Silicon Palms Blog

Recently I met British fellow at the commodity and futures exchange in downtown Sao Paulo, during lunch he mentioned that his wife, originally from New Zealand (aka Kiwi) and several other Kiwi and Canadian women, were members of a charity organization that was formally called "Canadian Women's International Society" and that they were hosting a party at the house of the Canadian Consul General, to celebrate the re-launch of their charitable society, plus opening the doors to men. My curiosity was piqued and a few days later I found myself enjoying the company of about 50 foreign nationals (Expats), many of whom were from Commonwealth countries, and all of whom were charmed by the gracious hospitality of our hostess, the Consul General of Canada for Sao Paulo, Brazil.

As my good luck would have it, I'm now a member of the newly formed "Canadian International Society"

Who we are

The Canadian International Society (CIS) takes its name from the group of Canadian Women, who founded the group in 1962. Led by the wife of the Canadian Consul General, it was founded as a social organization with a focus on charitable work in Sao Paulo.

These days the CIS is open to women and men of all nationalities, and has a broad range of members. The group has expanded and today has over 60 members from at least 20 different countries, including Brazil.

What We Do

The CIS mission is to offer a social forum for its members while also assisting NGO's in the Sao Paulo area through fundraising events and opportunities to volunteer in vulnerable communities. These activities include monthly luncheons and happy hours as well as one or two major events throughout the year such as family day BBQs, fashion shows or evening soirees.

The Society is coordinated by a volunteer Board of Governors who are elected yearly. Positions include President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, Charities, Membership and Communications. The Canadian Consul General is the Honorary President of the board.

Introducing ... The Lexicon of Sustainability from the lexicon of sustainability on Vimeo.

People ask me all the time about moving money from one country to another and when I use the term "offshore banking" they often have a quizzical look on their faces and ask me: "is it legal to have an offshore bank account?" That about sums-up the way most people think about banking offshore, especially because of the way mainstream media has portrayed the topic but also movies often depict the lawyer with the brief case, on a tropical island, meeting-up with the beautiful co-conspirator, after having pulled of some big rip-off back in the states. So it probably surprises my friends in Brazil and Canada even more when I suggest that United States offers some of the best offshore banking services that they'll be able to find anywhere - now they're really confused....

Offshore relates to banking in any country outside of where you are domiciled (definition of domicile: a person's fixed, permanent, and principal home for legal purposes). Therefore, your bank account doesn't need to be in Cayman or Switzerland to be offshore and in many cases you can get excellent bank services from almost any country in the world. I recommend U.S. banking for anyone not permanently living there because the rates are relatively low but more importantly it's really easy to get a Paypal account with a U.S. bank account. However, in today's world privacy and asset protection play a more important part of an overall banking strategy and let's face it, the U.S. is just not big on privacy, as a matter of fact, when you open a new business account in America you'll soon-after be barraged with solicitations from local businesses and services, which means that the bank sold your information before the ink was even dry. Now that's not as much of a problem, more of an annoyance but the fact is that most people just don't want anyone, including a snooping government, to know how much money they have in the bank - that's where I come in and the reason people ask me about banking, as I've been setting-up offshore accounts since 1994.

In the country of Brazil the supreme court ruled that Poker is a game of skill, and is not classified as a game of chance like, say, Bingo. For this reason there are legal poker rooms throughout the country and online poker may be growing faster in Brazil than any other market on earth, which has prompted many of the biggest online poker companies to sponsor top players and spend allot of money in marketing and advertising their brands inside Brazil.

Brazil Poker Pro was launched to provide poker information in Portuguese and in a short few months the site has grown in popularity and created a buzz on Twitter and Facebook amongst Brazilian poker aficionados, some relationships with followed and strategic partnerships were formed and now less than 4 months later BrazilPokerPro.com is generating revenue and has a promising future to become a key voice in the poker community of Brazil.

The main author of Brazil Poker Pro is a an authority on the topic, extremely passionate about poker, has won some significant poker tournaments both online and in the big poker rooms of Sao Paulo but most importantly he's very prolific and likes to publish a new story every day, as well as Tweet to his large group of followers and friends and Facebook. We're seeking more strategic partners and thinking about adding another author, once the traffic reaches 1,000 visitors per day. Also, we'd like to hire an assistant to help us keep up with the social networking.

