I heard San Francisco Mayor, Gavin Newsom, say that 75 percent of the world’s population lives within five hours flight from Bangalore. I have a suspicion he is right.

Last week I traveled to Malaysia, leaving  the familiarity and comfort of India for the first time in six months.My first stop was Singapore, which in spite of its large Indian population is the antithesis of all things Indian.

In Singapore I had one of the best sushi meals of my life (thanks, Mike), but on the whole, I found the place boring and soulless–not unlike walking through downtown Seattle. Between bouts of exhaustion I found myself  comparing Singapore’s oppressive logic to the exuberance, noise, foul smells unimaginable chaos of India and feeling proud of having lived in Bangalore and adjusted over time. Walking around (and around, and around) Raffles Place, I saw a small pile of trash bags and  instantly seized on the opportunity to snap a photo, almost as though I had uncovered some hidden flaw in Singapore’s grand plan.

The next stop was Kuala Lumpur, for some Saturday night revelry. Tired and smelly, I arrived in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur’s backpacker epicenter, an hour after sundown.  Choc-a-block full of hostels, bars and restaurants, Bukit Bintang was perfectly insulated island of travelers from across Europe and South America. Here I met Italians, Belgians, Argentines and a study abroad student from Tanzania.  With so many tourists shuffling from one watering hole to another, we could have been in Beijing, New Orleans or New York.

Tell me more …

My first story for GigaOm, about advertising solution, boo-box, was recently published. Read the full text here… I’ve got a few more Brazilian startup stories in the offing, for different outlets, so definitely stay tuned.

India is not for beginners. Living here for a week I could write a book. After a month, I would have enough observations to flesh out a few articles and, after a year’s time, my sensory powers will be all but nullified. Best to get it out while I can.

Tonight was a strange night due to the fact there was nothing strange about it. Everything that should tell me I’m in India makes me think I’m back in Brazil or the U.S. After watching Sri Lanka and Pakistan play cricket, my roommate and I vegged out to reruns of ‘Friends’ and ‘The Simpsons’ at his parent’s flat.  At a Karaoke night at Opus later in the evening, hardly an Indian tune was sung until after last call. If anything was strange, it was how few of the songs I was able to recognize and how few of the words I could sing to those that struck a chord.

There were two standout perfomers: A girl whose Joss Stone electrified the crowd, and Bharat Krishna, once of the most gifted musical madmen I’ve encounted since Helder Araújo. Before I talk about Krishna, it’s appropriate that I delve into the irony of an Indian songstress in Bangalore imitating a British girl whose claim to fame is her imitation of American soul singers. The performance I saw of ‘Fell in Love with a Boy,’ itself a cover of song by ‘The White Stripes’ was quite clever. Her rendition of ‘Lady Marmalade‘ from the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge was even better.

A dropout of the IIT, India’s most prestigious technical university, Bharat Krishna fuses American radio hits with contemporary Indian pop. When he stepped on stage, I thought he looked like my friend, Harith, until he started pop lockin’ and ripping up the stage with slick dance moves. Krishna and his multiple musical personas are makin an impact on the local music scene here in Bangalore and on the Web with his cutting edge mashups. The window below has one of his tunes, Wonderbrawl, which he performed. I hope I get a chance to pick his brain while I’m out here because he’s definitely an innovator.

Barry – WonderBrawl | Online recorder

Yesterday I nearly got robbed without a gun; worst of all, I did it to myself.

I’m a pretty trusting guy, which occasionally comes back to bite me. The whole TechTrotter trip is built on the notion that I can trust people whom I only know through a social media profile, be it LinkedIn, Facebook, CouchSurfing or Twitter or A Small World. The apartment where I’m living and nearly all of my social connections are the result of some form of social media. To date, I’ve been overwhelmed by how helpful people have been to me as a complete stranger, and their willingess to help me find new people to interview.

However, my trusting nature nearly got the better of me. At The Hub Sao Paulo, I met with investor, Mike Nicklas, the American who helped to co-found Amanaie, Social Smart and Startupi, along with Brazilian partners such as Gilberto Jr.

On our way to find a coffee shop where we could chat, a harried looking man approached us and said “You’re the only ones who can help me.” At first I couldn’t believe my ears. He was speaking  but he came closer he began to unravel a tale of misery that included being mugged and spending three hours in the police station, where he was offered no help and no ride home. For R$ 32 he could get a taxi home and on Monday he would have his secretary send me the money back.

Bullshit! I have heard every bit of this story before and spun 70 different ways, yet we still fell for it. Perhaps it was the fact he said he was a teacher, or because his story was convincing and heart-wrenching, or just the fact he was speaking to us in American English (he said he was from Kansas), but I took a R$ 50 note out of my wallet and handed it over to him. Initially, I was going to give him a subway ticket, but I left them all at home. As I did this, I knew I would never see the money again, but I didn’t care. “Steve,” as he called himself, even asked me if I wanted to take down his information so I could retrieve the money Monday when his school re-opened. I wasn’t going to because I already knew I had been had.

