techcrunch.com - 

It’s pretty telling that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t chose Beijing, London or Dubai to have the first Facebook overseas town-hall meeting. He chose a place that 10 years ago few people in Silicon Valley knew much about, and much less regarded as a player in technology: Latin America.

A lot has changed in this part of the world over the past 20 years. Today, with over six countries worthy of investment-grade debt rating by Fitch and S&P; (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panamá and Perú among others) and a pervasive and ubiquitous penetration of both social and mobile technologies, Latin America is a radically different story, and technology companies that have understood this and learned to play in this turf have reaped generous benefits.

Foreign companies, like Waze, Moovit and WhatsApp are clear examples of this and have profited from it. At the moment of Waze’s sale to Google with roughly 50 million downloads, the region represented roughly about 10 million (20 percent), and Brazil was the second-largest market after the U.S. with ~5.5 million users.