The Latin American population online is redefining the use of the Internet and next Twitter or Google will likely be born in Latin America.

The stats speak for themselves: 30 million people have escaped from poverty in the last seven years, and 15 million more by 2014. This means consumption has been increasing, including the purchase of computers and mobile devices. There are now 90 million boradband connections. 96%of digital population now access the internet daily, and 86% more than once. The average usage is 41 hours monthly.

The four important trends in Latin America are:

• social: The penetration of social networks is 86% in Latin America, and more than 90% in Brazil.
• live: People want to know what is going on, right now
• video: 96% of digitally conntected watch videos online versus 87% offline (DVDs). 31% watch TV series online vs 27% who just watch TV.
• music: Music has always been big in Latin America

The rest of the presentation was about Terra’s services, including upcoming streaming of Olympics and World Cup.

Daniel started his first company when he was 14. Sweden was known for piracy, because of Kazaa and Pirate Bay. Because everyone had broadband and it was super fast, consumption existed before services did, so pirate sites had lots of users. Spotify was a reaction to this. It was evident that people loved Kazaa and Napster, but these solutions did not satisfy the industry. There had to be a way to offer a service within the bounds of legality. The idea was to create an iTunes with all the world’s music, available on any device and not just the iPhone.

Daniel announces that the Spotify team has built a radio app on top of their own platform. It’s like Pandora, but with unlimited skipping. It ended up being really fast for them to develop this. The best part of the experience is being able to skip as many tracks as you want — as opposed to Pandora, which limits your skips and your number of stations. But users want to easily add tracks from the radio into their own music library (and pay for it). Developers are welcome to build on top of this app as well.

Some advice for entrepreneurs:

1. Idea is 5% and the execution is 95%.
2. People is everything. If you want to build a strong product, then be familiar with all aspects of it, including development. As an entrepreneur, you have to try everything. Also, the most important part is the early days, when you build the initial team.
3. Focus. As an entrepreneur, you are an editor, setting the context, choosing what not to do, what to do, and distilling everything to the most essential.

Spotify has 2.5 million subscribers paying about $10 per month. However, there is no IPO in sight. The Spotify team has a culture of wanting to build a really great company. The objective is not to sell the company. What they want to do is to change the world (of music).

Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel both believe that music is the most social object there is.

Three trends to watch:

1. Local social networking. This is about groups and about communities. It’s the local meetup club. It’s the local library users. The social enterprise is also about local networking.
2. Convergence of entertainment and digital. The convergence of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Things like TV integrating the web more into their shows.
3. The end of the real-time web. We’re going to find better ways to control and parse through the information that’s coming at us.

Three problems startups will face:

1. The financial crisis has created an uncertainty cloud that hangs over all startups now. Entrepreneurs don’t know whether there will be money or not. Customers don’t know whether they should buy things or not.
2. The talent wars. Companies like Google are offering every greater sums and perks to keep employees. Startups are also giving out perks and gimmicks to keep engineering talent.
3. There are lots of ideas out there. People think that “if you build it, they will come.” This is a fallacy. Most ideas suck. Less than 15% of the ideas Ben hears on a daily basis have any chance of becoming a startup. Most of the ideas are just incremental improvements, rather than fundamental changes to technology and society. Incremental ideas are easier to pursue because they require less ideas. The problem is that people will spend three or four years building incremental ideas, which will leave them with no real business and they will not have built up good skills. Also, this leads to a crowded market. (Please don’t build a photo-sharing app or a dail deals site). Changing the world is really, really, really hard.

Some friendly advice:

1. Don’t plant a flower, plant a sequoia. The tree will survive harsh winters, not the flower. Build something that will last.
2. Be adaptable. Great ideas always evolve, and so do great entrepreneurs.
3. Don’t build a company. Build a cause. Don’t just build a business because you think it’s going to make money. Build something that you will spend hours and hours behind because you know it’s going to change the world. Money is the side effect.

The price of an iPhone app is about the same as a really good quality French pastry or even baguette. However, mediocre apps spoil the environment for all developers. Mediocrity is the enemy. It kills great ideas. One mediocre ideas leads to another, which leads to another, and so on.

How do you fight mediocrity in app development?

Have a point of view. This clarify the vision behind the product and crystallizes the team around a central focus.

Touch changes everything. The fact that you can manipulate objects on a screen changes the way people relate to technology. Understand what a phone feels like, and what the experience should feel like.

Design every screen right down to the last pixel. Every pixel counts.

Iterate until you love your product. Then, bring your users along for the ride.