Nowadays with the built-in translation tools found on Google chrome, or available at the click of a mouse to Babelfish etc... the information on Brazil Poker Pro offers value to any poker player, no matter the language they speak.

One of the great benefits of mastering Brazilian Portuguese is being able to fully appreciate the music by understanding the lyrics. Brazil enjoys the largest recording industry outside of the United States, so the number of brilliant artists and the wide variety of genres (most people have never heard of), is truly staggering. Perhaps the first time I'd ever hear this beautiful language was by recorded music, as my father had an extensive jazz collection, and even before I was born the bossa nova was played in my house and now today the first song I can sing in Portuguese is the Garota de Ipanema (The Girl from Ipanema).

Legend has it that the Portuguese language was brought to Portugal by the Knights Templar and was the last Romance language created from Vulgar Latin by an order of monks who were language makers, somewhat like today's software makers, that means that Portuguese was on the cutting-edge of the evolution of Latin, maybe a: Latin 5.0 at that time. Now there are some 800 million total Romance language speakers, worldwide, the largest segment of which would be about 500 million Spanish/Castilian and the French with 250 million are just slightly ahead of the worldwide population of Portuguese speaking people, however Brazil has the largest population of Portuguese speaking citizens and then a slightly lessor number of Italian speaking people. I've been told that it's easier for Portuguese speakers to understand and adopt the other Romance languages, for example many Brazilian's can understand Spanish but my friends from Costa Rica, for example, found it really difficult time to understand Portuguese.

Once upon a time the Portuguese were a great seafaring nation with a colony spread far and wide over the globe, today it is the fifth most spoken language in the world, the most widely spoken in the southern hemisphere, and the third most spoken in the Western world. In addition to Brazil and Portugal, it is used in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and East Timor, as well as in the former territories of Portuguese India (Goa, Daman, Isle of Angediva, Simbor, Gogol, Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli) and in small communities that were part of the Portuguese Empire in Asia as Malacca, Malaysia and East Africa as Zanzibar, Tanzania.

In modern times the language has a home, if you can imagine that? The world's only museum for a language was opened in 2006 in Sao Paulo, in a refurbished building (see photo) that was once the central train station, Estacao da Luz where 300 thousand passengers arrive and leave the station everyday, in a neighborhood of the same name. The Portuguese language lives and grows in this fabulous refurbished building which was chosen for the museum because of the fact that, it was mainly here that thousands of non-Portuguese speaking immigrants arriving from Europe and Asia via the Port of Santos into São Paulo got acquainted with the language for the first time.

The famous Brazilian singer, songwriter and composer, Gilberto Gil spoke at the opening of Estacao da Luz, with these remarks:

The language speaks for you. The purpose of studying and interacting with a language in a museum, cultural and exchange programs, orthographic agreements, and the development of new words show how important it is. The language is our mother. This museum covers most, if not all, the aspects of the written and spoken language, of the dynamic language, the language of interaction, the language of affection, the language of gestures and of any other aspects that this museum was meant to promote.

Looking around online I found some very good resources, both free and subscription, plus found a large variety of YouTube videos, some making the nearly impossible claim of having you speaking Portuguese in 30 days, The reason I say "nearly" impossible is because if you already speak another Latin language then it is possible to be conversational in a relatively short period of time, depending on your memory, study habits and your latent ability for languages. For myself I will be satisfied to reach the conversational status before the end of 2011 and plan to use this blog to post updates, from time to time, on the best resources I find.

The amount of positive comments from Rosetta Stone was what won-me-over to try their software but I also liked the course offering (especially price) and free downloads, blog and Facebook group associated with the company called Transparent Language and a really cool Blog called Tecla SAP.

Image via Wikipedia

To become successful in life requires a long list of important steps, lots and lots of persistence but above all else; determination. There are several great manifestos, filled with the keys to achieving success and several thousand (or more) places where you can obtain this information, all of which is meaningless until it's assimilated to become knowledge, then put into practice to become wisdom. This process is known as "The Pursuit of Happiness".

If we were to amass all that's ever been written or spoken about happiness and then distilled it down to the purest idea, that which we could consume like a magical elixir, it would be this: the secret to success is in your mind. Now I know that may sound rather simplistic, and yes it's been said by a thousand different people but herein lays the road-map to enlightenment - master your mind, moment by moment, and make yourself manifest your destiny.

