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Rousseff used her visit to strengthen ties with U.S. technology
companies after visiting Washington, D.C. and New York City
earlier in the week.
During her visit, Google announced it would inaugurate a new
engineering space in Belo Horizonte in November that will more
than double the number of engineers working in Brazil on some of
the company's core products.
Rousseff began her day with a breakfast with University of
California President Janet Napolitano, also the former U.S.
secretary of homeland security. She then met with Google
executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who showed off one of the
company's self-driving cars before sending her on a test drive.
Her California visit coincided with a new low in her national
polling numbers, following a massive corruption scandal at
state-run oil firm Petrobras and an economy that is heading
towards recession. The number of Brazilians considering
Rousseff's government "great" or "good" dropped to just 9
percent, according to the Ibope opinion poll commissioned by the
National Industry Confederation, or CNI.
At a press briefing at Google headquarters in Mountain View,
California, Rousseff said her U.S. trip had been productive but
declined to comment on her poll numbers.
Rousseff also attended a lunch with top Silicon Valley
executives from Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc, Facebook Inc, Amazon
Inc, Cisco Inc and PayPal. Brazil is the second-largest market
by users after the United States for Google, Apple and Facebook.
Earlier in the week, Rousseff met with U.S. President Barack
Obama, and agreed to a series of steps to ease trade. She said
"things have changed" since October 2013, when she canceled an
official state visit after revelations from former National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the United States
had spied on her.
(Reporting By Yasmeen Abutaleb; Editing by Bernard Orr)
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