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This article again illustrates the nature of the Latin American technology market: largely consumer driven. This stands in opposition to the American model, which is mostly a top-down funding model where infrastructure is the primary concern for investors. In fact, most infrastructure spending in Latin America is imported from Japan, China, and the US, while in consumer markets, these global players have a hard time competing with local providers. Latin American must diversify its tech industres foundation to include local businesses focusing on infrastructure technologies if it wishes to be a competitor on the global scale in the future, rather than remaining dependent on these global powers for tech innovation.

Broadpeak will for the first time showcase its nanoCDN technology in Latin America at TB Connect LATAM. This new CDN (content delivery network) techology " leverages subscribers' home networks to reduce infrastructure investments for network service providers," essentially utilizing equipment already in subscribers households to minimize the need for some sort of additional tower. These sorts of technologies are necessary for the development of technology markets in Latin America, where a lack of infrastructure remains one of the most significant barriers preventing a break-through in online and technological usage by the populous.

This article continues analysis of Latin America's potential as an economic and technological powerhouse of the future. Christopher Johnson writes, " As Europe attempts to cope with its financial crisis and Asia braces for the looming slowdown of China's economy, Latin America - in America's backyard - is witnessing an unprecedented expansion of its indigenous technology economy." Of course, the region is not without its problems: violence in Northern Mexico, lack of Brazilian infrastructure, and the attempts of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to kindle anti-US sentiment, to name a few. However, the result of the diligence of a number of independent technological startups in countries such as Peru, Brazil, and Argentina give many hope that Latin America will become a significant player in the global marketplace sometime in the near future.

An interesting story discussing an enrichment program directed at Peru's underprivileged schools. The aim of the program was to put a laptop computer in the hands of every student. With the help of this technology, the hope was that young Peruvian's would be able to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of literacy, mathematics, technological aptitude, etc. However the results of the project were not exactly as planned. The rural areas, which are often the neediest, suffer the greatest complications when trying to implement the technology in the classroom. It appears that these communities are simply not equipped to maximize the potential of the laptop devices. Remote locations, lack of prior understanding, and poor electrification infrastructure all play a part. Still, the use of the laptops did seem to improve some aspects of the learning experience, and at the least provided some exposure from which future interests may be sparked. This article seems to shed a bit of light on the dramatic discrepancies across cultures. In the U.S. individuals are so completely surrounded with technological resources that the assimilation of new technologies is often seamless. For other countries, like Peru, their lack of technological immersion creates systemic and epistemic faults which greatly affect their ability to actually make good use of information technologies. I thought this piece was fascinating and seems to point toward other worthwhile cultural questions.

I wonder what the impact was in more urbanized areas, as opposed to Lacachi.

This article explains a new road that has been built that is working to revitalize a road for farmers. This road creates a direct path to the super market in order to boost earnings for the farmers. It was funded by the United States supported "Millennium Challenge Cooperation."

More new stuff for me to learn about, thanks, Elizabeth! It's amazing that lack of reliable roads can be a stumbling block to development in the 21st century, but often this is the legacy of colonial regimes that in previous eras weren't interested in internal connections among the people, but in building only what was necessary in terms of transportation infrastructure to extract indigenous resources and get them exported (a problem in Africa as well). I didn't know anything about the Millennium Challenge Corporation, so began looking up some info. One interesting fact is that they are rated as the most "transparent" US agency and 9th most transparent out of 72 in the world by "Publish What You Fund: The Global Campaign for Aid Transparency" [one of 13 organizations marked "fair," the second highest category -- only two came in at the top category]. http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/index/2012-index/ The pressure for transparency: a consequence of the Internet, since the cost of "publishing" the information is minimal? It will be interesting to see how well the federal and state governments at home and abroad do on this score in the coming years.