Ten things that are genuinely brazilian

There are a few things that are very common in you life and you didnt know that it was invented by brazilians. So lets get started:

1. Brigadeiro - a similar translation to this candy it could be “chocolate truffle” which is present in any brazilian party such as birthday. It consists on a bown of condensed milk, butter and cocoa powder. It’s name came from the elections in 1945 where the brigadier Eduardo Gomes was in the race for presidency and in his honor it was given the title of the most senior Air Force officer.

2. Airplane - Many people already heard about this invention, but Alberto Santos Dumont is considered the “father“ of the aviation. The first achivement was when the 14-Bis airplnane, built by him, flew over the sky of Paris in 1906. Many other inverntors claim to be the inventor of airplane, but the history gives to him the merit.

3. Rice drainer - it was invented by the dentists Therezinha Beatriz Alves de Andrade Zorowich, who was tired of seeing the drain of her sink always clogged. So with a help of her husband, the engineer Solon Zorowich, who set up a prototype in aluminum foil and introduced him to the owner of the company Trol S / A. Shortly thereafter, the product went on sale.

4. Typewriter - as it happens to the airplane, this invention is claimed by many countries. But here is granted the creation of a mechanical writing to the prist Francisco João de Azevedo, born in North Paraíba (now João Pessoa) in 1827. Professor of mathematics and a member of a family of mechanics, he built a model that was presented at the Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition of Pernambuco in 1861 and at the National Show in Rio de Janeiro in the same year.

5. Ballon - Bartolomeu de Gusmao, who found that the heated air was lighter than air from the atmosphere. As a result, the creation of the hot air balloon. The first attempt to Gusmao was not a success: the vehicle caught fire and frightened the public who had gone to check the discovery. 

6. Voting machine - this invention of Judge Carlos Prudencio, from Santa Catarina Court of Justice allowed the vote was secret fact and better protected. The paper ballots were more fragile and more prone to fraud. The electronic ballot box also helps at the time of the vote count, which was faster and safer.

In 1989, Prudencio organized the first vote in the city of Brusque (SC), with the help of a computer. The process has only been improving ever since. In 1995, Brazil became the first country to have a fully computerized election.

7. Caller ID - No one wants to live in a world in which the phone rings and you do not know who it is. This invention is so integrated into our daily lives that not remember what it was like not to have this invention, who is granted to Nelio Nicolai in 1977, it is used worldwide and still, the Brazilian expert phones does not get anything for it, all because he failed to register the patent.

8. Orelhão (public telephone booth) - Created in 1970 by the designer Chu Ming Silveira, China naturalized Brazilian, the first public phone was placed at Rua Sete de Abril in São Paulo. In 1972, gradually, the public telephones began to be deployed by all states. This invention is now found in many Latin American countries besides China.

9. Electronic panel  - The lighted sign of the stadiums had to be Brazilian, right? The product was patented in 1996 by Carlos Eduardo Lamboglia. The debut of the product took place two years later, the French Cup and is now indispensable in many sports competitions. Certainly, it is also used for other purposes.

10. Artificial heart - The creation of the artificial heart is the Brazilian mechanical engineer Aron Andrade of Dante Pazzanese Institute of Cardiology (SP). Invented in 2000, the artificial organ is connected to the natural and powered by an electric motor. Prior to this development, there was a procedure in which the natural heart had to be removed and replaced by the artificial operation - which did not last long. With the Andrade’s idea, nothing is extracted, the advantages of this pattern are many, such as making itself simpler surgery.

Things the Internet killed

I still remember when I accessed the internet

for the first time, it was in 1998 (the internet arrived in Brazil in 1995). To get an internet connection we had to have a service provider to dial up thought the telephone (landline) using a modem (which is very different of what we see today, despite the fact the concept is still similar).

After a few year the ADSL connection started becoming popular in Brazil, so it was affordable to have this kind of connection and pay not a cheap monthly fee, but 24 hours of connection for the same payment - and with that, the old modem was retired which had to pay for a minute connected.

Year by year, we see the internet speed is increasingly faster in a way that we are able to watch a movie online now, or even download a movie in Blu-ray quality in minutes; make phone calls for free (not speak and listen, but actually see other people while speaking); make use of many public services such as the light invoice, income tax return, check the public expenses (know as transparency portal); and also talk to the politicians.

So if we stop to think how contrasting and interesting is to compare the two periods, our life before the internet and today with dedicated connection.

