The Khemka Social Entrepreneuship Forum at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, may as well have been called the conference on scale. While the attendees and presenters were scheduled to touch on various nuances of social entrepreneurship, the word that arose again and again was “scale.” Sponsored by The World Bank and the Ford Foundation, The Khemka Forum was an gathering of 100 top stars from various disciplines, business and organizations who met to “accelerate the business of social change,” so said the event Web site.

For statistics junkies and demographers, India is the promised land.  ”India is like a miniature Europe,” said  Professor Madhukar Shukla, but even this colorful metaphor understates the complexity. The world’s second largest country by population, seventh largest by land area and boasting the 12th largest economy in the world, according to Maps of India, India is home to more than 16 percent of the world’s diabetics and a whopping 41 percent of all poor people on Earth call this country home, according to Nation Master.

President of the ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, Dr. Nachiket Mor, said that India, a pilot program has 15 million participants. With so many languages, cultures and religions united under a single flag, the true test of any innovation are those that can reach India-scale, in the words of Teamlease owner, Manish Sabharwal. Firstly, Sabharwal said, it is critical to identify those businesses that are babies and those that are dwarves. You can give all the food and attention you want to a dwarf and it will remain a dwarf, while the same care will make a baby grow and grow. Companies work the same way; some are destined to remain small because it is in their DNA, while others have the potential to impact millions. Identifying those ideas and companies and making them India-scale was the order of the day and one of the most important challenges of the years to come.

Investing venture capital funds in Brazilian startups is a lot like match-making, which would make Monashee’s Capital partners Eric Acher and Guillerme Decourt  part investor and one part Yenta. Today we sat down at their office to talk about educating the market about the role of a venture firm, taking the long view of investments, how to spot a winner and the importance of saying “no.”

“We’re not techy guys, we’re strategy-oriented,” Acher told me. As such, marrying the right idea with the right team is a strategy that Monashees views as central to their long term success. “An idea is a commodity,” Acher said. “The name of the game is compatibility.” And, just a like a  couple who saying their vows, Monashees is committed to the long-haul.

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One of the best things about traveling is the ability to reinvent oneself on the fly. In New York, I’ve become somewhat of a curmudgeon. After four years in town I’m not as filled with wide-eyed wonderment, or as willing to experiment. One consequence has been my declining intake of live music, a significant departure from the days when I would trek to the Bronx or Brooklyn to see African Hip Hop or grime rappers at a moment’s notice. Expensive drinks, snobby fans and long, late commutes home were just some of the reasons that come to mind.

Not so in Brazil. Last night I attended my third concert in two weekends; a pretty good streak. Last weekend I saw Seu Chico, a group from the city of Pernambuco who cover songs by Brazilian legend, Chico Buarqe.  The venue, Studio SP,  which bills itself as an urban art space and performance hall on Rua Augusta, had a nice blend of grit and posh, with an upbeat crowd.  Even better were the cheap drinks, such as the “busca vida,” which was a mix of cachaça, extra cane sugar and lemon juice.

Of course, the highlight was the band itself. In spite of the fact they played covers, or perhaps because of it, they had the crowd enraptured, singing along loudly with every tune. While the lead singer looked a bit bereft, the group’s 19-year-old pianist, Vitor Araújo, stole the show.

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Yesterday I got to demo a revolution in the offing when I met with boo-box founder, Marco Gomes, and company CEO, Marcos Tanaka, at their headquarters in the Sao Paulo neighborhood of  Pinheros

By creating a tool that is “non-intrussive, yet elegant,” in the words of Tanaka, boo-box allows publishers to target ads based on images and content that appear within a post, leveraging the relationship they have with their audience to add value for all parties involved.

One cool feature I saw was a full-page ad for Marvel comics that expanded to inlcude old comic book covers and a video trailer for the movie ‘Iron Man.’ Those same slots could easily be used to show previous, related posts if a drag and drop feature were to be rolled out some day.

Image via CrunchBase

In 2007, boo-box was the first Brazilian startup to be mentioned in the American press while the company was still in a “pre-alpha” stage, Tanaka said. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch speculated, “this may be quick acquisition bait for Amazon or eBay.” Two years later, the company has partnered with Brazilian e-commerce heavyweights such as Buscape and Mercardo Livre, with shows no signs of slowing down. Twenty two-year-old Gomes wears the hat of CIO, which in American might stand for chief innovation officer. At boo-box, his job is to be constantly on the lookout for ways the company can reinvent itself through innovation.

The full rundown of our lengthy discussion is destined for another venue, so to avoid the risk of plagiarizing myself I won’t say much else. I will however share with you a remarkable lesson I learned. At one point during the afternoon, Tanaka told me his image of an American is a boy with a lemonade stand, or a girlscout selling cookies door-to-door. Brazil does not have an equivalent.

So simple and yet so poignant, that statement helped me to see how as Americans, entrepreneurship is practically part of our DNA.

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Fabio Akita wants Brazilian businesses to fail. Really.

The Ruby on Rails evangelist and apostle of agile management also thinks that while nine out of 10 Brazilian startups will probably fail, this is good for business overall.  The quicker flaws are exposed, the sooner people can go about fixing them. “Having no problems is a problem,” Akita said. “You can’t improve if you assume you are not making mistakes.”

