The Internet is Booming en Colombia

Latin America must be one of the higher growth markets for “the internet” at the moment. Colombia has currently about 12million users and this number is growing with about 30-40% !!!!! a year. Actually I think we (as in my Colombian people and me ) are one of the bigger “communities” in what must be the most popular site worldwide of the moment; Facebook which I see as a great accomplishment for our third world country

With a fast growing amount of users, Colombias internet economy is also growing fast. I read last week that payments through the internet grew by about 50% from last year so it seems that also business over the internet is going to be a very normal thing here soon. Slowly people are getting more confidence and we are seeing better (Colombian) made and more secure pages arriving to the market. Especially the younger crowd (more than elsewhere in the world) is leading this developments and is putting its time and effort in developing sites, ideas and business without any big investors backing them up for the moment, but they should soon wake up and smell the coffee.

For me these developments are great as I live without the internet would be a little boring; the more internet the better! Without internet I could not know how to write “guevón” (popular word among Colombians that is kind of offensive except when used with friends), how my friend in Holland is doing with his new baby, when there will be another family meeting or I would not have the cool watch that I found at www.mundounik.com, a Colombian webstore that sells some crazy watches.

Hopefully this development of the internet will continue for a long time as it is not only good for the economy (ie. it has created big opportunities for outsourcing in LA) but also the general education level of the Colombians must be rising fast with the increasing access to global news and resource information.

My refrigerator is sending me an email that we are out of tomatoes so got to order some from Carulla and make lunch…