Latino Startup Alliance Expands Presence to the Central Coast

Latino Startup Alliance Expands Presence to the Central Coast

Focused on encouraging the inspiration and cultivation of Latino led technology startup ventures

August 21, 2013 -- Latino Startup Alliance (LSA) based in San Francisco, CA is excited to announce that it will be expanding its presence to the California Central Coast.

The Central Coast has been very active in the tech ecosystem with recent Startup Weekends being held in Santa Maria, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo. Spanning some of the most beautiful coastline in California from Monterey to Port Hueneme, the Central Coast is home to a vibrant collective of change agents, dynamic entrepreneurs, and forward-thinking educators. Highlighting the Latino entrepreneur and tech community's need for a bigger platform is what a global organization like LSA can provide.

In addition, leading LSA Central Coast's (LSA CC) efforts will be Jose Huitron - Founder of Hub 81 and Co-Founder of Crowdismo, the first Latino-focused crowdfunding platform. Jose has been very active in the local tech community through efforts such as Startup Weekend Santa Maria helping to accelerate the conversation on entrepreneurship and increase startup activity.

"The Central Coast is fast becoming a booming tech and entrepreneurship corridor. An opportunity to help foster increased diversity in tech and entrepreneurship is a welcome challenge. The Latino Startup Alliance brings an important bridge to the region with direct access to Silicon Valley and vital support that will help increase the number of Latinos in tech and entrepreneurship locally." says Jose.

To register for this upcoming event visit: http://latinostartupalliancecentralcoast.eventbrite.com

About the Latino Startup Alliance
LSA launched over a year and half ago and has proudly grown to over 400+ innovators. LSA's mission is to encourage the inspiration and cultivation of Latino led technology startup ventures by providing a strong support network of fellow entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, and mentors. For more information visit: http://latinostartupalliance.org/

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Top Gadgets for Business Owners: Guest Post by Tanya Salcido of #LatinaGeeks

Let’s be honest. We all love playing with new gadgets, especially ones that will improve the productivity level in our business or simply for entertainment. As Latinos, it’s no surprise that we are enthusiastic mobile users. Three-in-four (76%) Hispanic internet users say they access the internet on a cellphone, tablet or other mobile handheld device at least occasionally, according to a Pew Hispanic survey. Nothing is growing faster than the adoption of portable devices and the consumption of content on these devices. 

In the U.S., Hispanic consumers’ usage rates of smartphones, television, online video, social networking and other forms of entertainment make this group one of today’s most engaged and dynamic populations in the digital space, according to Nielsen’s recent State of the Hispanic Consumer: The Hispanic Market Imperative report. It’s proven that mobile presents a significant avenue of opportunity for marketers looking to reach Hispanic consumers.

So with all the data presented, it’s comes with no surprise that the go-to gadgets for a majority of savvy business owners or entrepreneurs are a smartphone or tablet. They can definitely help knock out the to-do list, especially with the help of business enhancing apps, such as Evernote, Square and HelloSign. Among Latino adults, half (49%) say they own a smartphone, so you know that cafecito break will be a productive one.

Let’s look beyond the a smartphone or tablet and dive into gadgets that will take business performance and everyday life to a whole other level. Who knows … your tech savviness may even help you seal the deal at your next client meeting.

Leap Motion Software - $79.99
Touch screen? That’s so 2007. This smartphone-sized gizmo by Leap Motion puts touch screen to shame. You will no longer need to use a keyboard or mouse and kiss those smudge marks on your monitor goodbye. With the Leap Motion Controller, all you have to do is wave your hand or lift your finger, and, as if by magic and pinpoint accuracy, stuff moves on your screen. You can even pick something up and put it down. Just like in real life. It’s been called “the best gesture-control system we've ever tested,” by Wired. It’s design is sleek and only 3” long, so it’s perfect for travel or beside your computer. Using this gadget will not only make your feel like you’re on the next level of your tech game, but it will be sure to impress potential clients when presenting your company’s services.

Leap Motion

DOCKr - $149.95
This gadget is a 6-in-1 solution for your iPad. Not only will it protect your iPad, but it works as a battery charger via USB and micro USB port for your smartphone and tablet, has a wireless keyboard, speakers and provides flexible viewing. You also have the option to customize the look of the case by adding your logo. What says, “You rock”, more than a branded case for your team? It’s lightweight and will make meeting note-taking a snap. The DOCKr offers an extra 4-8 hours of extra battery lifetime and will allow you to carry and continue your work while on the go. 

DOCKr

Wi-Drive - Starts at $80.50

Having a wireless portable drive can get you out of a tight spot when running late for a business trip or meeting. Did you forget to load your 32GB video to your laptop? No worries. Add it to your wireless drive in advance for safe keeping. Kingston’s Wi-Drive lets you store and share your content with your colleagues. It gives you up to 128GB of added storage for your mobile device and lets you share photos, videos, files and more with three or more users on their own mobile device. Access the Wi-Drive through any Internet browser or download one of the free Wi-Drive Apps to access and easily share the content. This pocket-sized device offers 4 hours of of continuous use and can handle a few drops, bumps and knocks.

