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A couple colleagues and I recently traveled down to Mexico City to discuss the state of the capture market in Latin America with some of our partners and customers. While we dined on authentic Mexican cuisine and sipped some of the best margaritas I have ever tasted, we kept coming back to an increasingly important topic in Latin America: mobile capture.

For document management and data capture solution providers, Latin American holds tremendous potential, especially when it comes to mobile capture. While many countries in the region aren’t as technologically advanced as the U.S. or many Asian countries, the region is primed for growth. If you don’t just want to take my word for it, IHS Research reported that the region has emerged as a strong growth market for mobile content consumption, and is expected to represent seven percent of the global market, up from two percent in December 2008. They go on to say that the growth can be attributed to the combination of low PC penetration, improved 3G coverage and better handset capabilities, igniting demand for mobile content and internet access over cellular networks.

While visiting our neighbors to the south, it was interesting to see that the most popular smartphone in the region was not the iPhone or an Android-device. Instead, as we attended the various meetings, lunches and dinners, Blackberry’s proved to be by far the most used type of mobile device. While this is currently the case, it actually reminded me a lot of what I saw in Japan two-plus years ago, and I think the end result will be the same.

I believe that iPhone’s will quickly take over, and become the smartphone of choice for enterprise users in Mexico. I also believe that this device growth will combine with the emerging trend of enterprise mobility, to result in a market ripe with mobile capture opportunity. It may currently still be fresh and new, but Latin American businesses will catch on to the functions and use of mobile business applications. And, since the technology is already available due to the headway made in the U.S. and Asia, Latin American organizations and employees can begin to focus on mobilizing core enterprise processes through mobile capture applications.

Whether it be for translation, bar code scanning, or text recognition Mexico and the rest of Latin America represents tremendous opportunity for application developers leveraging mobile capture technology.

For me, it’s from one country to the next, as I am now headed to Japan. Upon my return, I look forward to expanding on what I shared from my last trip to Japan, and provide more examples of the innovation and applications driving growth for mobile capture in Japan.

In the meantime, what do you see being a catalyst for mobile capture in Mexico?