In my last post about imitiation vs. innovation in Brazil and I used rock music to parallel what goes on in technology. Today I want to talk exclusively about innovation in music, because Brazil is one of those places that has a reputation for producing hits. In my opinion, few countries besides Jamaica and The U.S. are known for their breadth and depth of musical styles and hit-making abilities.

Rather than go into the history of Brazilian music (which I don’t know), I thought I would share with you the BBC’s take, which have conveniently been sliced into digestible episodes posted below. My classmate Luis first brought the series to my attention.

• Section One deals with Brazil’s most famous form of traditional music, the Samba and its spread into the U.S. and beyond.

• Section Two is about Tropicalia music and the creative resistance of Brazilian musicians to two decades of military rule.

• Section Three starts around the time I was born and deals with contemporary music such as Hip Hop and Baile Funky.

I hadn’t watched any of the episodes from Section Three before today and I fully intended to post them sight unseen and go to sleep. My highest praise is due for the BBC production team that put this masterpiece together. In a  matter of hours I have learned a tremendous amount about Brazilian history and culture, though from a 30,000 foot view.

The reality on the ground is much different and cannot be fit into vignettes, but I hope you will take as long as is required to view this amazing documentary series. If you’re short on time, you might skip ahead to Section Three.

I’m sure my non-Brazilian friends will find the following series enlightening. The production value and storytelling are unparalleled as documentaries go. Although it’s in English, I would be delighted to find out from a Brazilian if he or she has learned anything new about their history or music from these clips.

And now for your enjoyment and edification:

Brasil, Brasil – Samba to Bossa Nova -BBC 1

Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI

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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.

Click to play

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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This picture is a few days old, but it shows Brazilian President Lula embracing the Pirate Bay co-founder, Peter Sunde. The “boys” at Pirate Bay made headlines with their new product, The Video Bay, that will function like YouTube, without displaying notices that copyrighted material has been removed. However, the release of Video Bay comes shortly after the founders were convicted of copyright violation by a Swedish judge and sentenced to one year in prison and $3.8 million in fines.

The accompanying entry by Brazilian scholar and cyberfreedom fighter, Sergio Amadeu, said that Lula defended freedom on the net and spoke to the importance of collaboration at conference in Porto Alegre attended by notable hackers and free software activists. He also posed for pictures with a convicted criminal, which is not something every elected leader would be willing to do. Granted, I have no sympathy for the record labels whose complaint led to Sunde’s conviction (which he and his co-defendants will appeal), but still.

When I was growing up, Richard Pang,  fled to Brazil after the fire he set in his parents’ Seattle warehouse killed four firefighters. He was eventually arrested on Ipanema Beach, by undercover agents, who said he confessed that he fled to Brazil because he knew he would could not be extradited on charges of murder. Nine months after his arrest by Federal agents, the Brazilian high court rules that he could be extradited to stand trial for the murder charges, though this was not part of the original extradition treaty between the U.S. and Brazil.

I just checked to see if Sweden and Brazil have an extradition treaty. They don’t. Perhaps Sunde is already thinking about hanging out with his new best pal, Lula,  and his Brazilian hacker buddies if his subsequent appeal is denied. Just a thought.

Thanks for the tip, Fabricio.

[Photo via: The 3oo]

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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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.

Yesterday I wrote about a fact-checking service that would help lend credibility to bloggers. Today the answer came back; it exists. Wow, that was fast!

VentureBeat today published an article and video about a new add-on for Firefox that let’s readers dispute and update content they suspect of bias or lack or factual inaccuracy. The program is called Dispute Finder. From VentureBeat:

The Dispute Finder works like this. When you read a story where you think the information is false, you can highlight the snippet of text and report it as disputed. Then you or others can add information that shows arguments on both sides of the dispute. When other users read the story, they will see the highlighted text in dispute. They can click on it to see the arguments, and then vote up or down on what they believe is credible. They can also rate sources of information for accuracy. Of course, you have to weigh the opinions yourself. God forbid that a minority viewpoint that isn’t popular should actually prove to be the most accurate.

It’s really cool to know that a bunch of smart people at Intel and the University of California were thinking about the same problem I was. Crowdsourcing answers was another great way to ensure that the story is told accurately. I was thinking of Correct.ly as a business, but leaving the work up to the audience was a master stroke.

As it stands, blog comments provide a great filter for false or misleading information in stories, however, the comments are not part of the stories themselves. When a story rises to prominence, the comments are considered to be a separate entity, though that may one day change.

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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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