Being in Silicon Valley, I have been able to witness first-hand how major technology companies have shifted their focus to becoming more connected with the booming U.S. Hispanic community. More and more tech companies and startups are launching Hispanic-focused marketing divisions, introducing new Latino-flavored campaigns or taking an active role in major Hispanic events. This is especially evident this year at one of the nation’s largest and most influential Hispanic conference: the 2014 NCLR (National Conference of La Raza) Annual Conference, which takes place this weekend in Los Angeles.… more

What do DREAMers and other immigrants need the most when it comes to pursuing legal status? How about a one stop destination? In 2012, Más Wired wrote about LexSpot, a service that focused on providing easy access to the necessary resources for immigrants in the United States. LexSpot, however, has redesigned and re-launched, as BridgeUS, and now provides a new service — access to immigration attorneys at a reasonable price. This feature allows immigrants the opportunity to have their applications reviewed by lawyers without going through the entire process with a lawyer, thus saving the applicants money.… more

A study from Indiana University Bloomington seems to suggest that a candidate’s ability to be mentioned in social media may directly correlate with the politician’s performance in elections. The findings of the paper even persist with variables such as candidate incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and even demographic variables such as the district’s race and gender composition. The study suggests that Twitter’s correlations with other measures of human behavior (such as film title mentions correlating with a film’s revenue) can be used to measure how people will vote.… more

Twitter has become a global protest staple. Along with the spread of Guy Fawkes masks, the service has become an all too common feature in the many world-wide protests of this decade. The recent protests in Brazil are proving to be no different, and researchers are documenting the use of the service in the Brazil protests which have swelled in numbers since their beginning. Microsoft Research Fuse Labs researchers Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Emma Spiro recently published an excellent write-up focusing on the protests and the user of social media by protestors.… more

By Christie Thompson, ProPublica Federal spending on border security is at an all-time high—and it would get even higher under the Gang of Eight’s new plan. The Senate immigration proposal, released last week, would allocate $4.5 billion in the next five years to tighten control of U.S. borders. The U.S. spent nearly $18 billion dollars on immigration enforcement agencies last fiscal year, more than all other law enforcement agencies combined.

The “Gang of 8” bipartisan group of Senators introduced immigration reform legislation last week that, after a time, would theoretically allow people without legal status in the U.S. to gain access to a path to citizenship that would take 13 years. There are many caveats in the bill, as you can see from this infographic put together by Quartz. There are caveats if you committed crimes, what dates you arrived to the U.S. and more. Check out this infographic from Quartz and let us know what you think about immigration reform.… more

By Lois Beckett, ProPublica The Republicans have admitted it: They need to get serious about collecting and analyzing voter data. Well, you can’t get much more serious than talking to Teradata, the “data warehousing” company that helps Wal-Mart, Apple and eBay store massive amounts of information about the behavior of their customers.

Latinos and Latinas under the age of 35 benefitted the most from California’s online voter registration during the 2012 election cycle, according to a new study from the Center for Latino Policy Research at the University of California at Berkeley. In a study, titled “Differences among Latina/o, Asian American, and White Online Registrants in California,” authors found that 22.6% of all of the 829,297 online voter registrants in California in 2012 were Latino, compared to 59.8% who were white and 11.1% who were Asian.… more

This post originally appeared in Latinopia. A question that burns on every politico’s mind these days is how to engage more Latinos in the electoral process. Although we are 17% of the population, we were just 10% of the vote in the last election. What’s more, although 24 million Latinos are eligible to vote, only about half do so. Upping the ante even more is the fact that 50,000 Latinos turn 18 every month. While there may not be a silver bullet solution, at least one tactic has shown some promise with young (read: Latino) potential voters: online voter registration.… more

A massive amount of data from the Pew Research Hispanic Center has been released for statistic junkies, dataphiles and anyone else to analyze. In this multi-article series, Más Wired takes a look at the Pew Center’s data and pulls out some of the more interesting bits. “A Statistical Portrait of Hispanics in the United States” contains a variety of statistics about the Hispanic population. Más Wired has taken the time to examine and analyze the statistics released, as well as mull over the meaning and repercussions of this data.… more