Category Archives: AndesBeat News and Perspectives

Meet AndesMade Advisor: Christian Limon

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AndesBeat is proud to announce Christian Limon from Tapjoy as our next confirmed AndesMade mentor.

He will be working with our international advisory team for our forthcoming AndesMade immersion based initiative to support Chilean startup founders and tech entrepreneurs with rapid prototyping and quickly getting their ideas into the marketplace with their bootstrapping mode on.

Our beta group launches 26 May 2012.

(You can follow our running list with newly named mentors here!)

As Chile is home to less than 100,000 developers, we have a big job at AndesMade to build awareness, education and opportunities so that we can start growing a new ecosystem of specialized and mobile apps developers.

One of the major incentives to stimulate and capture the interest of this group will obviously be exploring ways to mass distribute and monetize those apps.

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Let’s get this party started: Beer with Shoni and Carlos launches tomorrow!

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Shoni and Carlos would like to thank our die-hard AndesBeat community (all 48 of them, wink, wink), who have been huge evangelists in terms of getting the word out about our work and referring us steady streams of new contacts, organizations, potential clients and projects. But at the same time, while we would love to meet everyone, we simply can’t.

In person meetings take too much time. And meeting (local people) by Skype and phone, while more convenient, seems so impersonal.

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AndesBeat to host Yale University journalism delegation in Santiago, Chile

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AndesBeat will host new world change-makers under the radar of old world knowledge at an upcoming event in Santiago, Chile which will showcase the emerging startup and entrepreneurship scene in Chile.

Santiago, Chile – AndesBeat, Latin America’s first English language media publication dedicated to ‘covering the uncovered’ stories in Latin America’s emerging startup scene, announced today that in their inaugural event they will host a group of students from the Globalist (the quarterly international global affairs publication of Yale University).

Many local organizations were surprised to learn that AndesBeat inaugural event was not a ‘startup themed’ event. However, directly in line with their cultural game-changing mission, the event serves as a critical foundation in terms of integrating Latin America’s media ecosystem into trends in the international media. The event will leverage the rising media talent from a prestigious 300+ year institution of higher learning along with the timely theme of stimulating and promoting a culture of entrepreneurship within a sub-developed country. AndesBeat is working hard at a grassroots level to increase the amount of coverage Latin American startups receives from local and international media. By making these stories more ‘accessible and approachable’ to the media, they also seek to educate the everyday citizen in Latin America about the entrepreneurship and startup world.

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Co-Founders Life: Staying out of jail with your partner in crime!

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Recently I told my co-founder I knew he was ‘the one’, but it wasn’t because he fit the profile of someone I would consider marrying, but because I had come to the realization that I would be willing to do something illegal for him – not that he asked me, but the thought randomly crossed my mind of just how far would I go for him?!

Then I started thinking about the irony of people who always advise that you choose a business partner based on someone you would want to marry. The crazy thing is that between the ages of 25-39 is when 60% of all divorces happen (in the U.S) – which is also around the same time that people are active in launching a business or getting connected to the startup life! Continue reading →

Meet AndesMade Advisor: Louis Lautman

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AndesBeat is proud to announce Louis Lautman as our next confirmed mentor. He will be working with our international advisory team for our forthcoming AndesMade immersion based initiative to support Chilean startup founders and tech entrepreneurs rapid prototype and quickly get ideas into the marketplace with their bootstrapping mode on.

(You can follow our running list with newly named mentors here!)

As one of the fastest ways to emerge from bootstrapping mode is to be able to sell, sell, sell, we decided to bring on an accomplished and fearless cold-caller (since his teenage years) who got his real taste of cold-calling by knocking doors on the streets of New York City in his early 20’s where he made over 10,000 cold calls in person and on the telephone!

After personally connecting with him back in 2009 before he released his film and seeing the path and tremendous growth he has made personally and professionally over the past few years, Carlos and I are extremely ecstatic to have his support, enthusiasm, expertise and magic sales touch here in Latin America!

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AndesBeat X Games: Startup Gladiators Inquire Within

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Today Sir Richard Branson arrived in Chile (Bienvenido)!

