The Washington Post recently profiled the top tech trends of 2012. The list read as you would expect, focusing on big data, wireless devices and the cloud. But the story that the list really tells is about the astonishing amounts of information consumers want access to, instantly, wherever they are. The business community has stepped up to deliver. From app developers to the largest corporations around the world, innovators are striving to bring innovative technologies to market.… more

The Next Web had a really interesting list of top Latin American startups to watch in 2013. They created the list not based on monetary concerns, necessarily, but noted that most of them received funding from international investors and worked with business accelerators. The list in alphabetical order:

• Agent Piggy
• Bandtastic
• Cinepapaya
• ComparaOnline
• Cumplo
• Descomplica
• Ideame
• Pagpop
• Workana
• Wormhole IT

The startups come from all over Latin America: Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, etc.… more

By Lena Groeger, ProPublica A year ago I didn’t know how to code. I had a journalism degree and had made some graphics, but I would have been hard-pressed to explain the difference between Ruby and JavaScript, and I was pretty happy when I got the YouTube video to embed correctly. I considered myself pretty technical but generally avoided the command line. When I did start learning, I was amazed by how much was out there: introductory videos, explanatory blog posts, tips and tricks and step-by-step guides.… more

Slate wrote an interesting piece recently talking about how the immigrant makeup of Silicon Valley startups has begun to change. Specifically, that this change now includes more startups and founders from Latin America. According to the piece:

…some tech insiders have seen Latin American-born entrepreneurs, a previously invisible cohort, begin to make their presence known in Silicon Valley.

…There is, however, a nucleus of innovators from places like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia who have started companies aiming to create customized travel advice, digital wallets, and more.

… more

An analysis by the San Jose Mercury News found that Latino tech workers in Silicon Valley decreased from 2000 to 2010, along with African-Americans. Instead, Asians now make up more than half of the workforce, in large part, according to the report, because of companies’ reliance on importing workers with work visas. White workers in these fields shrank from 50% to just 41%. Latino workers dropped from 4.6% to 4.2% of the Silicon Valley workforce from 2000 to 2010, and these numbers were 2.8% to 2.3% for African-Americans.… more

Rutgers University in New Jersey launched a think-tank dedicated to producing research around social, political and economic issues affecting the Latino community. The Latino Information Network at Rutgers (LIN@R), will be run like something of a news organization, according to a press release. LIN@R’s editor and director will be Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Robert Montemayor, Patricia Munoz will be the managing editor and Jorge Schement, the Dean of the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University, will also be involved.… more

A paper published by academics at Harvard University shows that, using simple and publicly available information, it is possible to track and gather information about Mexico’s 13 drug cartels. They created a tool, MOGO, that scours online information to gather reliable data about the cartels. The paper, “How and where do criminals operate? Using Google to track Mexican drug tracking organizations,” was written by Michele Coscia and Viridiana Rios. … more

By Silvia Vinas, Global Voices Diverse initiatives have arisen in Mexico that use citizen participation to report on the violence caused by drug trafficking, from the use of tags on Twitter to broadcast acts of violence that are censored by the media, to crowdsourcing initiatives like Hero Reports [es] used to geolocate reports of positive social behavior in the most violent cities in the country. Retio is a free application that uses citizen reports to geolocate “information about shootings, murders and assaults, vandalism, blocked roads, police abuse and all kinds of corruption through Twitter.” Paula Gonzalo explains more about this application in an article from Periodismo Ciudadano [es] (Citizen Journalism).… more

FloatingSheep did an interesting analysis of racist tweets that preceded and followed the presidential election in the U.S. Turns out the tweets were concentrated in the South, especially in Mississippi and Alabama. Check out the map here. The post by FloatingSheep also noted:

• The prevalence of post-election racist tweets is not strictly a southern phenomenon as North Dakota (3.5), Utah (3.5) and Missouri (3) have very high LQs.  Other states such as West Virginia, Oregon and Minnesota don’t score as high but have a relatively higher number of hate tweets than their overall twitter usage would suggest.

… more

Latinos between the ages of 18 and 34 tend to be more entrepreneurial than their white or African American counterparts, according to a recent report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which supports entrepreneurship.  According to the survey young people in the U.S. today are interested in pursuing their own ventures, but:

Young Latinos and African Americans (64 percent and 63 percent, respectively) are even more motivated to start their own businesses.

The report also shed some light on why this might be.… more