3M™ MP180 Pocket Projector - $399.00
With a 3M Mobile Projector, you can connect to virtually any digital device with digital output and share it with others. They’ve made it so easy to plug in and present. With Bluetooth technology‚ you can access‚ update and download files over the Internet. So you never again have to worry about having the right content for your presentation. Need a projector that supports Microsoft Office suite and Adobe files? They’ve got you covered. Need to connect to an Apple device? Consider it done. You will always be prepared when walking into that corporate office for a presentation.

MP180 Pocket Projector

SlimScan SS100 - Starts at $139.99
This credit card sized scanner packs a punch. It allows you to scan all your receipts into monthly directories, then import to software to view, OCR (Optical Character Reader) into expense database, edit, create Excel report for the period, and also create a report containing Excel and all related expense images together to easily send by email. This device is perfect if you are a frequent traveler or always taking clients out to dinners. No matter where you are, you can bring this scanner with you and capture receipts and business contacts. The best part about this little scanner is it can hold up to 600 images. Remember to pack this device for your next week-long trip.

About Tanya Salcido

Described as the “go-to girl in branding,” a self-professed social media addict and early adopter of technology, Tanya Salcido is skilled in the ways of digital branding, strategic online communications, online community-building, blogger/influencer outreach and formulating successful marketing action plans. As an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional and with professional experience in social media dating back to 2008, Tanya is well-versed in helping companies and non-profits excel in their social and online presence.

While she’s savvy in serving the needs of a wide variety of clientele, Tanya has a particular passion and flair for digital marketing for the Latino market. Her work in this area includes event organizing with an online Latino social media organization, published pieces in Hispanic Network Magazine, Professional Woman’s Multicultural Magazine and co-founding #LatinaGeeks, an online community that aims to empower and inspire Latin women by spreading knowledge of entrepreneurship, social media and technology.

Tanya loves exploring California’s wine regions, cooking, and watching 80’s movie classics like The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Valley Girl. She is also an avid baseball fan, which once led to her scoring an Ultimate Fan grand prize from the Angels.

URBAN TxT’s Secret Sauce Turns Teens Into Tech Entrepreneurs

“I guess we’re used to a teacher coming in and telling us what to do. When it was just us, nobody really knew what to do.” This answer resonated with everyone of the 31 teens accepted into URBAN Teens eXploring Technology (URBAN TxT) summer program, also known as the Summer Hackaneer Academy. The new participant was explaining why some teens stepped up to the plate and others did not during a teambuilding activity that happened earlier in the day.

URBAN TxT students during first program activity.

Creating an environment that allows young adults to explore their talents, insecurities, attitude towards leadership, reflect on daily achievements and failures, and openly discuss these amongst the entire team takes a lot of work. Interestingly enough, South Los Angeles’ URBAN TxT has that environment. More importantly, the organization is using computer programming to develop the best and brightest minds in the inner city into technology entrepreneurs.

Founder, Oscar Menjivar, and Bagel, URBAN TxT mascot.

This unique environment comes out of a curriculum based on peer-to-peer and projectbased learning. Oscar Menjivar, co-founder of URBAN TxT, has been perfecting the curriculum for more than a decade. The program’s secret sauce needs many ingredients. The ability to teach technology concept without technology is key. For the first few weeks it’s all about team and leadership building. On the first day of the 2013 Hackaneer Academy the teens were given a problem. It was up to them to find the solution. The only rule was no verbal communication. Along the way students learned about communication, trial and error, troubleshooting, the frustration that small errors bring about and the satisfaction a coder gets after finishing a perfectly crafted project.

As students and staff get to know each other, basics of computer programming are incorporated into the activities that make URBAN TxT the only South LA technology organization that does leadership development. URBAN TxT’s secret sauce also needs personal investment from every member of the leadership team. None of the directors, coaches or volunteers are in it for a paycheck. They put in their time, creativity and commitment because they believe in the organization and, more importantly, the teens that are in it. This “students first” mentality helps the leadership team overcome obstacles, grow their own leadership and technological skills and push the boundaries of creativity.

Now, don’t think you know all there is to URBAN TxT, though. After all, the secret sauce remains secret for a reason. If you get to know the organization enough you might learn a little about the other ingredients, like a talking duck, furry hat, foam ninja or the pup named Bagel.

Blog written by Juan Vasquez, Communications Coach for URBAN Teens eXploring Technology. URBAN TxT is a nonprofit organization that encourages inner city teen males to become catalysts of change in urban communities. The organization develops teens from South LA and Watts into a new generation of leaders through technology. To learn more about URBAN TxT visit www.urbantxt.com. Follow Juan on Twitter at @JuanSVas and URBAN TxT at @URBANTxT.

