Today's San Jose Mercury News has a feature story in its Biz/Tech section on Chile. Among other things, Chile is lasted as 9th among the top 10 offshore locations. Last year, Yahoo and
Synopsis opened small research and development facilities in Chile,
employing 10 and 26 people respectively. In January, Oracle opened a
shared services facility that employs 120 people.
More about Chile's IT initatives here.
Raul Camposano, CEO of XoomSys and a Chilean recently pointed out to me that Chile has become an innovator based on the needs of its natural resouces. Here are a few excerpts from Technology Review's article on Chilean innovations:
- Biomining
Chile is the world's largest producer of copper, and copper accounts for about half of the country's exports. But it is becoming more and more difficult to find high-grade deposits that are cheaply and easily mined. The government has therefore encouraged a partnership between the state-owned mining corporation Codelco and Japan's Nippon Mining and Metals. A joint venture between these two organizations, called Biosigma, is developing the use of bacteria to extract copper from ore. This approach, known as biomining, is less expensive and less environmentally destructive than conventional processes.
Other markets? How about U.S. and China? - Biotech - Vaccines for Aquaculture
The Chilean salmon industry—ranked second only to Norway's—is threatened by a bacterium that grows within salmon liver cells, killing off massive numbers of fish in salmon farms and costing the industry as much as $150 million a year. Because this microbe—Piscirickettsia salmonis—does not cause nearly as much damage in the Northern Hemisphere, Chilean researchers and entrepreneurs had to find a way to combat it on their own.
The work was coördinated by Pablo Valenzuela, the senior research officer at the Millennium Institute of Fundamental and Applied Biology in Santiago. Valenzuela and his team sequenced all the salmon-killing microörganism's genes, which allowed them to identify those genes responsible for the infection. Those genes were then used as the basis for a set of five vaccines, which were successfully tested at fish farms. The most effective vaccine was licensed to Novartis Animal Vaccines. Valenzuela estimates the potential market for the vaccine at around $50 million per year, while annual research costs were only about $1 million. - Biotech - Wine Industry
Biotech could also aid Chile's wine industry, which has experienced explosive growth in recent years. Nicolas Beltran, a researcher at the University of Chile in Santiago, has worked with winemakers to develop a system that uses a standard chemical sensor—an "electronic nose"—and an artificial neural network to certify the quality, purity, and origin of wines. The system can be "trained" to distinguish between cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and chardonnay. Beltran is now working to give the system the ability to recognize the valleys where the grapes were cultivated in order to certify their denomination of origin.
Looks like this could be of great value to Napa Valley vintners as well.
Chile is following
the trend started by Mexico a few years ago to reach out to Silicon
Valley. As many Hispanic-Net regulars know, the Mexican government
established its first high tech incubator, TechBA, in San Jose a few years ago. Since then, TechBA has expanded to Austin, Montreal and Madrid.
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