Well I would say that as so many other sector, Peru has a long way to go, but could transform the gap into an opportunity, if the country manage the change cleverly. To give you an idea about that gap, UK has a internet penetration rate of 73%, France stands at 69%, compared to the 23.4% in Peru. I remember the effort of the French public body, to emphasis the use of Internet and the effort to invest in proper communication infrastructure, as did many other European Countries. Actually northern European countries are probably the best examples, with Norway at 90.9% and Sweden at 89.2%. And Peru should do so. Today a basic 1MB internet connection cost you around 50US$, while the average income is around 200$ per month. Would you spend nearly 25% of your wage on Internet? Probably not.

On the other hand, I’m not pretty sure that Telco are making their best effort to support the growth. I had to decrease my connection at home from 2MB to 1MB, as Telefonica admits they couldn’t deliver a stable 2MB connection due to the increase of new users in the area. In other word, the pipe was far too small to address the (little) demand.

But let’s hope those numbers will continue to increase. Let’s also hope Government will push for better infrastructure and as other countries in the continent (Argentina, Chile) will encourage the population to use more and more Internet. I can’t imagine an Emerging country, aiming to reach the next level, without considering Internet.

That’s how we went for the first time to Cibertec, the tech branch of one of the best universities in Lima, where the event was hold. The venue was a good surprise, with a very comfortable auditorium, good quality Wi-Fi.
The 3 presentations that followed were very interesting and very educational for us both, as we are still learning about the usage of Internet in Peru, which as you can imagine is slightly different from what we know in Europe. All presentations can be found here.
And then comes the networking event, another great surprise for us. The people were really friendly with us, “The Gringos”. All the people we were lucky to talk with, made an effort to converse in English, and we had some very interesting discussions.
Personally I have been to a lot of networking events, sometimes related to other industry than Internet, and I can tell you that some of them are very boring. It clearly wasn’t the case here. It was great to feel the enthusiasm, the interest that procures Internet in Peru, and to get to know new people.

It was definitively worth it, and we will of course attend the upcoming events from Lima Valley. We would like to thank the people behind Lima Valley and all the people we met, and we hope to see all of you again at the next event.

And if you are a company related to technology and Internet, and you a located in Lima, we would recommend you to join this community, without a shadow of doubt.

Surprisingly (or not) we realized that all of our ideas were merging into one single interest: to help promoting local businesses online.

Even though the communication infrastructure and the internet access in Peru is growing pretty fast, there is still lots to do in that field. Some people are still not convinced that Internet could help them to make more business. Others simply doesn’t know how and where to start. I’m always very surprised to see how many local businesses are using @hotmail.com or @gmail.com email addresses as business emails.

But back to the main question: How we could help local businesses to jump into the internet world? How we could help them to generate more revenue?

We realize that the existing offer were standard business directories located somewhere in the world but not in Peru, i.e without any connection whatsoever with local businesses. The few who are actually located in Peru, only provide listing without helping the businesses with their online promotion.

That is how we came up with the idea for BusinessPeru, where we have three main goals, that we want to provide to the local businesses.

- Visibility with a directory, where the local businesses easily can be listed, located and contacted.
- Accessibility to very simple tools to build and maintain their presence online, using either a dedicated page or a dedicated website.
- Efficiency by combining our knowledge of the Internet Marketing world with our experience in the local market.

We are still in the development phase, and are very excited about what we build day after day. If you have any ideas/suggestions that you think might be helpful, please let us know, either by commenting here or by emailing us at info@businessperu.net.

Make sure you follow us to receive news as soon as we launch BusinessPeru, and feel free to register your company at BusinessPeru.net. You can grab our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or just Like us on Facebook.

Since the early days of 2000, where my internet career started, I have always had my hurdle with Flash designers. While I always have agreed that Flash can be a useful tool, many web designers have misunderstood the use of Flash, and started making Full-Flash pages, crazy animation and sounds, and in general just misusing this tool. Unfortunately I noticed Peru isn’t exempt from such a situation. If you are interested in making a successful online presence for your company (or maybe are a developer yourself), you should read on to get 5 reasons to stop using Flash.

#1: The Search Engines cannot read your site!

The most important reason not to use Flash on your website, is the way Flash works in regards to SEO. For those who have not heard about it, SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, and is a term of what you can do, to make Google and other Search Engines (like Bing and Yahoo) rank your site higher. SEO is a big subject, so we will have more posts about SEO for beginners later.

Now regarding Flash, it is one of the worst things you can do to your website. In order for Google to index and list your website, they need to read the text of your website. If you use Flash to show this content to your users, Google will not be able to read you content, and will not know where to put your website. In other words, Search Engines can only read text; Flash has no text. Search Engines finds your site and content by following links; Flash has no links. By using a Full Flash website, you are making sure that your customers will have very poor chances of finding your business website through Google and other search engines.

#2: Not a true standard

All browsers can read and understand HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We all know and understand how to use the browser when we receive our new computer. With Flash we are required to take action, and install the Flash Player on our computer. Though most computers today have Flash installed, it is still not everyone who runs Flash. Platforms like iPhone and iPad from Apple does not support Flash. By making a complete Flash site, you are excluding users from your site.

#3: Requires more bandwidth and is CPU Heavy

When you enter a Flash page, you are often prompted by “Loading…” bars, and have to wait for all the content to download, before you can view the page. Since most Flash designers seem to hate simplicity in their designs, they often go for big media-rich pages, which often include animations and music. When you finally have loaded all the content, it can slow down your computer; especially if you are using an older computer, and have a few different websites open in your browser.

#4: Breaks the rules of the web

During all the time the web has existed and seemingly becoming more popular, one of the reasons is the basic rules. When we browse the web, we know how we click on links, scroll down a page, press the back-button in the browser to go back to where we came from and share links with our friends by bookmarking and copy/pasting the address. Many of these function, like bookmarking or linking to a sub-page or using the browsers back-button, are not enabled in most Flash sites, and will general make it harder for the users to navigate your site. On most standard Flash sites, you can’t print a page or simply copy/paste some text either.

Number #5: Can be replaced by other technologies

Today more and more browsers are supporting HTML5 and CSS3, together with optimizing the speed of JavaScript. Together with libraries such as Jquery and Mootools, this gives developers new ways to make graphic and moving things on a website, without having to use Flash. This also allows for making smoother and more graphical navigation on your site, and will often be faster to load than Flash and be supported on all platforms and browsers (Cell phones, PS3, PSP, iPhones & iPads, etc)

I hope that these 5 strong reasons can make more “web designers” to understand that they should never use Flash to make a full website. And even more important, Business owners who are hiring a web designer should know, that you should never hire someone who offers to make a full site in Flash. While Flash does have a few good uses, it is not useful for most websites.

What are we going to share with you here? First and foremost we will be sharing information about our project BusinessPeru. How we deal with the project, the improvement we are making, but also the difficulties we face. We will also share what we consider as Best Practice in Business, Technology and all other fields we are involved in.

Stay tuned, and don’t hesitate to comment in English, Spanish or even Quechua, we also love to engage conversation.