Meet Cíbola: South Side Chicago's Innovation Center Fueling Diversity in Tech Innovation

Fresh off 54 hours of startup ideation via Startup Weekend Santa Maria, the excitement and energy still remains. Questions arise as to how we can keep the momentum going in the area of moving viable ideas forward. Enter Cíbola, a prime example of a focused collective effort aimed at helping drive the number of everyday innovators. The Rainforest by Victor W. Hwang and Greg Horowitt identifies several important aspects of the 'Innovation Funnel' including:

• Ideas
• People
• Entrepreneurs
• Organizations
• Coordinating Infrastructure

Cíbola, founded by Mahrinah von Schlegel and Emile Cambry, Jr., is an interesting example of coordinating infrastructure focused on launching new ideas and lasting companies of all kinds in South Side Chicago.

Cíbola is a hub for startups innovation, collaboration and creativity in Pilsen. Our mission is to help Chicagoans become everyday innovators, solve complex challenges, promote diversity and create a community of support for all of us to build our dreams. Cíbola is dedicated to building companies of all kinds, with a focus on tech entrepreneurship, social enterprise, and growing both Pilsen and Chicago's entrepreneur communities.

About Pilsen
Just three miles from downtown, Pilsen has been a port-of-entry community for more than 130 years. The eastern section of Pilsen has attracted been home to artists and galleries for more than 20 years. This arts district, along with the expansion of the nearby University of Illinois at Chicago and is less than five minutes from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Depaul University’s downtown campus.

Why Now?
The Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) reports that less than one percent of venture capital dollars invested annually has been directed to the country’s 5.8 million minority business owners, who represent 29 percent of all businesses in America. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of minority-owned firms increased 46 percent, compared to 18 percent for all U.S. firms. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 2002 and 2007, the number of people employed at minority-owned businesses jumped 27 percent, while job growth for non-minority-owned firms increased less than one percent. The MBDA asserts that closing the funding gap between minority-and non-minority-owned startups, based on the share of the adult minority population, would add $2.5 trillion to the economic output of the U.S. and create 11.8 million new jobs.

Cíbola, a coworking space, aims to create an intimate, engaging environment for entrepreneurs to learn actual lessons from actual experiences. It’s hard to do that with 3,000 people spread out in a giant auditorium at a keynote full of theory and fluff. What we need is an environment of accelerated and directed effort towards product and idea development.

Starting in the mid to late 2000s, hackathons became significantly more widespread, and began to be increasingly viewed by companies and venture capitalists as a way to quickly develop new software technologies, and to locate new areas for innovation and funding. Some major companies were born from these hackathons, such as GroupMe, which began as a project at a hackathon at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 conference; in 2011 it was acquired by Skype for $85 million. The software PhoneGap began as a project at the iPhoneDevCamp (later renamed iOSDevCamp) in 2008; the company whose engineers developed PhoneGap, Nitobi, refocused itself around PhoneGap, and Nitobi was bought by Adobe in 2011 for an undisclosed amount.

We need more spaces like Cíbola and innovators to help set the tone for ongoing ideation and exciting entrepreneurship.

Learn more by supporting Cíbola on Facebook and Twitter.

NORTEC Collective and Interesante.com Composing New Technology Tune.

NORTEC collective and Interesante.com composing new technology tune.

Mexico is experiencing an economic renaissance. The country's explosive growth has fueled a new wave of technology startups that are betting on the Mexican market. Interesante.com is one that has been able to fuse culture and technology into a service that allows users to publish, share and discover millions of interests in Spanish and English.

Interesante users are a highly mobile crowd. To support this, we are regularly releasing improved versions of Interesante for iPhone and Interesante for mobile web. Our users can explore different categories, create collections and get recommendations.

Colors, sounds, location, content and type, play a crucial role in the recommendations we serve users and our highly sophisticated algorithms are making this happen. The algorithms work diligently in the background and simplify the user’s actions.  We show our users the best content as fast as we possibly can.

Discovering new musical tastes through video

NORTEC Collective, a collective of avant-garde artists in electronic music lead by Ramón Amezcua (Bostich) and Pepe Mogt (Fussible) and twice Grammy nominated artists, are now part of the group of advisors to Interesante. NORTEC collective provides the artistic point of view and opens the doors for up and coming artists to be a crucial part of the discovery engines of the future, where the crowd discovers the hidden gems in platforms like Interesante. Video is key in the discovery of new artists and music and we are committed to taking video discovery to a new level. Interesante has integrated YouTube’s API, enabling video content recommendations

NORTEC and Interesante are working to understand the needs of musicians and solve the problem of how to be discovered among a sea of noise.  Interesante wants to let artists and musicians find their core audience and increase the initial engagement by bringing their music directly to them.

Interesante, Inc.
Menlo Park, CA
(650)-799-1592
prensa@interesante.com