So we decided to publish this post, that was actually inspired by his blog post Life Begins at 60 (a video of him kitesurfing in Necker Island). This along with an email from one of our AndesBeat fans who really dug the concept of how at AndesBeat we are promoting entrepreneurship and the startup life like an “extreme sport”, accelerated our motivation to share why:

AndesBeat is on a serious mission to become the

Sports Illustrated for Latin American entrepreneurship.

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Meet AndesMade Advisor: Mike Michalowicz

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AndesBeat is proud to announce Mike Michalowicz (pronounced mi-cal-O-wits) as the next confirmed mentor for AndesMade. (You can follow our running list with  previous named mentors here!)

Mike will be working with our international advisory team for our forthcoming AndesMade immersion based initiative to support Chilean startup founders and tech entrepreneurs with rapid prototyping and quickly getting their ideas into the marketplace with their bootstrapping mode on.

Being that we are going to be bootstrapping (sin shoelaces), we had to flip through our ‘Golden Rolodex’ and find at least one accomplished bootstrapper for our advisory team.

Enter Mike Michalowicz aka ‘The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur’ who started his first business at the age of 24. With no experience, no contacts and no savings he systematically bootstrapped a multi-million dollar business. Then he did it again. And again. He sold his first company to private investors and sold his second company to a Fortune 500.

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Let’s change the Chilean mindset

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Editor’s Note: This guest post is courtesy of Francisco Sáez, Nixter CEO. In this post Francisco writes about a ‘real story’, his story!
..and if you’re from Chile or Latin America, it’s probably your story, too!!  

Would you like to feature your experience, story or knowledge in a post?

Please connect with us!

We’re open to share guest-posts generated by our community.

First off. Chile doesn’t need more (cut and paste) engineers.

Chile needs more artists, more innovators and of course…more entrepreneurs.

I’m trying to find the reason why Chile has a low rate of entrepreneurs and I think it’s all because of history. Continue reading →

Chile Pi: Singularity University intrigued by transcendental possibilities in the region

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Editor’s Note:This post is 1 of 2. The 2nd post will provide our Singularity University transcription from our interview with Salim Ismail, Vivek Wadhwa and Andrew Hessel.

While Chile is often seen as the country at the end of the Earth, ironically, it is not where South America ends. If one were to travel here, they would see that it is actually where it truly begins.

This storied and enchanted land is filled with tremendous economic development opportunities, natural resources, spirited, unified and determined citizens, and a rising middle class that provides a growing and dynamic market to create, launch and test new ideas.

With a 106% mobile penetration and top ranking among countries worldwide in terms of social network adoption per capita makes Chile an extremely attractive market for development in the mobile and technology space. And it also lends the possibility to scale throughout other markets in Latin America and/or Asia.

The Latin American market is very “vibrant”, as there is a growing number of people who have a smartphone for the first time and even people who are having their first experience with a mobile device. Latin America is also a source of innovation of products and applications at lower cost. – Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO

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Made in Chile: Hip ‘Maker Space’ set to launch in Santiago

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Back in the late 1990’s as we began to launch into the Age of Information I wondered if information overload would kick in and shift us towards the Creative Age to help us process, curate, visualize and package all this information in other RIGHT BRAIN formats. And are we not seeing this now (ohhhhh, 14 years later, :-P) with the emergence of DESIGN along with data visualization and gamification crossing over into everything?

Following ‘developing countries’, I then wondered if the Creative Age, along with the rise of the now ’emerging markets’ would shift us back from building for a novelty based virtual world to building for a needs based real world thus resulting in the Age of Micro Manufacturing,  where everything would be made to order (locally/regionally) and produced in small volume on a needs basis.

In the U.S. this emerging group of creative-tech inventor types who are the ‘early adopters’ and ‘pioneers’ playing in this micro ecosystem has been affectionately branded ‘Makers’…and damn it, they are so gosh darn special to us and the renaissance of manufacturing in the U.S. that we even gave them their own ‘festival‘!

And maybe in the future we would see the ‘creators’ of these products receive a royalty/licensing fee  (for sustainability and intellectual property) every time their product gets resold in the marketplace which would be tracked via an RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tag.

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