500 Startups selects 2 Mexican companies to join their program
By Celeste North of emprende.la for Opinno. Emprende.la focuses on entrepreneurial innovation in Mexico. In past posts we have talked about the big difference new incubators and investment funds have been creating in Mexico’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Among these is MexicanVC, a discovery fund for Mexican start-ups, that continues to disrupt traditional incubation processes with Silicon Valley’s best practices. Recently their first generation of entrepreneurs...
read moreTR35 Spain 2012 kicks off today
Opinno, the publisher of MIT’s Technology Review en español, is launching the second TR35 Spain competition to recognize 10 young Spanish innovators under 35. This follows after the first awards – both for Europe and a Spanish-speaking country – where given during last year’s EmTech Spain in Malaga. The award will be given in November. “I am enormously excited that TR35 Spain has now become a tradition and I look forward to shaking the hands of this year’s...
read moreWatch your walls: Many firms peeking into social networks while hiring
In this global economy, everyone knows jobs are often hard to come by. Most of us also know how vital a role the Internet often plays in job searches these days, and often turn to sites like Monster and CareerBuilder in their quests for employment. However, comparatively few may realize the role social networking may play—positively or negatively—in the whole story. According to the results of a survey conducted by CareerBuilder between Feb. 9 and Mar. 2, 37% of...
read moreLosing out: only a 5th of SMEs use social networking
For less than a decade we’ve had the ‘pleasure’ of looking at social networking screens. But today, communication is nearly inconceivable without them, which is why big companies spend long hours to spread their campaigns, ideas and events through Facebook and Twitter, among others. However, the situation is very different when it comes to small and medium enterprises (SMEs): less than a fifth have a presence on social networks. But why? “The lack of budget...
read moreNatural-language programming becoming a reality
Argentina’s Nadia Huebra is a rare bird. Given various awards in her teens, she decided to follow a career in systems engineering. Only great things could happen and, indeed, they did. She had yet to finish her degree when she set herself the goal of creating programming tool that used only natural language. For five years she studied semantics and formal linguistics, among other esoteric disciplines, to create MORE. MORE is a formal logical-semantics model....
read moreCrowdsourcing to help NASA plan future Mars exploration
Calling all scientists, amateur and otherwise, NASA and its newly established Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) are on the hunt for innovative concepts to cut costs while improving performance as it revamps the Mars Exploration Program — and they just might want your suggestions. With President Obama’s challenge to get humans on the Red Planet by the 2030s looming on the horizon, NASA is, as astrophysicist, astronaut and associate administrator for...
read moreTalkTo: Universal customer service via SMS
With the universality of the Internet and the advent of smartphones, phone calls have taken a back seat. As we have entered the age of 24-hour connectivity, we have become more impatient. We want it all today, here, now. In response to these needs, the company TalkTo, Inc. has created an application called talkto: Boston, a service that allows users to communicate with businesses such as restaurants, hotels, barber shops all through simple text messages. Currently,...
read moreDevice Convergence: It’s closer than we think.
Javier Agüera is the co-founder of GeeksPhone, a Spanish company founded in 2009 that was the first European brand to launch a smartphone based on Google’s Android operating system: the GeeksPhone One. Javier is passionate about mobile technology and is a firm believer in disruptive technologies. He is also a winner of Spain’s first TR35 competition for his work in the mobile industry. “In these times of economic uncertainty, one thing remains constant, the need...
read moreNew study highlights growth of LatAm web usage and services
By Celeste North of emprende.la for Opinno. Emprende.la focuses on entrepreneurial innovation in Mexico. comScore, a leading digital metrics provider, world recently unveiled an interesting study about web activity in Latin Americatitled 2012 Latin America Digital Future in Focus. This study shows many of the trends around online consumption and growth. Some interesting facts comScore revealed: Latin America’s on-line population grew faster than...
read moreTechnological development in LatAm: What’s wrong?
A couple of days ago, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released its Global Report on Information Technology 2012, in which analyzes the development of countries in a hyper-connected world. Besides presenting a list of each individual country’s development as compared with others, it became clear that Latin America is ‘behind the ball’ in terms of technological development. Puerto Rico is the first territory (it was treated separately than the US) to appear at...
read more