Lets see some interesting topics:

- Correct writing: many acronyms raised in order to make shorter the time to type, such as u, ur, 2moro, ily, omg, ttyl, wtf, and many others. In Portuguese we see others similar but mostly the way its pronounced, the phoneme such as vc (means voce), mto (muito), etc.

- Listen the complete album: buy a CD of your favorite band to listen at home or in the car it out of question. You buy or listen the sound track that you most like, online or downloading it. By the way, internet radios are about to change again the music market.

- Truth famous people: mostly because of the social networks and blogs we see people becoming famous due to specific activities - perhaps the most common is with music, DJs, etc.

- Sex mystery: Before this change, people would discover the sex only at that time together with the partner, and as a consequence it created a much bigger expectation. Today with sex trivialized, anyone can learn everything about it before “practicing".

- Encyclopedias: perhaps kids have another concept of what encyclopedia meant twenty years ago, many books with lots of books and pretty expensive. For them, the information might be on Google, Wikipedia, etc, but definitely not on a book.

- Knowledge: everyone today can have a minimum knowledge about any subject, just need some spare time to search a bit.

- Know places at home: how many times you were first on the web to search about a place you have to go, to get more info, or to see how to get there using maps. And more, look for more info about a city you are interested in visiting, the main sightseeings, hotels to stay, etc.

Absolutely sure there are many other things the Internet changed the way we do things, and of course, we haven't even quoted what smartphones and tablets have changed.

But for the next time you use any service of the internet, you will think how that thing was in the past (if you are older than 30 years old, of course)!!

"A giant leap for mankind" make sense now

Philae at 67P comet

When Neil Armstrong in July 21, 1969 spoke those famous words "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" make sense now when we see the Man making a galactic history when the Rosetta Mission successful landed its Philae probe on a speeding comet - at least for those who wasn't born at that time (like me).

When we see numbers of this project, An Ariane 5G+ rocket carrying the Rosetta spacecraft and Philae lander launched in 2004 and travelled 3.907 days until the day November 12, 2014, when the Philae achieved the first-ever controlled touchdown on a comet nucleus, it is really something that we haven't seen since the epic event of Armstrong on the moon.

Due to the side of the comet where Philae landed, the dark side and no sun to recharge the batteries, Philae rests in peace three days after its landing until one day the batteries get recharged again touched by the sun and then new experiments starts all over again.
Let's be patience and wait for this magical moment to happen again.

The time is over! The World Cup 2014 is started

June 12th, 2014 ... this was the day spiked on the Government's schedule to prepare everything for this big event of FIFA called the World Cup 2014. We still see a few group of workers spread around the city and the arena in order to accomplish the work, but we know we should have many other big things accomplished.

When the FIFA announced in October 30th, 2007 that Brazil would be the host country for the World Cup 2014, the government promised to the nation that we would take the opportunity to adequate the stadiums to FIFA's standard, but more than this, we would have the chance to have better infrastructure in several aspects, not only stadiums (called now as arenas).

With this perspective every Brazilian had been very excited about the chance to finally dream with infrastructure similar to developed countries. However, month by month we could follow up how the government in three spheres (federal, state and municipal) were dealing with the schedule in order to accomplish on time.

The last two or three years until today, Brazilians realized that we wouldn't have what had been promised in 2007, and than movement born in the streets spreading all over the country against the World Cup and the government.

Today with the schedule finalized, although a large part of the initial schedule has been chopped off, ​​the only thing we can do now is to cheer for the Brazilian national team and after that wait until October 2014 to decide in the elections who deserves to "coach" this country.

Graphene, the material of the future that is present

Known as the material of the future, the graphene keeps the scientific and technological community astonished because of its amazing properties and countless of potential applications. Adding to other compounds such as main raw material or as a new process of production, graphene will make possible touch screens that don't break down, internet 100 times faster than today with optical fiber, flexible transistors at 100 gigahertz, solar panels, purify seawater into drinking and in many other applicable areas and examples.

The properties of graphene are superlative: it is transparent, flexible, waterproof, hydrophobic (repels water), stronger and better heat conductor than diamond, capable of supporting a large electrical current density, thus having a higher conductivity than copper and even silicon. The resistance, malleability and ability to produce energy make graphene an element with transformative potential, with application in various sectors of the automotive, aerospace, biomedical, telecommunications, electronics, energy, components and sensors.

Actually the whole world is investing huge amount of money with research in industrial and electronic applications in graphene. Samsung already has 407 patents related to graphene and IBM almost with 150.

