Mothers Day 2013 may have passed but one San Antonio-based company is finding a way to celebrate Moms and their newborns every single day of the year.  Biovideo Productions produces movies of a baby’s first day of life. Filming, editing and production is completed generally less than 48 hours after the baby is born so that parents can view and share the video directly from the hospital. Biovideo delivers more than 1,500 custom videos each month thanks to the ability to manage and control operations through an online interactive enterprise system which allows the start-up to monitor production status every step of the way, from anywhere in the world. … more

Immigration and tech may not seem to be intricately linked on the surface, but the current immigration reform debate in Congress and some recent data show otherwise. States where immigrants are concentrated have strong, and growing, tech sectors, and thus would likely benefit greatly from immigration reform. California and Texas ranked first and second, respectively, in tech employment, according to a recent Cyberstates report. These states also happen to be places where Latinos, and immigrants, are heavily concentrated.… more

The number of Latinos listening to online radio has almost doubled in the past year, according to a report. The Media Audit just released a report that found that a total of 32.7% of Latinos listened to the top Internet radio stations in March, that’s 4.2 million people, and they are 35% more likely to listen to Internet radio than the rest of the population. We previously wrote about how Pandora had been targeting the Latino community, whereas Spotify had basically been ignoring them.… more

Racism and homophobia on Twitter are concentrated pretty much all over the United States, according to a new mapping project that tracked racist tweets against geographic data. The Geography of Hate is a project from California focusing on the geographic centers of hate speech on Twitter. The map is part of the work by Humboldt State University’s Dr. Monica Stephens and students of her Advanced Cartography course. Using Google Maps, the researchers pulled geocoded tweets from June 2013 to April 2013 with “hate words” in them (150,000) and students classified them as negative according to a rubric, then these “hateful” tweets were used in the analysis for the map.… more

Dr. Yanira Cruz, Executive Director of National Hispanic Council on Aging For fifty years now, May has been Older Americans Month. It’s a time for celebrating older Americans and for encouraging them to share the wisdom and knowledge accumulated over their lifetimes. In our fast-moving, modern age, we can benefit from the guidance and experience of previous generations.Seniors are not just looking back. They are looking to the future too and, defying all stereotypes, are embracing the high speed broadband tools and technology of the 21st century with enthusiasm and aplomb.… more

Barely a day after it became public that Disney had made a move to trademark Dia De los Muertos for an upcoming Pixar film about the holiday, the company has given up the effort. A company spokesperson has stated that the effort to trademark Dia was given up as the film’s title would change. However, the backlash regarding the move was enormous — and almost instant. Many were furious that Disney had attempted to turn their culture into a piece of consumerism. The effort to fight off this cultural appropriation is certainly admirable and a testament to how the Internet can become a loudspeaker for the marginalized, however, Dia De los Muertos did not escape unharmed, and the exploitation of the holiday continues unabated — with icons and symbols being sold constantly to naive consumers at Hot Topic.… more

A new study from researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough recently found that our brains respond differently to people of different races. In the study white participants watched men of different races pick up a glass of water and take a drink. Researchers reported that, typically, when we watch people perform a task a part of our brain fires that correlates with when they themselves would perform that task. But in this study:

…participants’ motor cortex was significantly less likely to fire when they watched the visible minority men perform the simple task.

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Freedom House and the International Center for Journalists (ICJ) is launching a digital and interactive map to track the attacks on journalists and bloggers in Mexico. According to a report from ICJ more than 80 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2005. Periodistas en Riesgo, Journalists at Risk, is a crowdsourced map that allows people to report assaults anonymously. You can see these reports reflected on the map or on a stream on the site, check out the map here.… 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 Boston attacks are still fresh in the minds of many. One suspect was killed in a firefight, another has been detained — and is reportedly being outfitted with a good defense team. However, there are still unresolved issues. We have no clear motive,  and the question of whether the FBI bungled it’s job are the two big questions. Despite the unresolved threads in the attacks, we have witnessed innovation in technology by bystanders and concerned persons. One of the most innovative uses of technology came in the form of crowdsourcing via “Google Person Finder.” It is not always easy to reach people during crises.… more