Invitation to the Tecnifícate conference on June 4th, 2011. (In Spanish) from Ariel Coro on Vimeo.

Three major conference within the next month will either be completely produced by a Latino organization or have a major Latino component – BlogWorld 2011 in New York, Tecníficate in Santa Clarita, CA, and the Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) Latino2 conference in Silicon Valley.

The word is out, Latinos are connecting online in high numbers, which is important for advertisers like Google. Mark Lopez from Google will be presenting at the #LATISM Latino 2 Conference.

Also, the myth of Latinos as pure consumers will be debunked at BlogWorld New York when #LATISM announces the results of its massive Latino bloggers survey.

En Español

The Tecnifícate conference in Santa Clarita on June 4th will be one of the largest tech conference in the US that is completely held in Spanish. I spoke at the last Tecnfícate event at LA Mission College in January and there were over 150 attendees. The Santa Clarita conference will be at College of the Canyons and 500 attendees are expected. I’ll be presenting at the June 4th Tecnifícate conference as well.

Technologist Ariel Coro, head of TuTecnologia, is the primary organizer and driving force. he is widely know for his morning appearances on Spanish language technology segments on Univision TV and on Despierta America. His Tu Tecnologia online network has 6900 members.

I was extremely impressed by the Tecníficate attendees and their commitment to technology. When was asked, more than a third of the attendees indicated that they were small business owners. The June 4th event will focus on technology, economic development, and job growth in technology. I look forward to meeting you!

Register

BlogWorld New York – Register May 24-26, 2011

Tecnifícate – Register – June 4th 2011, College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, CA

LATISM’s Latino2 in Silicon Valley – June 11th


The following video is a quick look at the last Latino2 conference held in Los Angeles.

LikeALittle.com allows users to post tweet-like flirtatious updates about nearby people. The site is already posting updates from users at over 450 college campuses, has over 25,000 Facebook “Likes,” and has brought in millions of page views.

LikeALittle only allows the posting of positive messages to keep the positive karma going on. It’s a flirting site, not a bashing site. The site is also anonymous and every user is assigned a fruit name. If the user leaves then returns, they are assigned a new fruit username.

Here are real examples of recent posts from the Stanford University area (I’m using Stanford in this example especially because the co-founder, Evan Reas, is a Stanford grad):

At Stanford University: Female, Black hair
What to do when you like a girl, and you’re pretty sure she feels something too, but she recently started going out with someone else?

That post received 10 comments including this one:

Apple says: Or just wait a bit…things around here don’t last long… Unless they do.

I was curious to see what the buzz was on LikeALittle so I did a search over “LikeALittle” on Twitter and found seemingly mixed opinions such as:

“#likealittle website gives me the creeps…yet somehow i’m addicted?”

“Okay so this whole likealittle website thing literally FREAKS me out. SO weird and freaky and desparate…”

“LikeALittle is the greatest thing to ever happen to this campus. I’m in heaven.”

“someone wrote a likealittle about me #flattered”

The Future of LikeALittle.com

LikeALittle is still ramping up in terms of its userbase. If you visit a campus page and scroll down a bit, you’ll see items that are several days or weeks old. It reminds me of Foursquare in its early days.

Like Facebook, keeping activity on a campus by campus basis will be difficult as the number of users increase. People who are not in college will want to use the service to get flirty with folks at their local cafes and libraries.

Right now, the site has a “Keep your posts complimentary and positive” policy. As more users find LikeALittle, it will be more difficult to manage the tone of the posted comments.

Flirty vs. Creepy

What do you think, is the LikeALittle.com concept fun and flirty or creepy? Drop a comment and share with the other readers.

WordPress announced its new Learn WordPress.com site.

This online tutorial is ideal for beginning and intermediate WordPress.com bloggers and for folks who are migrating over from other blog platforms like Blogger and TypePad.

NOTE: For those of you who are not familiar with the WordPress platform, there are two flavors of WordPress – WordPress.com the free site and WordPress.org blogs which are custom install versions. You can get more information on the differences here.

The Learn WordPress.com tutorial breaks down the blog learning experience into 10 sections and also has an easy-to-print version (66 pages of learning fun). The site is well organized and does an admirable job addressing the gazillion ways in which people can blog.

