Is it possible that he did not had a chance to go to college because he grew up in the midst of the cultural revolution? He seems a middle age man, who could be in his late teens/early twenties in the late 1960's, when for the regime any academic degree was suspicious.
Mexico is not only about manufacturing, even if this is one of our strongholds.
We are starting to generate a vibrant startup ecosystem. A few months back, there was an interesting overview in TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/03/mexico-is-happening-at-tech...
The idea for a new product/company comes from a long process of experiencing situations that give you the background to create that new concept/product. Only after that process you are ready to see those "key igniting observations" that allow you to come up with something new.
I think that in this prank there is hidden an interesting experiment, which shows alternative ways to create micropayments.
I wonder if you can build a bookmarklet was built it would become less cumbersome to use.
Many people in Latin America or Spain can write great code, but they are not that fluent in English. There was nothing similar before. And among 400 million people that speak Spanish, there are many, many good hackers.