Today, 1 gram of graphene can cost between 100 and 300 dollars in the international market. However, 1 kg of graphite costs 1 dollar and from this amount it's possible to extract around 150 grams of graphene which would make possible to have at least 15.000 dollars of graphene. Of course it requires investments and material processing to reach this amount.

According to some specialists, the first applications are expected in 2016-2017 and from 2020 its advantages will be a bit more generalized. The time that the industry needs to incorporate a new material is estimated at 15 to 20 years and in some cases up to 50.

It will be the big companies in these sectors that will decide when and how to introduce these innovations to the market. The impact on quality of life, the environment and energy is invaluable. We will need decades to evaluate the success of this technology.

An interesting thing is that Brazil has one of the world's largest reserves of graphene and its applications increase daily. So investments will be important to lead us as one of the greatest producers not only in material but that develops products that generate patents, licenses and royalties.

How the 3G internet has changed the telecom companies' life

With the booming of smartphones and tablets in the last four/five years, the business model of telephony companies has been put against the wall. With the competition of applications that replace phone calls and text messages, the carriers are betting and investing more than ever on sales of data packet to the internet.

Today there are 273 million of active mobile phones in Brazil and 38% of this amount has access to the internet 3G - in 2009 this percentage didn’t exceed 2%. Access to mobile broadband also made popular applications to exchange messages and files such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber and a few others. Each time, users are more connected not only by 3G but also by Wifi hotspots, and then, users need less to fall back on SMS with more alternatives for phone calls and messages.

The change is not only in Brazil, but globally. A research by the British consulting Ovum says that the preference for applications makes telecom operators around the world stop profiting USD 33 billion per year with SMS. The prediction is that the next two years, the value of the annual loss will reach USD 54 billion. In 2012, the consulting company Informa affirms that the number of messages exchanged by apps for the first time surpassed the number of text messages sent via SMS - it was 19 billion messages per day compared to 17.9 billion.

With this scenario, it made the telecom companies had changed the strategic and charge less for the SMS, now selling by a pack of 100 or 500 SMSs, before that, charged by unit. Despite of being the voice service as the main service, the revenues coming from this vertical are dropping in some countries and in Brazil stopping growing. The telephone companies are now increasingly investing in landline and mobile broadband, which is where it is coming revenue growth.

Why the 3G in Brazil has problems?

Very often we hear people complaining about the 3G that is not working properly or the signal is not good enough for the basic operations. But what is the main cause of this problem that has been dragging for a long time?

Looking for the answer for this unsettled question we found a few possible reasons. First, the carriers were not prepared for the exponential growth in demand for data usage in mobile phones. According to the IDC Consultoria, the sales of smartphones and tablets last year (2013) have increased 142% and 122% respectively. There are a few reasons why those numbers are so big, although mainly driven by the lower prices and the trend of replacing devices less modern. So imagine all those mobile devices accessing 3G network in the same area.

This aspect raises the second reason why the 3G is slow. The carriers have not invested in infrastructure enough to support so many users in a dense area, there is no enough Base Transceiver Station (BTS) - also known as Cell Tower or Cell Site, that telecommunication towers we see spread around the city. The carrier AT&T alone has more BTS than the five largest Brazilian network operators together in a similar geographical area. Each BTS has capability for "X" number of users. Conforms the congestion increases, the range decreases to try to meet all nearby users - not always it is possible. This explains why one day the signal is optimal in a certain area and at another time it is impossible to use because many people are trying to connect at the same time. And it's not only to have the BTS spread around the city, it's required to have a good link between the cell tower and the backbones of the carrier, otherwise the information will be received by the antenna, but it will get stuck due to the poor link. The fourth generation (4G) will not help on this if the links are kept the same.

Brazil has about 64 thousand BTS across the country; half the number of BTS in Mexico, for example. Okay, why carriers just install more antennas? Simple, isn't it? Restrictive laws prohibit the installation of new antennas in many places. The green and yellow bureaucracy allows each city to create their own legislation about antenna installation - are currently more than 250 laws about the theme. There is a law stopped in the Congress that would regulate in a single law this matter. Today an authorization to install a BTS takes 12 to 18 months.

What's more, the biggest bottleneck of mobile broadband third generation - believe it is not between the smartphone and the antenna, but the infrastructure to carry this enormous amount of content consumed and exchanged daily. The data stream is much larger than the transmission capacity allows. Possibly not even the fourth generation (4G) will solve the problem, once this technology only changes the capacity between the smartphone and the cell site.

There are many knots that still need to be untied and the World Cup could be a great reason for this, but the legacy that it leaves us is not at all close to the minimum acceptable.