Screenshot of Learn WordPress.com site

As you may know, I have my own Getting Started With WordPress.com online class as well (launching soon). As far as I’m concerned, the more options to learn blogging, the better. My blog class includes my direct feedback and guidance on blogging topics, for those who need a little bit more than 100% self-serve learning.

I’m honored to have one of my WordPress.com video tutorials as part of the official WordPress.com curriculum. WordPress links to my “Using slideshows on WordPress.com” tutorial on its “Get Flashy” page.

Check out the Learn WordPress.com site and let me know what you think.

Here’s the Using Slideshows on WordPress.com video to get you into the WordPress.com learning mood. Enjoy!

If you liked this blog post, you may want to sign up for the RSS feed, email, “Like” and share the post, and join us on Facebook.

Photo Credit: @tiabel on Flickr, by special permission.

An historic blizzard in blasting the Northeast and is shutting down air travel, affecting emergency vehicle response rates, and forcing many to stay indoors.

In classic social media style, Twitter users respond by tagging blizzard related tweets with #Snowpacalyse and #Snomageddon hashtags.

Some tweets are light-hearted:

Other tweets are serious requests for assistance:

Two Twitter Superstars, Cory Booker and 50 Cent have very different approaches to dealing with the resulting blizzard crisis.

CORY BOOKER – Public Service
Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker (@corybooker), is using Twitter as a sort of radio dispatch system to connect Newark citizens with updates on snow plow activity and to help with emergency services. With over 1 Million Twitter followers, much of the Twittersphere is seeing him in action and the media is taking notes.

Mayor Booker actually rolled up his sleeves and went out to dig people out.

50 CENT – A Lesson on Hustling
In a smaller scale shoveling endeavor, multi platinum rapper 50 Cent (@50Cent) shoveled his way out of his Connecticut home then said he intended to go into the shoveling business.

50 Cent later told his 3.7 Million Twitter followers that he was scaling up his shoveling operation and had hired 3 kids to help with door to door sales.

Whether or not 50 Cent was really charging and hiring people for his ad hoc business or just having some fun with his followers remains to be seen. But his tweet stream does provide a lesson on how to flex one’s hustle muscle.

Final Thoughts

I can personally relate to both Snowmageddon approaches. On the one hand, I’m all about public service and helping others in times of need. Cory Booker is definitely one of my role models. On the other hand, as a someone building my own consulting business, I appreciate 50 Cent’s startup hustle mentality.

I think that the snow fall and our response to it is a larger metaphor for strategies on how we’ll approach the new year. Will we work collaboratively and negotiate our way through the recession, job loss, and home price collapse or will we focus on our own personal islands?

Related Articles
* Mayor Hacks Snowmageddon With Epic Tweets- Wired Magazine
* 50 Cent Shovels Snow for Money After Northeast Blizzard – Billboard.com

Photo credits
* 50 Cent on Plixi
* @douglasingram on Twitpic
* @AgingBackwards on Twitpic
* @hijofrizbe on Twitpic

When I first saw Shel Israel’s (@shelisrael) tweet and the iTunes store description off of his link, I was skeptical, as was Shel. Visual translations via an iPhone app?

Word Lens is the real thing.

I just conducted a quick test on the iPhone app.

On-screen text message:

iPhone screenshot of the Word Lens translation:

The application has a “Pause” button which takes a still of the translation. In still mode, the translated words become hyperlinks which allows the user to click through to see the translation of the specific word.

How much is this app?

The actual Word Lens application is free and it comes with a Word Reverse and Word Erase tools.

The English-to-Spanish and the Spanish-to-English translation engines are $4.99 each. To access those libraries, you click on the white oval at the top of the screen (it will read “Demo:Reverse Words”) and you are taken to a Languages screen which shows the installed items and the “Available to Download” items.

VIDEO: Word Lens in action – Santa Paula, CA

I photographed the “Smile at the camera” sign at the La Unica bakery then showed the owner how it worked. She was amazed by the translations.

Notes

* I’d rate the translation accuracy around 70-80%.

* The app doesn’t work very well with full pages of text but it will parse through and try to translate what it can.

* The app doesn’t have Spanish regional settings so it won’t know whether to translate “potatoes” to “papas” or to “patatas.” There are hundreds of such words that vary in usage from country to country.

* According to the iTunes listing, the requirements are:
– Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPod touch (4th generation). Requires iOS 4.0 or later.

Is the Word Lens application a game changer in the translation world or is this just another app?

