In the history of the Net, "World Wide Web" has been something of a misnomer. Whether because of availability, price, or language barrier, people in Europe, Asia, and the United States are so far the only ones who can really enjoy the bandwidth-hogging that you and I have come to know and love. But a few Web sites - including StarMedia - are working to change that.
StarMedia was founded in September 1996 by chairman/CEO Fernando Espuelas and president/director Jack Chen. The 15 full-time employees are located in Greenwich, Connecticut (were you picturing Montevideo, Uruguay?), but they're eager to move into a new 7,000-square-foot Manhattan loft next month. They have a sales office in Bogota, and - with an infusion of US$3.5 million in VC from Chase Capital Partners and Flatiron Partners - they are also poised to open sales offices in Mexico City, São Paulo, Santiago, and Buenos Aires by the end of '97.
Part financial imperative and part good-will mission, the new-media company saw a great untapped audience: Latin America. "We realized that if you were able to take the incredible hunger for new products in these countries and add US technology, you could create enormous value," says Fernando, who emigrated to the United States from Uruguay as a 10-year-old.
Despite StarMedia's line about uncharted territory, there are already a few good Spanish-language news sites on the Web, and StarMedia's graphics-heavy design certainly isn't bandwidth-friendly on the lean phone lines in Latin America. But the focus of StarMedia's site so far hasn't been on content so much as community. They have two interactive channels, a topical discussion area called Talk Planet, and an adults-only dating space called Personet. In a nice little PR coup, a couple met this year in a Personet chat after logging on from different countries. They've since married and are expecting a baby.
StarMedia's chat rooms have been brimming lately, thanks especially to recent ads on the Latin American version of Fox and on Aaron Spelling's TeleUNO cable channel. The company has made marketing and content partnerships with these cable channels - and, as the folks at Yahoo know, there's nothing like trumpeting your URL on TV to boost traffic. The site now receives more than 7 million pageviews per month and is growing at a rate of 20 percent a month.
Since chat rooms and bulletin boards are a priority for StarMedia, they're looking for a director of community to make the space as active as possible. The director will be in charge of facilitating the discussion in chat rooms and recruiting moderators for chats. Salary depends on experience; marketing VP Tracy Leeds, who's hiring the director, says she might even take someone straight out of college (in which case the title might change to "manager" of community).
Requirements for the job include an interest in (and perhaps tolerance for) hanging out in chat rooms all day, and a thorough knowledge of Web culture. But the main requirement for the job is to be a native Spanish speaker. And from what I can tell, StarMedia desperately needs a few: Besides Fernando, none of the four top executives I talked with speaks a word of the language they hope to create content for. The company, of course, plans to hire a lot more polyglots in the future.
StarMedia is certainly an ambitious venture, but who knows if building a brand across the 23 countries of Latin America will be profitable. Anyone taking a job with StarMedia would have to take as much risk as Fernando did when he decided to start an online network for Latin America. "When American companies think of going international, they think of Europe or Japan," Fernando told me. "That's left ... 450 million people to a few pioneers."
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