The Civil Rights Framework for the Internet

In April of 2014, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and Senate have approved the civil rights framework for the Internet (in Portuguese, Marco Civil da Internet), a project that is considered a Constitution of the worldwide web.

After being discussed and developed collaboratively in an open debate through a blog, in 2011 the Civil Marco was presented as a bill of law. Initially approved in the Chamber of Deputies on March 25, 2014, the draft law went to the federal senate, this approved on April 23, 2014 on the Senate floor. President Dilma Rousseff signed a law passed in the legislature on April 23, during NETmundial conference in São Paulo.

The text of the bill deals with topics such as network neutrality, privacy, data retention, the social function that the network will need to comply, especially to guarantee freedom of expression and the exchange of knowledge, besides imposing liability obligations to users and providers.

After weeks listening to discussions and critics about the Marco Civil, there are three main points pretty important and so far not regulated, putting now a specific regulation about this sensitive discussion that Brazilians always had to live with many frustrations and barriers due to the gap in current law. Let’s talk about those:

- Network neutrality (or Internet neutrality, or neutrality principle) means that all the information that travels over the network should be treated the same way, navigating at the same speed, or the speed of hiring. If we look the telecom’s perspective, it’s obvious that its better having a user navigating through the websites, checking emails, simple stuffs, instead of having users watching movies via streaming, using VOIP, file sharing and many other things that overload the network. With little (or poor) infrastructure, the telecom company could provide the service the lightweight user needs, but due to the heavy user, it requires more investment to attend all kinds of users. With this important topic very clear, no matter which user you are, you don’t need to worry if you’re going to pay more or less to do what you want on the web, just you use it.

- Keep the internet logs - requires that records users' connection should be retained by ISPs for a period of one year, under strict confidentiality and secure environment. This information relates only to the IP, date and start and end times of the connection. This action helps to identify who is responsible for any crime occurred on the web. The project also fixed privacy principles regarding the data that the user provides to providers. On the internet, the data are now collected, processed and sold almost instantly. The law gives users the right that their information cannot be used to a different to that were provided, as stated in the privacy policy of the service order.

- Removal of Content and responsibilities - The Marco Civil establishes the rule that content can only be taken down after a court order, and that the provider cannot be held responsible for offensive content posted by users on their service. With this, the project aims to prevent Internet censorship: to prove that content is offensive, this person shall have the right to adversarial in court.

Of course the Marco Civil is not only about that, it covers a total of 25 articles divided in 5 chapters, but personally speaking, this law will be good for everybody once anyone is a internet user!!

25 years of .br domain

Most of the Brazilian websites we access today we put ".br" by the end of the domain, and those "2 letters" completed 25 years last week. On April 18, 1989, American Jon Postel, director of the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), the agency that regulates the distribution of IP numbers and management of root servers, delegated the .br domain to the group that operated the academic networks in Brazil. Today, 25 years later, the country has more than 3.4 million of .br domains registered.

At the beginning, the internet was restricted to universities and research institutions. In 1991, the famous subdomains were created com.br, net.br, org.br, gov.br andmil.br, but the number of users was still quite small. The commercial phase of the Internet in Brazil was in 1996.

The CGI.br, who coordinates the services of Internet in Brazil in early 1996 there were only 851 registered .br domains, that number jumped to 7,507 at the end of the same year. Today there are over 3.5 million .br domains registered, which places Brazil in eighth position among the countries with the largest number of records.

To register a domain with CGI.br costs R$ 30,00 per year, all money raised is reinvested in maintenance such as the operation points of traffic exchange, researches with valued statistics about the use of the internet and free courses about IPv6. Since 2008, any person with CPF (Brazilian ID) is eligible to register a domain, before that, only companies could do that.

Interested in registering a .br domain, visit: www.registro.br

A very special post

As mentioned previously in a post last year, I've been working on a personal project for Apple Store which runs on iOS, by the way my second app (this is the first).

The purpose of this app is to have a small dictionary on your pocket (your iPhone, but also designed for iPad), but differently of many other dictionaries, you can choose one main language and you will have other 3 languages for references. Suitable for a trip where you would like to know how to speak a few words with natives, but you don't want to look for a word all the time on a dictionary - so this is the app you would need, a few taps and there it is the word.
Eg.: You choose English as the main language, and then you have Portuguese and Spanish languages for reference. Furthermore you can also pick Italian language, more languages will be available soon.

Take a look here on the iTunes App Store:

Enjoy it ... and thanks for downloading..