FYI, I'm very engaged with Quora, and I live in Chile http://www.quora.com/Carlos-Leiva-Burotto
and through Quora I made networking with a guy who works on Mauritian Island.. that's in the front of Madagascar!!!! Not even through Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, etc I engaged with someone from that place!!
So Quora is definitely a worldwide tool and the active members are not only people from SV.
You should definitely open your mind to not see only the things that you want to see.
In terms of salaries for a developer with at least 2 years of experience:
Program Analyst: $1210/mo
Informations: $1450/mo
Civil Engineer, Information: $1700/mo
Programming: $1100/mo
Design and Industrial Production: $700/mo
Are there other foreigner software startups / companys or immigrants ?
There are companies such as Wanako Games (NYC), Bio Architecture Lab (Berkeley), Bling Nation (Palo Alto), Atakama Labs (SF), Entegris (Nasdaq: ENTG), InquiroGroup (Palo Alto) and Zappedy (SF).
More information on http://supercoolschool.typepad.com/startupschool/2010/08/sta...
What about the English skills ?
I think you will be fine here, there is no deal if your software is written in a different language.
(I'm not sure if I understand your point with the english skills.. you're worried because you have to learn spanish?)
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.
* 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.
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:
- Startupweekend:
For first time, Startupweekend.org is hosting an event on Santiago, Chile on December 10, 11 & 12, 2010. Check http://santiago.startupweekend.org/
I'm currently reading "UML - A beginner's guide" from Jason T. Roff.. the goal of that book is to learn for software design, analysis, and development.
UML = unified modeling language
A few weeks ago, I did a survey trough Google Docs "Forms" and I didn't want to embed the survey on a blog, so I can't get a track of the visitors of my survey.
But now, you can get full statistics with Google Analytics, so just think about the future that Google Docs could have in a few months.
this is just great!