Chilean Startup Scene

On Chile, since 2007, the startup scene has been initiated at Santiago with two most highlighted products developed by Chileans, those are Needish.com & Bligoo.com.

Needish is like Redbeacon.com while Bligoo is like Blogspot.com for chileans. I have to say that Needish launched the service before Redbeacon, so Cheers for the chileans.

On 2008, I went at differents events, like www.FirstTuesday.cl and www.Webprendedor.com, doing networking with local people (investors & developers) and it was great to feel that finally the chileans are currently working developing startups. On these conferences, there were people like:

- Pedro Pablo Fuentes Schuster who is a developer, and who's the Director of the website http://www.chileayuda.com specially developed to help people find information after the last Feb 27th Earthquake. He also organized the last RHoK [1] event at UChile.
He haves two web development companies: http://diDigital.cl and http://OXUS.cl with a good portfolio on both companies.

- Daniel Undurraga http://twitter.com/eldani Is the founder of Needish, what's Needish? Please read this article: http://blog.needish.com/content/view/4/About.html
Also this year, Daniel with the team behind Needish, launched http://clandescuento.com on March and on June, Groupon acquired Clandescuento [2]

- Cristián Sepulveda http://twitter.com/crsepulv is the founder of http://Ubiqq.com (real time conferences)

- Paolo Colonello http://twitter.com/colonnello is the founder of http://Bligoo.com

- Tomás Pollak http://www.bootlog.org http://twitter.com/tomaspollak
One of his projects is Prey Project, a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen http://preyproject.com/ [3]

- Leo Prieto http://leoprieto.com/ http://twitter.com/leoprieto He's the founder of Fayerwayer ( http://www.fayerwayer.com ), the most visited blog about technology on Latin America.

- Juan Francisco Diez http://twitter.com/jf10 He's the founder of Chile Hardware http://www.chw.net , the same thing that Fayerwayer, but on Hardware things..

* Leo Prieto and Juan Francisco Diez founded BetaZeta.com, a network of Blogs.

- Nicolás Orellana is the guy behind Webprendedor or the Chilean Startups Conference. This year is going to be held on November 19th & 20th
See http://www.webprendedor.com/conferencia-2010/

These guys didn't went to Webprendedor, but they are also involved on the startup environment:

- Javier Salcedo http://twitter.com/JavierSplitcast He's on the team of Splitcast.net, their product is a new P2P Multicast Streaming technology, which reduces the bandwith consumption on 70% and can increase the people already connected up to 70 times. http://www.twitter.com/SplitCast

- Agustin Feuerhake http://twitter.com/AgustinF He's the founder of Voxound.com, this web application is like a music recommendation system. I didn't tested yet.

- Esteban Sosnik. He's the founder of Atakama Labs http://www.atakamalabs.com/ (gaming industry). Check his profile on Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=369165

On 2009, Chris Anderson (from Wired Magazine) and Sarah Lacy (from Techcrunch) came to Chile to an event organized by Wenceslao Casares [4] and Tiburcio de la Carcova [5], called Traweln [6].

* Traweln is an informal gathering of entrepreneurs, executives and investors that work with technology, design and entertainment companies in Latin America.
This year Traweln will be hosted in Silicon Valley at 455 Old la Honda Rd, Woodside, CA.
More information at http://traweln.org/

On 2010, If you are interested to launch your business on Chile, you should read:

- Chilean Government to attract entrepreneurs http://www.corfo.cl/startupchile/
http://startupchile.org/

- Top Reasons to Invest in Chile in 2010
http://www.investchile.com/

- VISA Stuff http://www.extranjeria.gov.cl/ingles/

- Startupweekend:
For first time, Startupweekend.org is hosting an event on Santiago, Chile on December 10, 11 & 12, 2010. Check http://santiago.startupweekend.org/

Reviews of Chile on the Startup Scene:
- http://www.inc.com/articles/2010/05/chile-next-silicon-valle...
- http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/10/chile-wants-your-poor-y...
- http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/oct2009/tc200...

Hope this helps to get an idea of what is the startup scene on Santiago, Chile.

For any question, don't hesitate to contact me.
I'm @cleiva http://twitter.com/cleiva

[1] http://www.rhok.org/
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/24/groupon-clandescuento-clube...
[3] http://lifehacker.com/5273620/prey-phones-home-to-help-you-r...
[4] Founder and co-CEO of Bling Nation http://twitter.com/wences
[5] He founded http://www.atakamalabs.com/ with Esteban Sosnik http://twitter.com/tiburcio
[6] Flickr Gallery: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42080094@N03/