Common Sense attended last week a great IT event hosted in Austin, Texas: The Americas IT Business & Investors Forum, a high level gathering of technology sector leaders from across the Americas. This event was a great idea to meet up before SWSX interactive started.

The event allowed us to meet our IT region fellows and also be aware of the state of the art of Nearshoring. As the presenters made clear, Latin America is right now one of the highest growth markets in IT and largest attractors of Foreign Direct Investment.

We also had the pleasure of listening to brightest keynotes: The successful entrepeneur Gary Hoover and the expert on technology and economic development Angelos Angelou. We had the chance to learn about how Texas encourages technology companies established in the state, listening to Honorable Hope Andrade Texas Secretary of State and Amir Mirabi, Office of the Governor of Texas. We learnt that Texas is a great gateway to the US market.

The Americas IT Forum consisted of four sessions which were very interesting and enlightening. Common Sense was present in two of the sessions, so we were sponsors, but also panelists!

Networking

Austin has become the Silicon Hills, thanks to this there were great attendees who also was interesting talking to! Some people that we met and that we would like to work together leveraging Latin America’s potentials were Marianne Martinez from International Program Coordinator City of Austin, Texas and Kevin Koym from TechRanch (I hope you can visit Argentina this year!).

View the photos we took at the event here.

2012

We would like to thank the Americas IT Forum organizers, they were great hosts and awesome session moderators! Ricardo Guerrero, Fernando Labastida, Estuardo Robles and Tom Evans. We are really looking forward for the 2012 event and are willing to hear the opinions of companies that outsource and companies that don’t.