there were lots of cool buildings to shoot, so here are some of the pictures from my wanderings.