North by South is pleased to inform that a member of our team Isabela Fernandes was invited to lead the Medical Project in Brazil. Medical is a GPL Hospital Information System created by the GNU Solidario project. North by South News wrote about Medical in 2009, at the time, with only one year of existence, they were finalists for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards at the category ‘Best Government Software‘.

Medical is being used at clinics in the rural area from the north of Argentina and at the Peerless Hospital in Nigeria. They are also at the Public Software Portal from Brazil federal government and soon with Isabela help will be full translated to Brazilian Portuguese and ready to be used by clinics, hospitals in Brazil.

Check out the new release launched on June 6th, Medical 0.0.50.

Below the annoucement from Luis Falcón creator of Medical:

Dear Friends,

I am pleased to announce that Isabela Fernandes is the new leader of the Medical project in Brazil. I met Isabela in Berkeley last year and since then we have been in contact working with the dissemination of free software. She is a member of the GNU Solidarity and have helped me, along with Cesar Brod and Corinto Meffe, in the dissemination of Medical in Brazil.

Isabela has worked more than 10 years as an advocate of free software in different sectors, from her company North by South in San Franciscon as well as from the IT sector of the Presidency of Brazil. She is a person who has been involved with social welfare organizations, working at GESAC, a digital inclusion project from the Ministry of Communications of Brazil and at projects of inclusion of women in the FOSS world.

She has always been in contact with the health sector, accompaning closely the proplems experienced by the Brazilian population. She is the daughter of a surgeon-dentist and a dental prosthesis, and she has studied Master Dental Technitianat the University of Alfenas, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. When she met Medical, she knew immediately the importance of the project in the health care sector, as in Brazil, where a federal government policy to use free software has generated significant progress in various sectors and institutions of the government.

Isabela believes that a project such as Medical will be the key to improve the public health care system in Brazil, as well as managing budgets in this sector. There is why she didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation from my part to be the leader of Medical project in Brazil.

From my side and from the Medical team and GNU Solidario she has our full support and I am sure that her management will be entirely successful.

Luis Falcón
http://gnusolidario.org

An annual survey conducted by CETIC (Center for Study of Information Technology & Communications) found that the use of free software in mid-sized and enterprise companies continued to grow through 2009. The survey, TIC Empresas 2009, has been surveying commercial trends in Brazil’s growing technology markets for five years now.

While government adoption of free software is ordered by presidential decree, voluntary commercial adoption continues to grow in Brazil. The survey found that open source software has been adopted in 65% of large business, up from 61% in 2006. For mid-sized companies, open source adoption increased to 49% in 2009, up from 44% in 2007 and 2008.

The study found that 35% of the companies had adopted free software at the operating system level (mostly Linux).

Alexandre Barbosa, a spokesperson for CETIC, said that “[t]he increase for Linux and other open source operating systems in mid-level and large businesses reflects a search for cost reduction, greater security and the fact that there are more professionals specializing in [open source].”

This analysis is in line with NorthxSouth’s own observations: that the widespread adoption of free software by the government, public schools and digital divide programs has created a unique talent pool in Brazil of IT workers and programmers that creates a bias in the labor pool that favors open source.

Another NXS organizational favorite — remote collaboration — is also trending upwards in Brazil. The survey found that telecommuting is used by 25% of companies in Brazil, a 10% increase since 2006. For large companies, working remotely is even more widespread, at 62%. Forty-three percent of mid-size companies use remote work arrangements while only 20% of small businesses have adopted it.

Finally, the survey also revealed corporate vigilance against the use of social networks on company time: 48% of the companies surveyed ban the use of Facebook, Twitter and Orkut (the most popular social network in Brazil).

North by South (NXS) is excited to be attending the SMASH Summit that’s happening in San Francisco this week. And, we’re also just happy to see more events like this happening, as the industry starts to normalize some of the innovations that we have been recommending to clients. It’s going to make our jobs that much easier.

The way NXS operates, we make a lot of recommendations to our clients (or potential clients) after we hear out what they want to do. This includes a lot of very specific recommendations that are unique to each project but, for instance, some recommendations aren’t confidential eyes-only secrets: Most projects we come into contact with, we recommend building everything with open source/free software platforms. We recommend that the project is managed like open source projects are managed (because it works). Obviously, we recommend building a flexible team out of a distributed network of developers from the Latin American free software world.

For the most part, all of this makes perfect sense to all types of clients. And once the website or application is built, and our client tells us their pageview/traffic/revenue goals, we recommend using a methodology that is one of our strongest skill-sets we offer: the science and art of social/viral analysis-based marketing. And, sometimes, it’s a little harder to convince clients that they should be doing this.

We explain the logic of it. We also explain that our core team in San Francisco includes people who have been involved in all facets of designing, engineering, launching, scaling and optimizing literally several dozen virality-centered websites for going on a decade now, including Tagged.com (which recently announced a deal to exclusively rock a streaming Bon Jovi performance to its 80 million users; the user metric makes them the third largest social network in the US).

Even though peer-initiated user acquisition (viral techniques and analysis) has driven the majority of the Web 2.0 era, there’s still surprisingly little interest and understanding in applying these techniques at many startups and existing web companies.

