It's been a month since my last blogpost and some stuff has been going on with my life at the moment. Currently I am looking for something to do and stack some bread. Meaning that I need money. After doing some sales pitches on some local colleges and working on a few classes on enterprise software and also some web development. I am currently trying to promote them and hopefully land a few gigs.

That said, I am worried about what would be the next big business strategy. Currently I have been scheming some plans on doings retriets to central america and the caribean and trying to land some gigs there and do some business abroad.

I still need to get some kickstart budget to activate that, but I am already working on it. I will be having just one flight abroad this year but I hope I can get some interest into doing some business there.

On NBA matters I am a bit disappointed with the Heat after the all star break and truth been told, they have been a bit sluggish. Not enough to matters since they still on the fight for the no 1 spot in the NBA but some of that killer instinct fuel has been running low. Then again, playoff is a different thing and teams tend to bring out the goods.

I hope things work for the better for the Heat but at the moment, the Heat seem to be not just running out of gas, but doing some major re-engineering on themselves.

So I have been speaking with my network around the world on the topic of e-commerce, e-marketing based on the conversations that we have recently with my local geek group. We talked at the beginning of why e-commerce never really took off in Mexico. The conclusions where that enviromental circumstances that have not been solved has stagnate the development of the web as most people would like to think about it at least in countries like the US.

The conclusions where that advertising never took off because e-commerce never took off, and e-commerce never really took off because of two big parts of what e-commerce came to become. logistics and billing. The lack of flexibility on billing and the high cost of logistics will make e-commerce too dificult to become.

So even after 15 years of internet we still view e-commerce as:

1. Step 1. Check out the products get the bank account.
2. Sept 2. Go to the bank and direct deposit.
3. Step 3. Scan the receipt and wait for a relatively big overprice over the shipping.

So the surcharge is quite steep, well between 15 to 20 dls. In the US is around 5 USD for a package between a book or a cellphone and will take 2 days across the country. This make it impossible to scale sales and marketing well enough. Which makes it hard to do a good sell.

The second issue is billing where there is a whole book of drama and stupidity when banks still seen as the one and only way to do commerrce in Mexico. From bad deals that these banks have sign with providers that sell them shit non-standard technology makes it way too hard for money to move around. The worst part is that banks have no accountability of these failures. People with debit cards can't make purchases on regular internet billing tools. Merchant accounts are stagnated and finally commerce in itself is way too hard.

So I start talking with friend in other countries, the first one is Colombia where my friend told me about their ecosystem and how internet savvy is the people in that country. From paypal-like systems like PagosEnLinea, LineaPagos and PSE. The big issue is that is like Cuba where there is an e-commerce embargo where payments are just valid within the country and rarely goes out of it.

The next critical point is logistic, well it seems that Colombia has many choices on this regards, there is not only more companies dedicated to shipping and handling but also much cheaper. At 5-10 dls for regular packages across the country with a 1 to 2 day timelapse.

My next stop is Brazil, where I chat with a friend and gave me some info about most of the companies doing e-business. Big retail like Carrefour, Wall-Mart, Submarine, Ponto Frio, U.S. So big retails already take care of e-business, while billing gets payed with some paypal-like services like DineihroMail, PagSeguro UOL. Logistics are also in charge of quite a few alternatives like Cometa, 1001, Correios, FedEx, TNT Express.

The average cost of a book nationally is 10 dls shipping across Brazil. So we are seen that most of these costs are really high compared between each country.

My next stop I want to be either Chile or Argentina but would be looking around for people that can inform me about the way e-commerce status is available in those countries. I'll be reporting back.

An interesting topic came yesterday almost unconsiously as we navigate between startups, enterpreneurship and the marketing of brands over the actual products. A desbelief that users have the capacity of tell the difference between products so they rely on trust as a major factor to make decision purchases. This is rather simple to understand, yet the concept becomes a bit hard when getting into more complex issues when it comes to a solution negotiations in the IT world or the FUD that providers put on the mind of decision makers.

Learning and studying the thought process of directors added to the context of market pressure and enviromental situations make providers push their product on every button EXCEPT the product. Since rather these factors have a major impact on the decision makers than the last mile of the solution. So now you see that most of the decision maker process is a bit irrational and responsive to a dim picture. Trully you have to recognized the skillful sales people to target these resources to put a killer sales strategy.

On the free software area, we do need more skillful salespeople to be able to recognize sales strategies and marketing plots to break through these scenarios. Beating the appreciation strategy could be a bit too tough for the sales guy. Rather he needs to improve these appreciation with it's own. That's where building brands is expected to be surged.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I moved to cancun and things have been going quite well. I find myself with time for myself without restrictions. It also has clear my mind to think about the things I have been trying to do for quite a while.

I need to concentrate and practice my developer skills and start having a real focused mind on achieving my short and medium term goals on the FLOSS end as well as on the entrepreneurship side.

I also need to find a good way to reconnect socially and productivewise with local enterprises and perform well. I hope to do whatever is possible around the inmediate future and excel on some of the lagged work that needs to be taking care off like the certification material and the release of other materials that can work with other projects.

Cancun is a great place run things and the landfield is clear to enterprise new things.

Recently I watched social network, a movie than far from annoying me it inspire me about the way that enterprises get done. From great hacking to VC connections in california make the dreams of making lots of money. I dunno if it was the instant plug of projects like Mozilla, KDE, Python, Apache, Perl, MySQL and PHP.