The Geo wave in Brazil

Recent events in the geospatial field have kept us entertained with the Brazilian community, as if for a moment it were the center of Latin America. It is not for less, theories such as the Goldman Sachs Group they project it as one of the four emerging superpowers, with a global dominance by the year 2050; along with Russia, China and India, where the term BRIC comes from. These types of projections are born from well-founded studies, plus some capitalist premonition that will or do not move the economic interest of companies and stimulate investment initiatives.

It is difficult to predict what will happen in 40 years, with the way humans are destroying natural resources, including Brazil as a terrible example. But it is interesting how the World Bank currently considers Brazil as the largest economy in Latin America, the second in America and the seventh in the world.  

With the slight peculiarity of the language that it does not share with the rest of Latin America, Brazil constitutes a hope of economic attractiveness for the southern cone and in general for the continent. In Agriculture, it remains the largest coffee producer, in Livestock it has the world's first bovine herd and 80% of the oil consumed by its 190 million inhabitants is produced locally. The ranking of the Bancos do Brasil and Italú ranking at the Latin American level, the position of Petrobras over Pemex and PDVSA or the size of Rede Globo are just examples of the economic growth of Brazil.

And going back to our field, surely Brazil already has its years growing in the economic issue, but international visibility is a somewhat recent aspect. Apart from the Second Esri Users Meeting that will take place this August, three important aspects have kept me entertained in the Carioca environment:

1. The Latin American Forum Geospatial, which is being developed just in these days of August, enhances the issue, concentrating the interests of large companies in Brazil. Although this event can be seen as an isolated event, it is due to an external intervention for positioning this sector by GIS Development, which systematically carries out at least 8 events of this level in Asia, the Middle East and Africa and, which is also an editor from Geospatial World and Geo Intelligence magazines.

2. The MundoGeo group and its inclusive scope.  This is a company that in the geospatial issue has achieved an enviable position in terms of the confluence of efforts, including the publication of magazines, forums, alliances with representative companies and the recent launch of GeoConnectPeople, which the Spanish-speaking community will surely absorb. The InfoGEO, InfoGPS and InfoGNSS magazines are examples of the avant-garde that the issue has taken in the area.

Seeing what's happening with GeoConnectPeople in just a couple of days (more than 700 members) makes us think we'll have to learn some Portuguese before Mandarin.

3. The Be Insipred of 2011.  The excessive interest that we see in Bentley Systems in Brazil is due to this effort to make the sector visible. However, it is a company with less participation compared to AutoDesk, it happens that like Apple it is worth following the track because somehow they reflect the behavior of the innovative market in the field of geoengineering.

In my recent participation in the Be Inspired, I had seen in isolation the participation of Brazil, including gaining themes as shown in the following table (Apart from Sabesp SA and LENC) but always staying in the energy field.

The company SGO, In 2007, won the first place in the category of energy resources with Petrobrás.
In 2009, Engevix Engineering Won the first place with the Coqueiros Hydroelectric Turbine.
In 2010, Matec Engineering Won a prize in the BIM modeling area.

But for this year 2011, at least 14 projects from Brazil have already confirmed their participation in the Be Inspired that will be realized in Europe from 8 to 9 of November, as shown in the following table, and now in infrastructure, mining And hydrosanitary systems.

In conclusion, the Geo wave gains strength with the contribution of Brazil, the Open Source also has a significant boom, in GeoConnectPeople there is almost a group created for the different existing OSGeo solutions. The First Latin American Days of gvSIG were held in Brazil, and the Third of this year will be there again, a topic that I hope to talk about in a specific article.

In good time for Brazil, and the possibility that its development will bring us benefit to the continent.