The smartphone is the computer! Where Apple goes the South American way.

I've been lax in my reading of Ingrid Lunden. Caught up now and richly rewarded. First, the only thing that seems to be keeping Blackberry afloat these days is that it established footholds in very large markets, such as Indonesia, southeast Asia and Brazil, before Apple and Android.

Only a matter of time...

Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), as it winds up as a troubled joint venture to become fully part of Sony, is spinning out some talent in the process: it’s understood that Anderson Teixeira, formerly an executive that had run different regional operations for the JV, is now Apple’s first head of Latin America—a sign of Apple’s growing interests in the region.

If accurate, this would be the first time that Apple has hired a regional manager for Latin America in recent times, according to AppleInsider. And indeed, Apple, whose mobile devices and computers are priced at the higher end of market, has entered Latin America perhaps more slowly than it has other emerging economies like China.

Because Apple puts Latin America into the same category as the U.S. and Canada in its results, we don’t know exactly how much revenue the company generates there, but it’s clear that the figure is going up and represents a big opportunity for the company. In October, during Apple’s Q3 conference call, CEO Tim Cook noted that revenues in Latin America’s biggest economy, Brazil, were up 118 percent over the year before.

She notes that Teixeira, a Brazilian, may focus first on building a pipeline from Brazil that will export Apple products into North America but almost certainly will also help build up Apple's actual sales presence in the region.

Next, we learn that the smartphone is dominating technology investment:

Mobile investments accounted for 42.4 percent of all technology investment in 2011—or $6.3 billion for mobile startups in a year where, overall, venture capital investment in technology totaled $14.9 billion.

That’s a record proportion for the sector, and a massive spike on 2010, when mobile represented 30.4 percent of all tech investments worldwide, or $6.1 billion of investment. (See table at end of post.)

Ironically, while mobile is representing the greatest amount of investment, $6.3 billion falls just short of the biggest-ever year for mobile investment: that honor goes to 2006, when VCs pumped $6.4 billion into mobile technology.

Drilling down: As for the single-biggest category for investment in 2011, it’s consumer applications that have won the day—a sign of how the smartphone boom is leading to a big rise in the amount of companies rushing in to service those new consumers, and a subsequent rush of money men scrambling to finance them and get a piece of the action.