At just that moment, a young Brazilian approached us and asked Steve if he was the American teacher who had been mugged and couldn’t get home. He proceeded to tell us that our “teacher” had been working the same scam on Bela Cintra for three weeks and he scolded the hustler for taking our money.

Tell me more …

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

Attention founders in Brazil and elsewhere; you can now submit your company to be included in future TechTrotter articles. Just visit the “Submit Your Startup” page and fill out the form with as much information as you can about yourself. We can’t promise to do a story on anyone, but as this site grows, submitting your startup to our database will become a great way to connect with our global online audience. What are you waiting for?

Life expands and contracts at odd intervals. Barely a week ago, I was surrounded by thousands of robed graduates clad all in sky blue.  As our families watched our graduation ceremonies with swelling pride, we screamed our lungs out, knowing the diplomas for which we had toiled so long were within reach  and, at last and, it seemed the world finally belonged to us. The last shred of confetti has been swept aside, the last tear shed and I spent this afternoon trying  to cram my entire life into two suitcases.

By this time tomorrow I will be airborne, and somewhere high above the Gulf of Mexico, I will be carrying the notion that the world is a much smaller place than even optimists would care to imagine. In my idealized Sao Paulo, a verdant oasis of urbanity, heavy with the weight of 21 million souls, technology is creating a world where distance has finally been conquered and the planet as we know it is being changed forever. I’m not a technovangelist, by any stretch, but I can’t ignore what I see.

With just a few tools in my arsenal of social media, I have already contacted complete strangers who are willing to accomodate me on their couch at no charge. I have read the blogs, seen the portfolios and followed the Twitter streams that prove to me we have much in common. My friend Kevin calls his friend network the “global village,” because in London, Chicago, New York or Tel Aviv, he has friends who are always willing to put him up, or lookout for a friend in need. With technology, we live in a global village where our friends know each other, and we didn’t even know.

The wealth of the 21st Century will belong to those with the deepest and most vast social connections as technology continues to break down barriers and allow for exchange of ideas globally. Maybe I’m on a flight of fancy, but one thing is for sure. If I don’t get some sleep, I’m gonna be in sorry shape tomorrow when it’s game time.

[Image Via: Andre Deak]

The largest problem facing mainstream media outlets today is audience fragmentation. Major publishers once had a monopoly on their audience, but long gone are the days when a single local newspaper, or a triumvirate of national broadcasters could be confident  that everyone was tuning in to their message. The reality today is that competition for eyeballs takes the form of 24-hour news networks, niche cable channels, such as the Food Network, or ESPN, as well as Internet-only newspapers, blogs and video games. Competition today is also global.

Next week I head to Brazil to embark on the first leg of TechTrotter and today I’m starting to search the blogosphere for the best Brazilian technology writers. I was very intrigued when I found this post (translated from Portuguese) about a series of news-based video games that fuse fun with factfinding.  Andre Deak, whose article I found, mentions three different  types of video games a politician matching quiz, a Pacman-like game and a 1st person role player. By far the most interesting was the roleplaying game called “Global Conflicts: Latin America,” where the main character is a scrappy investigative reporter on the trail of corrupt officials and narco gangs in Mexico. I watched the trailer, but was unable to get the demo to load in my browser.

Based solely on what I saw in the trailer, however, it appears that the objective is to guide your character through a labyrinth of  conflicts of interests, violence and suffering in order to emerge with the story. Sounds a lot like the investigative work of my classmates at the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. Alright, I may be kidding about that, but I find it fascinating that a video game publisher is paying tribute to the role of journalists in our society and the risks that can be involved in breaking a major story. According to The Committee to Protect Journalists, 15 journalists have been killed in Mexico in since they began keeping records in 1992. Since the start of 2009 two more Mexican reporters have been killed, according to CPJ.

At the graduation ceremony for the Columbia Journalism School, the keynote speaker was Alejandro Junco de la Vega, Mexico’s largest newspaper publisher, who was the first non-American to be honored with the Columbia Journalism Award. While in his speech he downplayed the risks he and his family face, de la Vega relocated his family to the U.S. out of safety concerns, according to the Knight Center for Journalism at his University of Texas, his alma mater.

De la Vegas fearless  pursuit of the truth in Mexico’s drug war is commendable and his efforts are crucial to a free and open society. Whether the act of journalism itself can generate  blockbuster video game sales is debatable, however, it’s certainly an interesting turn or events. In the future, I would be happy to see old media types investing into these sorts of innovations. We’ve come along way since newspapers simply duplicated their print version online, but there is a still a long way to go for mainstream outlets to go before they once again captivate a young, tech savvy audience. Perhaps they should use their resources to jump into video game production whole hog. Anyway, it’s just a thought.

[ Via: White African ]