I received two security-related emails in the last 24 hours. One email was from Gawker Media, stating that there was a breach via its commenting system. The second email arrived this morning from LinkedIn, asking me to reset my password because my account was disabled for “security reasons.”

According to this Gawker blog post, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin, and Fleshbot were all affected by the security breach.

This Lifehacker blog post has more details on the compromised accounts.

When I saw the LinkedIn email, I thought it might be a phishing attempt so I double checked the the URL in the “From” then did a Twitter search to see if there was chatter on the password check. As expected, Twitter was buzzing with early morning complaints about having to reset passwords. This is also where I saw the Gawker connection (the Gawker Media email was still unread in my Inbox).

This is the email I received from LinkedIn, early this morning:

I still wasn’t clear on the LinkedIn/Gawker tie in until I saw this tweet from the official LinkedIn Twitter account (@linkedin).

What should you do?

• If you have a Gawker login account, change your password and don’t use the same password on other sites.
• If you have a LinkedIn account, reset your password following the instructions in the email (go to Linkedin site, click “Sign In” then click on “Forgot Password” linke and follow directions.

Even though changing passwords is inconvenient, I’m glad the news is spreading quickly to help us protect our social Web accounts.

Due to a number of factors, a great number of people (friends, supporters, participants) cannot make it this weekend to San Luis Obispo. But we still expect a very good group, so we have decided to hold a big meetup in town and postpone the formal event for early 2011 when more people can make it.

Come join the Latino2 speakers and organizers and Central Coast leaders to discuss the formal launch of LATISM 2012 and help us plan the Spring event.

Lunch is on us at the Native Lounge in San Luis Obispo — a truly unique dining experience — and the conversation will be good. We’ll meet at 2PM and stay as late as we have a crowd.

I’d like to personally thank everyone who has been so supportive of the Latino2 conference and the LATISM 2012 Initiative. I look forward to meeting with you at the tweetup and discussing how we can build this into a bigger event.

Tweet-up information

Native Lounge – San Luis Obispo
1023 Chorro Street
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401-3222

Saturday, Dec. 4, 2010 – from 2pm to 4pm (or later, as long as we have a crowd)

Lunch is on us!

Sincerely,

Latino2 producers and LATISM,
Jose Huitron @josehuitron
Giovanni Rodriguez @giorodriguez
Jesse Luna @jesseluna

Photo Credit: rx_kamakshi on Flickr – License

Google recently closed off Facebook’s access to import Gmail contacts. Google felt that if Facebook was able to import its Gmail contacts that Google should be able to import from Facebook. Since that wasn’t going to happen, Google pulled the plug on its Facebook integration.

To counter this Google move, Facebook added instructions to its site on how to do a workaround.

This is what I did:

1. Noticed the “Find More Friends” section on my Facebook profile

2. Clicked on the “Find Friends” button.

3. Facebook brings up a mini window which churns then redirects me to a “Find Your Friends” page which has instructions on how to download my Gmail contacts then re-upload them to be processed. SNEAKY!

This is the Find Your Friends page view:

It will be interesting to see if Facebook experiences a dip in new users after the Google move despite Facebooks workaround. What do you think, will it have an effect on Facebook numbers?

Photo credit: Ludovico Cera on Flickr – license

Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) is proud to announce San Luis Obispo as the second stop on the Latino2 California Tour.

Come join us on December 4, 2010, at the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center in San Luis Obispo. California’s Central Coast is the birth place of “La Causa”, the Latino civil rights movement. The conference will focus on the theme “Community and Collaboration in Central California: Then and Now.”

• REGISTER for the Latino2 conference (FREE)
• Tune into Latino2 conference details on the official site

Getting Excited?

The video below is a compilation from the first Tour stop in Los Angeles. Many thanks to Gina Ruiz (@ginaruiz on Twitter) and Deldelp Medina (@deldelp) for sharing pictures and videos!

Picture credit: lastorset on Flickr

This is the news article that prompted the creation of this poll:

LAUSD to use fingerprint scans for school lunches

This issue is of interest to me for several reasons:

• I used to work for a company that sold fingerprint recognition components
• I taught for eight years
• And, I’m fascinated by the overlap of technology and culture

Like this poll? Share it and feel free to discuss in the Comments section.

Photo Credit: lobstar28 on Flickr – License