On a blissful evening in the depths of *cough* winter, we met at a lively cafe on Paulista Ave, to discuss the language and lifestyle of Ruby on Rails programming, as well as what barriers must be broken for Brazilian companies to take their place on the world stage. Besides the typical culprit, stifling bureaucracy and its attendant cronyism, inefficiency and top-down management, Akita said Brazilians have been programmed not to take risks. In spite of the pitfalls, entrepreneurs just think differently. “If they are entrepreneurs, they will try anything to make their dreams come true,” said Akita.

Fabio Akita is the author of the first book on Rails created for a Brazilian audience and a product manager at Locaweb – the largest web hosting company in Brazil, with the mission to make Rails ubiquitous in the Latin American open source community, according to his profile on Working With Rails.

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Improving the truthfulness and accuracy of citizen reporting is the new initiative being floated by San Francisco-based startup, AllVoices. With the debut of a new credibility algorithm and payment plan for bloggers. The new system will pay anywhere from 25 cents to $2 for every thousand page views.

AllVoices is clocking some impressive stats, with 33,000 landing pages for countries, cities and special topics being covered by a legion of bloggers, who were previously reporting unpaid, according to News.com.au.

AllVoices.com was originally launched in response to the massive earthquake that rocked Pakistan in 2005, but in recent years it has become a global citizen-reporting site mentioned in the same breath as Global Voices and Associated Content. However, the same story from News.com.au, underscored the difficulty of relying on an algorithm and readers to rank the credibility of bloggers.

Contributors are free to post almost anything and their credibility is rated by readers and an in-house algorithm which measures postings against traditional media and other sources.

But throwing the site open to the public has its pitfalls.

One recent post with a high credibility rating said the Ark of The Covenant was about to be unveiled. Other stories cite no sources at all.

Futurist and entrepreneur, Ross Dawson, posted a comprehensive account on the new platform to his blog yesterday.

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Brazil is on the leading edge of Internet trends, but there is one huge sticking point; bandwidth. According to Internet World Stats, 34 percent of Brazilians are online, which is nearly 68 million people. However only 7 million had broadband access in 2008. Nearly everyone with whom I spoke in Sao Paulo echoed the same sentiment; download speeds suck and a robust connection is still very expensive. So what does that mean for the evolution of the Web?

A lot of great content is out there in video form. According to YouTube’s blog, users upload more than 20 hours of video each minute. In fact, there are lots of great stats about YouTube (none of them having to do the company earning a profit–yet), such as this Neatorama story that said in 2007 YouTube used as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.

My hunch is that social media is popular for exactly this reason. With download speeds that can be maddeningly slow, who wants to wait for huge video files to load? Chatting, commenting on profiles and sharing low resolution photos can be done with a minimum of delay in all but the worst scenarios and, these activities happen to be the stock and trade of social media. With the exception of commenting on profiles, all of the aforementioned behaviors first appeared in the chain-letter days of dial-up home Internet access

[Map of world Internet use 2000-2007]

Getting to the point where every Internet user can stream large video files will be a momentous occasion. Although I spend more time watching ‘The Family Guy’ on Hulu than lectures from Academic Earth, the potential is amazing. A wealth of information is available about entrepreneurship, philosophy, computer science or medicine for anyone with the time and connectivity. The same is true at TED, Big Think or Current, where knowledge seekers can slake their thirst for information.

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These two moguls in the making were at Lennox Lounge tonight selling home-made candies for $2 apiece. Elijah, age seven, (right) said the price was 4 x 50 cents. Not bad math for a second grader. Said elder brother, Giles III,  age 14, theirs is a multi-generational business. Angela’s World of Creations, which sells chocolate and hard candy lollipops, edible arrangements and assorted souvenirs is a mult-generational business.

While some might worry that these two are working before their time, it was clear they were enjoying themselves and gaining valuable skills. The ability to sell and to comfortably interact with strangers will always serve these two. Some people grow tired of the rat race and become their own boss. For others, entrepreneurship is in the blood.

This morning my Q&A with Amanie co-founder Gilberto Jr. was published in VentureBeat. True to Brazil’s social nature, the article is quickly making the rounds on Twitter. I’ve had fun tracking the aggregate URL using bit.ly.

Looks like my visit to Brazil was time well spent. I’m eager to get back as soon as possible once I handle a few things in New York. If you’re a Brazilian Rubyist, Web entrepreneur or social media maverick, ping me.

It looks like the word is getting out. On Sunday TechtTrotter was mentioned in an article published by one of India’s largest daily newspapers, the Deccan Chronicle. According to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the Chronicle has a circulation of over 1.3 million copies of their english-language.

In a story about changing job options for graduates of journalism programs, I was named along with Ankita Rao, a graduate of the University of Florida who will be taking a volunteer post in Northern India. We are both eschewing the traditional  post-graduation career path. You can read the story called “Catch A Falling Star This Year” here.

I was pleased to receive the free publicity, but the story itself was riddled with factual inaccuracies. Because a journalist lives and dies by his credibility, it’s worth taking a second to highlight some of the many mistakes that were injected into the story.

• The story misquotes me in direct citation. The author made a up a quote that sounded good. Here’s what author Asha Sachdev published:

“I created a journalistic project called TechTrotter (techtrotter. org) and it will take me travelling for two months to Brazil, Ukraine, Nigeria, South Africa, India and to the Philippines!” Chima writes to Rao.

Here’s what I wrote:

“Great post. You and I are embarking on similar journeys after the completion of the journalism degree. I will be traveling for two months to Brazil, Ukraine, Nigeria, South Africa and the Philippines as part of a journalistic project I created called TechTrotter. Check it out; www.techtrotter.org.”

You can see the original article and my comments here.

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