According to e-bit, a Brazilian consulting firm, Brazilians spent $10.1 billion last year online, a 26 percent nominal increase from the year before, and are expected to spend $12.6 billion in 2012. The data also shows the impact of growing competition. In the last three months of 2011, Brazil’s top 50 online stores lost market share compared with the same period in 2010.

Brazil has the highest active reach of Internet consumers using the social network from home/work computers. Some 38.1 million Brazilians visited Facebook during March 2012, equivalent to 76.7 percent of all people who were active online that month from home and work computers in the market

The international angle, Rimer says, is becoming an increasingly common early priority: “Companies have to think from day one about international,” says Rimer. He says that this is because the biggest competitive factor among many of them these days is scale: “A lot of tech startups from the last five to seven years have been less about technology innovation and more about the right service or software that has found a good fit. It’s much more replicable, and so they have to make sure that they conquer the international opportunity very early on.”