GOOGLE GUYS TRAVEL TO BRAZIL TO CHECK OUT BRAZILIAN ETHANOL

Note: the following story was adapted and translated from an article that appeared originally on www.uol.com.br, the electronic version of "Folha de Sao Paulo", Brazil's leading daily newspaper, on February 3rd, 2006.
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Somewhat belatedly, I report on Larry Page and Sergei Brin’s trip to Brazil in early February 2006. Several Brazilian mainstream media carried the news, including “Folha de Sao Paulo” and Computerworld.

As is becoming increasingly the norm, a blog broke the story, which was subsequently picked up by the MSM. H.O.
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It all started on “Blue Bus”, a Brazilian blog. In a post, the blog’s owner, Julio Hungria said, “The Google guys came to a restaurant next door for dinner. Can you believe that?”

“They displayed a local’s familiarity with Ipanema. But I’m sure the two guys were really Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The went inside the Gula Gula restaurant on Anibal Street, wearing jeans and a t-shirt. And you know what? Nobody noticed.”

Mr. Hungria added, “On the mezzanine, they tried to make sense of the menu. ‘What is picadinho?’, they asked. They thought it was some kind of fish, when, in reality, it is a Brazilian dish made of small pieces of chopped beef. Their reaction: ‘No, no red meat’”.

Soon a blogger from the state of Minas Gerais chipped in, saying, “I also ran across the Google guys in the hallways of UFMG”, one of Brazil’s top universities.

The statement was backed up by a picture on the university’s web site, which showed the two entrepreneurs with the university’s president, under the headline, “Google Wants to Boost Partnerships”.

Meanwhile, on Blue Bus, two comments had been added by readers. One speculated whether "the rwo men weren’t actually look-alikes who had been hired to transit around Brazil’s major cities”, part of a viral marketing campaign. The other reader, Marco Chiaretti, noted, “Soon, someone’s going to say, ‘Here come those two nerds from Google.’

Being a Google guy in Brazil isn’t always fun.

The Dow Jones News Service, on yesterday’s electronic edition of “The Wall Street Journal”, said that the search engine company’s numbers for the last quarter of 2005, which led to a sharp drop in stock prices, “demonstrated the risks of international expansion”.

The figures that gave the company’s stock a tumble came out of Great Britain, but the news service focused on investment risks in China, then Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and India.

By phone, from Brazil, one of the Google guys, Sergey Brin, said that, “We will intensify our efforts to raise our infrastructure abroad and develop products designed for each market”.

And the Google guys’ interest in ethanol, which led them to the interior of Sao Paulo state,
proved, in the end, to be genuine. An interest which is shared not only by them and George W. Bush, but by others as well, according to a headline from “Globo Online”: “Bill Gates, Bush, and Goole Eye Brazilian Ethanol”.

The story goes that the founder of Microsoft “plans to invest in the Brazilian fuel”. And there’s more. In analyzing the repercussions of Mr. Bush’s State of the Union Address, the print version of the WSJ spoke of a new “technological fever” in Silicon Valley: investing in alternative energy companies.

Among others, the WSJ quotes Vinod Khosla, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, a company from which he has departed, who, over the past few years, has invested in “half a dozen” new companies in “clean fuel”, such as ethanol.

By the way, the cover story on the national ethanol program that Mr. Bush dreams about, the WSJ underscored difficulties, praised the initiative, and hailed Brazil as a “success story”.
On another note, “The New York Times” highlighted the “lack of enthusiasm” shown by Mr. Bush’s Republican Party, and, in particular, by Saudi Arabia.

Toward the middle of the article, an independent researcher remarked, “It is remarkable that we do not impose tariffs on Saudi fuel, when we tax fuel from Brazil”.

Follow what's happening in the Brazilian ethanol market on Ethablog, the only blog in English dedicated to Brazilian ethanol.