I was invited to take part in a Press Conference announcing the new MSN
Search in Brasil, which we launched Aug. 3rd. Turns out I was in for a
bit of a treat — I got my picture taken with Osvaldo Barbosa de
Oliveira, the head of MSN Brasil, which appeared in Valor, a local Sao
Paulo economic magazine. Still trying to figure out if I need a
subscription to see the content or just fill out the form….

Anyway, we had a good press conference (about 10 local reporters) and
MSN Search was received pretty well. Like in most places, people in
Brazil tend to use Google or Yahoo, but they’re starting to see what
we’re doing and take some interesst. It’ll take time, certainly, but
it’s coming.

Some other fun facts about Brazil… some 70% of Orkut, Google’s
social-networking thing, are Brazilians. That’s about 6 million of the 8
million people on Orkut (which, in the grand scheme of things, makes
Orkut one of the smaller networks, but hey, Google doesn’t get it right
all the time!). Also, MSN Messenger is the #1 messenger there —
Yahoo’s a distant third, and AOL (AIM) really has no presence in Brazil.
ICQ (also owned by AOL) is also small now, as that product really hasn’t
done much in about 8 years.

What does this mean? Turns out Brazilians like networking and talking to
one another, a lot more so than I’ve seen elsewhere. Huh. Learn
something new every day.

That evening, my hosts Guillherme and Tiago took me to a nice dinner at
the Valermo (?) Grill, where I had a lovely picanha-cut (a local cut,
not sure exactly how it compares to any US cut) steak along with some
lovely sides. Mmm… Brazilian beef is just yummy.