Ship only what you love.

Why fight mediocrity? Why is this important.

Consumer expectations have changed. Blue screens of death are rare nowadays. The expectation is that

The 7 second rule: a mobile app needs to make the value proposition or “Wow” someone in less than 7 seconds, otherwise they won’t use it again.

Customer support for chewing gum just doesn’t work and doesn’t scale. If you build something that’s shoddy, you will spend a lot of time in customer support.

Niklas runs a $200 million fund which has invested in 50 companies. They don’t look for any particular subsectors. They look at opportunities in all kinds of sectors. When Google entered search, all the existing search engines pivoted into portals because that’s what the investment bank analysts were predicting was the next big thing. Google instead focused just on search with a better product. That is why Niklas does not look at a single sector, because similar timing opportunities for innovation exist in all sectors.

It’s very hard to develop for Windows or Blackberry. First, you have to put a gun to the developer’s head, because no one wants to go through the trouble. Alos, often the userbase on those platforms is just in the single digits, so it’s not possible to justify the cost and effort.

The growth in startups is not in US or Europe, it’s in emerging markets. China, Brazil, Russia, Turkey is showing a lot of growth.

The best way to reach Niklas is through the website, <a href=“http://Atomico.com”>Atomico.com</a>

There are four principles to Deb Roy’s concept of predicting learning:

1. Record everything and store this data
2. Develop machine learning algorithms to understand the data
3. Visualize those patterns to create understanding
4. Leverage those understandings to better certain areas of society

Language is the defining feature of the human species. The basic data to understand how a child learns is naturally in the home. Deb Roy recorded video of his baby son throughout the house as he grew up and started to talk. The video produced movement data that could be traced and datamined, particular when the son transitioned from saying “gaga” to saying “water.”

There is a natural relationship between the number of times a word is heard and learning that word. However, there is a social context to learning. The activity one does when learning also affects learning of words related to the activity. The 3-D movement landscape pattern associated with learning words can be referred to as a visual wordscape. The uniqueness of the wordscape is a predictor of how early the word will be learned. The more unique the wordscape compared to other words,  the earlier the word will be learned. This has implications for those having trouble learning language; you need to look at the non-linguistic aspects of learning.

The same principles of linguistic analysis can be applied to a whole new are: TV. His company, Bluefin Labs, connects what shows are running to what people are saying about the shows. Bluefin is indexing about 215 US networks, 200,000 shows and 2 million ads per month and linking these to conversations generated by 20 million people. With text mining and semantic analysis, you can understand what people are thinking about collectively.

Here is Deb Roy’s really interesting talk at TED:

This is Marissa Mayer’s fourth consecutive year speaking at LeWeb. MG Siegler interviews her in a less confrontational manner than Mike Arrington last year, but alas neither he nor Mike got any stunning new developments from Google. Why is it that some companies like Apple preserve the wow factor, while others like Google don’t? Perhaps this is why MG asked her “Is Google more afraid of becoming like Apple or like Microsoft?” Tellingly, Marissa skirted the question.

Currently, she is in charge of “local” at Google, including maps and deals. This includes indoor maps. Indoor spaces are equally important to outside spaces. Shopping malls, ariports, and other large spaces can be very confusing, so Google is tackling the problem with another offer. Not only are there indoor maps, but Google can place you within that map by using wi-fi.

Local feeds social and social feeds local, so Google+ has a big role to play in location based services. From the lessons learned during the launch of Buzz, they understood much more about privacy and built this into Google+

The role of a product manager is not to have all the answers, but to understand all the needs and bring together a coherent vision.

Etc and so on …

7 Principles of Innovation based on the “Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs.” 

Jobs and Wozniak started Apple in the spare bedroom of Steve’s parent’s house, before getting too big and moving the business down to the garage. What the world needs is more jobs … Steve Jobs. It’s fair to ask ourselves, “What would Steve do?”

Principle #1 is to do what you love. Bill Gross just said the same thing. Being the richest man in the cemetary doesn’t matter … doing something that matters does. Build a company that touches peoples’ lives every day. You cannot create something great unless you are passionately moving the world forward.

Principle #2 is to put a dent in the universe. There is a difference between vision and mission. A vision is clear and concise and consistently communicated. Vision inspires evangelists. A vision helps you see things that other people may have missed. Two people can see exactly the same thing and interpret things differently, based on their own vision. Starbuck’s founder Schultz’s vision was not to make a better cup of coffee, but to create a third space between the office and the home.