Our theory is that there’s something in the stories from the dot-com boom that bring out the Horatio Alger in people. With “honesty, thrift, self-reliance, industry and a cheerful whistle,” some startups are convinced that their website or app just needs to get online, get a little attention and the meritocracy will reward them for their one-of-a-kind idea. They underestimate how many websites are out there; they overestimate how many new websites the average user really takes seriously enough to register and come back.

Some companies are run by witnesses to the unnatural pay-outs during the dot-com boom and take this as evidence that whatever clever idea they have will lead to vast riches. Some serial entrepreneurs with successful acquisitions under their belt from a previous era and are convinced they have another winner. And, there are a lot of new-comers to the internet industry — they have their own money or “friends & family” funding and they’re convinced that if they can just get their site online, the users will come and then the money will come. As a famous American author said: “real Horatio Alger stuff.”

At NXS, we’ve gotten pretty good at explaining all this and walking clients through the scenarios. We’ve moved entire web businesses to healthy, metrics-driven growth. We’ve gotten pretty good at explaining the basic concepts of viral user acquisition — at least enough to help companies start the move in that direction. Once they start seeing the returns from disciplined, metrics/testing/analysis-based website management, the rest usually comes naturally.

The point is that it’s good to see events happening that help explain all this, that emphasize the use of metrics, social marketing, analysis, leadgen paradigms and so on. From the SMASH Summit’s website, the topics to be covered include:

• Social Networks, Platforms & Apps
• Search Engines (SEO, SEM)
• Mobile & PDA
• Social CRM
• Metrics & Analytics
• Lead Gen & Affiliate Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Links, Embeds, & Widgets

All these topics can become pretty complex but the hard stuff is part of what development firms like NXS should be providing these days. The more that it becomes accepted that these techniques are needed to build successful websites and web applications, the easier it becomes for us to steer clients in that direction. And we’re glad to see that happening.

The momentum of the Latin American free software movement is accelerated every year by the International Free Software Forum, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Last year, North by South was invited to speak at fisl10, where a decade of free software revolution was celebrated. NXS gave a presentation about our business model and we were honored to be included in the special audience for President Lula da Silva’s address to the free software world.

This year, we’re happy to help spread the word about the innovation being launched for fisl11 — a special social network that intends to facilitate on-going collaboration for people who meet each other during the event. The idea is to strengthen the bonds formed at the event and provide a vehicle for people to publish news & updates about their projects. Talk about an open social network outside of one company’s control has been happening at FISL for years, an idea that is gaining popularity in Silicon Valley.

FISL11 will take place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from July 21st to 24th. The call for submissions has ended already but you can still submit papers for the Free Software Workshop and online registration is now open.

Here is our coverage of fisl10.

After many discussions with private telecommunication companies, government institutions, civil society and LAN-house owners, the federal government of Brazil officially launched the National Broadband Plan on May 5. Between 2010 and 2014, an investment of R$ 15 billion Reais (about $8.5 billion USD) will bring broadband to 4,600 Brazilian municipalities and provide internet to 75% of Brazilian households.

The plan will reactivate the dormant optical fiber network from an old state company called Eletronet. In addition, the plan breathes life into Telebrás, a state telecommunications company that’s been inactive since the telecom privatizations in the 1990s. Telebrás will be the ‘manager’ of the project, but it won’t be a 100% state service; the government wants private companies to play a role similar to resellers, providing the service to the end user. Telebrás will be responsible for implementing the communication network of the federal public administration and provide support for broadband to universities, research centers, schools, hospitals and other public institutions.

The largest telecom companies who currently ‘own’ the market are concerned about the competition that will be generated by the plan. But, they only have themselves to blame. When Brazil privatized all of its telephone companies in the 1990s, the goal was to grow the market, make services available to more people and provide new & innovative technology products.

The market did expand and more people had access to telephones and cellphones. But, customer satisfaction is low and the services are expensive. But the real problem is that Brazilians pay 10 times more for broadband internet access than developed countries. Only 20% of households in Brazil have broadband. The private companies have no interest in offering broadband services to the poorer regions of Brazil, in the north/northeast.

In the spirit of Brazil’s current commitment to digital inclusion, the federal government decided that the free market would never have the incentive to provide internet throughout the country and the National Broadband Plan was born. Through the government plan, Brazilians will pay between R$15 ($8.50 USD) and R$35 ($19.50 USD) to get speeds between 512kb/s - 784kb/s. Currently, the private plans cost, on average, R$50 ($28 USD) for 256kb/s and high-speed plans cost over R$100 ($57 USD).

In 2010, the government will start building the backbones of the network in the Federal District, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Ceará, Sergipe, Bahia, Alagoas and Pernambuco.

Full broadband service will be offered this year to 100 cities. Exactly which cities will get the service this year is still not known but Cesar Alvares, coordinator of the federal Digital Inclusion Program, says that “[The list of cities] are diverse. Cities with a big population and cities with small populations, both, from the rural and urban areas, should be addressed.”

The goal is to offer broadband in 25 states and the Federal District by 2014. This leaves out the state of Roraima because the optical fiber doesn’t reach there but the government is starting a study to figure out how to provide services there.