Ricardo's Blog

Even before reaching Parintins I was very excited about coming to this place.  Parintins is perhaps one of the most isolated medium-sized cities in the world.  This week, thanks to a major effort by Intel and many other organizations, the city received an investment that is going to change its life forever.  The investment is the kind of effort that shows very effectively how technology can be used to improve people’s lives in emerging markets.

Parintins is a city of more than a hundred and fourteen thousand inhabitants.  It is an island in the middle of the Amazon, the world’s largest reserve of sweet water.  There is no highway or bridge into Parintins, the only way to reach the island is by taking a 15 hour boat from Manaus or by taking a plane into the city’s airport.  Despite its size, there is only one small community hospital in the island and furthermore, there are only 32 doctors to serve its people ---  a ratio of one doctor for more than 3,500 people.   There are 190 schools in the island and more than 2/3rds of them don’t have electricity.  Only one of them was hooked to the Internet.

Despite its infrastructure challenges, Parintins has won national fame in Brasil by hosting a local festival called Boi Bum-Bá (a fantasy derived by the mixture of Indian and European cultures that revolves around a bull). The festival lasts for three days at the end of June and the beginning of July.  The festival is a competition between two teams for the best fantasy, which includes music, singing, customs, fireworks and of course, dancing.  Think of it as some sort of a smaller version of the Carnaval of Rio. But don’t think that small means low quality; the Boi Bum-Bá festival is a world class cultural event that attracts more people from around the world every year. The whole city is engaged in the festival, half of the city in the red team and the other on the blue team.  They live their passion as much as the Brasilian soccer fans do for their national team.

On this place, Intel worked to establish a Digital City with an impressive array of partners.  The idea was to establish a proof of concept, an implementation in a city that was so challenging that if the concept could work here, it could work in any village around the world. Intel was joined by the following organizations for this project: Cisco, CPqD, Embratel, Proxim, the Bradesco Foundation, the State and Federal Universities of the Amazon state and the University of Sao Paulo.

The set up in Parintins includes a WiMax tower that hooks the island to the world as well as five sites that are linked to that tower.  The five sites are two public schools, one community center, one community clinic and one site of the state University.  The two schools and the community center now have Internet rooms hooked with brand new computers using WiMax wireless broadband access.  The clinic has a world class telemedicine set up where people can access specialists on Manaus or even São Paulo via high resolution cameras connected to the Internet.  The Parintins site is connected to the state University of the Amazon and the State University of Sao Paulo, both well advanced on telemedicine.

After we arrived today, the people on town performed a small version of their Boi Bum-Bá festival with kids to celebrate the occasion.  You could see it, not only in the eyes of the kids that they were grateful to receive this infrastructure.  The whole town was very excited about it.  So excited, that the mayor of the town cried when he delivered the speech to publicly recognize Intel for its contribution.  Kids that prior to this week had no experience with a PC were skillfully building power point presentations with pictures, animation and hyperlinks to Wikipedia.  The education in the town has been changed forever.

The whole set up in Parintins took six week to be implemented.  About 10 people from the Intel Latin America team engaged with a larger number of people from ecosystem partners and government officials that graciously dedicated time and effort to set this up over six weeks.  The challenges were many to do this; for starters, some of the sites to receive the investment lacked electricity, a service that was donated by the municipality. If we take into account that we were literally starting from scratch, then we can see how massive an achievement was to deliver the Digital City of Parintins.

Parintins is now a reality and we have learned what it takes to deliver a Digital City in a very challenging set up.  The model is ready to be exported. The plan is now to go and replicate this around emerging regions in the world, including Latin America.  All of this is a part of the Intel World Ahead Initiative, an Intel initiative to embrace the next billion users of technology, the large majority of them from emerging markets.  Just by looking at the people in Parintins, is easy to see that the emerging world is ready to adopt technology to improve their lives and aspire to a better future.

Photos (pass the mouse over picture to see description):

Links to word wide press articles:

-         San Francisco Chronicle: Helping Amazon’s Wireless Net

-         cNet: Intel builds Internet City on Amazon Island

-         Parintins.com: Parintins para o mundo,  via Intel (em português)