Principle #3 “Creativity is just connecting things” ~Steve Jobs. Successful innovators apply learning from one field, to another. According to Dennis Crowley, foursquare is a more interesting tool because it was built in Greenwhich Village and not Silicon Valley.

Principle #4 Keep it simple. Say no to 1,00 things to make sure you’re not on the wrong track or try to do too much. When you can create a product that a two-year old can use intuitively, you know you’re on to something. “As physical beings, we understand clarity” ~Jonathan Ives. Simplicity is crucial.

Principle #5 is about the experience with the product. Create insanely great experiences. Innovation is not just about product innovation, it’s about the experience people have with the product. The Apple brand was inspired by the Four Seasons hotel, because the hotel chain delivers such good customer experience.

Principle #6 is to master the message. Nobody was better than Steve Jobs, because he informed, illuminated, and inspired during his presentations. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t get people excited about it, it’s not worth much. Learn the rule of three. The human mind can only process 3 or 4 points of information in short term memory, so don’t bombard people with dozens of benefits. That is why you find groups of three in everything Apple does. Also learn to think visually. Use the Picture Superiority Effect to presentations, by adding great images to slides. Retention goes up by 65%. With words only, retention is about 10%.

Principle #7 is the most important: Sell Dreams, Not Products. As human beings, we are self consumed. Help people accomplish their dreams, and you will win them over. To turn Apple around, Steve Jobs focused and innovated around his customers and their needs. Steve Jobs’ advice was: “Dream Bigger”

Live post from LeWeb 2011: Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote and Loic Le Meur, Founder, LeWeb

Orange announces that all their customers will receive a premium subscription to Evernote as part of their service, starting in Spring 2012.

Phil talks about building Evernote as a “100 year” company. They were just named as Inc. Magazine company of the year (“How It Got Great, Fast”). Loic asks for a show of hands and it looks like 90% of attendees are using the service.

Phil says that their company is built on trust. If they want people to trust Evernote with their most personal notes, then Evernote must also act transparently.

Evernote has 20 million users (the company was launched in 2008). The growth has been organic, there has been no advertising. The question is, how do they behave?

After the first month, there is a big drop off. But once you use Evernote after one month, you don’t leave. And then, after two years or about 27 month, people start to come back — because Evernote contains their memories.

In the first month, only one half of one percent pay for Evernote. But the longer people use Evernote, the more people pay. After 3 years of use, about 20% of people are paid subscribers. There are about 750,000 premium users, paying $5 a month or $45 a year. The company became profitable about 6 months ago, then raised about $50 million from Sequoia.

Two new and separate applications were launched yesterday: Evernote Food and Evernote Hello. On mobile, they want really simple and evident apps, rather than adding more buttons to an existing app.

Evernote Food is a simple way to capture food experiences in Evernote. You take pictures of food and share them through Facebook, Twitter, email, or you just save them privately to your own space. The app automatically captures the restaurant.

Evernote Hello is a way to capture the people you are meeting, so you can have a way to remember them later.

Phil says that “Evernote is built for me.” The apps are meant to work together, so you can capture a picture of dinner, the people you were with, and notes from the conversation.

The goal is to reimagine productivity software, which is operating like it was 30 years ago. It’s time to refresh productivity to the new era of mobile phones, social networks, etc.

Bill Gross, Founder & CEO, Idealab

“Learning From Failure: 20 Years of Entrepreneurial Lessons in 20 Minutes”

Bill Gross has raised over $1B over the years. In a very fast-paced presentation, he shared 12 lessons of being an entrepreneur, of which I captured 9 …

1. Market Power Rules — Try to find a rapidly growing market, it’s like running a race with a strong wind at your back.

2. Master the Demo — Learning how to sell, to pitch, to explain, to demonstrate is one of the most valuable entrepreneurial skills.

3. Pursue Your Passion — Work at something you love — Every business will face huge challenges that you will only overcome if you have deep passion for the idea.

4. Focus, Focus, Focus — Focus is almost always better, even if you focus on the wrong thing. Do a few things extremely well and you will connect better with the customer.

5. Recognize Your Strengths — Design a structure around them, and balance that by having complementary skills

6. Test, Test, Test — Find a way to test your core proposition with customers as soon as you can, as often as you can

7. Stick With It — When you know you have something, stick with it despite what the critics say

8. Find Esssential Partners — If you have a large, world-changing ideas, you need to find the right partners to help you grow

9. All Truth Passes Through 3 Stages — First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is opposed. Third, it is adopted as if it was self-evident.