There's so much more than can be said on this topic and so many ways to come to the same conclusion but anyway you slice and dice it, you'll always come back to the same understanding. My favorite comparison of the mind, is the computer. Since the operating instructions for the applications to create happiness are default programs installed on the hard-drive (brain), and came delivered that way from the factory. It happens that sometimes we get more excited by new programs and become distracted by the gee-whiz shiny new applications, and forget the need to keep things simple.

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
• Mahatma Gandhi

Interesting to note, that one of Gandhi's greatest admirers was Albert Einstein, he talked and wrote about Gandhi often, even stating in an interview that he thought Gandhi was the greatest Politician of our time, and that we ought to adopt more of Gandhi's policies. While I searching a little deeper, I came across one of the most spiritual quotes from Einstein that I've ever read, and once I grasped it, I knew this is what I wanted to share for my New Year message.

In 1950 Albert Einstein wrote the following profound nugget of knowledge, then nearly 20 years after his death, it was published in the New York Times, and again the same year in the New York Post. My wish for 2011 is that Einstein's idea will manifest itself on our planet, in a faster and greater way, maybe as a peaceful cultural-revolution. I believe that we all have within us, enormous capacity to change (for the better), and it's just a matter of awakening, to what needs to happen. Let's make it happen!

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. ~ Albert Einstein

Letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times (29 March 1972) and The New York Post (28 November 1972). Source: WikiQuotes

I recently returned to Sao Paulo, Brazil after 6 months in North America, if there were an economic downturn in the rest of the world, they forgot to mention it to Brasileiro's. This country is drunk with economic excess, even the street vendors are upgrading equipment and spending more money than ever to build-up their businesses. The signs of growth are everywhere in this city, especially in the skyline, which is sprouting new high-rise condominiums, like springtime grass on a newly seeded soccer pitch. The economic growth Rio, for a change, is even more accelerated than Sao Paulo.

Brazil's commitment to sport can be seen in the further venue investment that is already under way in Rio. The world-famous Maracanã stadium will close next year for two years of refurbishment. The areas around it will be renovated, with access and transport links improved as the entire neighborhood is reborn ready for host the final of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Work is already underway on the ongoing development of the Olympic Training Center (OTC), which includes many of the state-of-the-art venues built for the 2007 Pan and Parapan American Games. The OTC will be at the heart of the Rio Games - and international sport for years afterward. Athletes and coaches from all over the world will be offered scholarships to what will be a new regional hub for sport.

With a strong economy and now guaranteed funding, Brazil's economy is now the tenth largest in the world - and predicted to be fifth by the 2016 Olympics. Brazil is the world's second biggest food exporter, one of the world's largest oil and ore producers and the fifth largest advertising market. This diverse economy is the engine that drives South America and one of the world's top 10 consumer markets. Brazil has the highest levels of Internet use in the world and according to the Brazilian Association of Information Technology and Communication Companies (commonly known as BRASSCOM), Brazil's offshore IT outsourcing market hit $1.4 billion in 2008, rising 75 percent in a single year, making this one of the best places in the world for a web development company.

Experts predict that an additional $500M will be spent just on IT and web development for the FIFA World Cup of soccer in 2014. The overall Latin America market for outsourced services, is expected to grow 12 percent in 2010 to $8 billion, according to Forrester Research. That's on top of the $19 billion that local companies spend on IT consulting services. However, Brazil has approximately 250,000 IT professionals, 23,000 annual IT graduates, and infrastructure capable of supporting double-digit growth, this places Brazil firmly at the heart of the IT services supply chain in the Southern Hemisphere.

In October 2009, a report from Gartner claimed that "Brazil's economic footprint combined with having the largest domestic IT consumption in all of Latin America, as well as international recognition as one of the most promising and rapidly emerging economies, makes it a natural destination to evaluate for IT services.

Reefer Poker Announces Surf's Up Promotion to Celebrate Launch of New Online CasinoBeach.com

Malta, June 29, 2010 - ReeferPoker.com, in partnership with ReeferCasino.com, has announced the launch of their new online casino partner; CasinoBeach.com.

As part of the launch promo for this new Real Time Gaming casino, the group of sites, which includes the social network ReeferPeople.com, has created a promotion that has players visiting all of their sites on a hunt for branded surfboards.