Next week, we are headed back to SXSW in Austin to explore one of our favorite topics: technology and innovation in the Latino community. Press release here. 

With fifty-two million Latinos living in the US today and an estimated 50 million Latino voters expected in 2040, this is a community that will have a major say in hat happens in 21st century America.

While a digital divide exists, the Latino population is making a huge impact on the ever-evolving communications landscape and the way brands and causes engage audiences online.

Our panel at SXSW is called “Latinos y Mobile: A Silver Bullet?”  in which we will explore the problems, opportunities and data surrounding Latinos and digital engagement. Panelists include Brent Wilkes from the League of United Latin American Citizens, Estuardo Rodriguez of The Raben Group, Kety Esquivel of Fenton Communications (her blog here) and our very own Lou Aronson, founder of Discourse Analytics. We’ll also be sharing the results from the second annual Latino Voice survey, which gives Latinos a platform to express how technology has impacted them and their community. The survey is currently open for submission.

If you are going to SXSW next week check out our event on March 8th.  Details here. If you can’t come, follow along the #mobileLTN hashtag on Twitter. 

Can’t believe that SXSW is around the corner. Just a year ago we were speechless when we found out we made it into the Startup Accelerator Finals. SXSW was a fantastic experience for us personally and professionally. We officially launched Votifi in Austin and the experience contributed to much of the success we had this past year. 

We’re looking forward to attending SXSW again, this time as Discourse Analytics. Thanks to everyone who voted for our panel on the Panel Picker. Lou will be speaking on a panel called “Latinos y Mobile: The Silver Bullet” on March 8th at 5:30 PM [link]. 

Joining him on the panel are Kety Esquivel (moderator) who is currently a VP at Fenton Communications (@KetyE); Brent Wilkes, National Executive Director for the League of United Latin American Citizens (@BrentWilkes) and Estuardo Rodriguez, a principal at the Raben Group (@EstuardoDC). 

New times call for new methods and as Einstein said you can’t solve the problems of today using the same technology we used to create them.

No where is this more the case than in the Latino community: a highly diverse, highly mobile, highly tech adaptive population. There is no better place to explore these issues than at SXSW.

Today we’re also launching the second installment of our LatinoVoice survey to elicit responses on the impact of technology in the Latino community.

Last year at SXSW, we learned that Latinos saw blogs and Facebook as the best places to interact with others in the community, felt passing the DREAM Act was a top priority, and believed vocational education was the best way to realizing the American Dream.  What will we learn this year?

Take the survey, pass it along to your friends, and help us make the Hispanic voice heard this year at SXSW.

You can follow the conversation on twitter at #mobileLTN. And let us know if you are going to be at SXSW this year. We’d love to meet up. 

Courtesy of @apptentive

Cult of Mac, which is usually unashamedly critical of anything not-Apple, gave a fairly positive summary of reviews of Windows 8 mobile. 

Let there be no doubt — Windows Phone 8 is a definite improvement over its predecessor, and it’s long overdue. In general, we like what we see, and users and developers have been eagerly awaiting this update ever since the Windows Phone platform first launched. It’s still far from perfect, but Microsoft has finally caught up in many ways to its competitors (and come up with some clever new features in the process), and by doing so, the momentum is now in its court.

Read the rest here. 

Super excited for our panel to get approved for #SXSW 2013

As the numbers of Latinos in the US continues to grow, we have heard that mobile will solve the digital divide in empowering the Latino population but what does that mean are we making the correct assumptions? Our panel brings in experts from all sides to explore the impact of the Hispanic voice on technology and, in turn, the impact of technology on the Hispanic voice. The panelists bring experience in politics, caused based organization, commercial campaigns and mobile in order to uncover trends in issue identification and activation around the Latino community as a whole and the subsets within that whole. Much like the consumer today can choose between various tablets and smartphones for functionality and personal identification the Latino Community is not one size fits all community. The Latino community in the U.S. today is one of the most dynamic and diverse of all communities from a socioeconomic, racial, political and country of origin perspective. We explore this diversity.

California governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have  placed restrictions on the ability of local law enforcement officials in California to interrupt cellular service. The legislation was proposed by Senator Alex Padilla in the aftermath of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Agency (BART) decision to take its mobile service offline during public protests in August 2011. The Governor’s argued that legislators needs to come back with a better bill that balances protection of speech with the ability of law enforcement to use mobile service shut down as a tool to protect the public. Free speech advocates included the Electronic Freedom Foundation lambasted BART and the local authorities for shutting down cell phone services as a means to quell dissent and the public’s right to express their views. Read more about the case here.

The shutdown of cell phone networks is deeply troubling for a number of reasons. Cell phones and text messaging are essential to every day life for millions and millions of people around the world. A legitimate outage caused by a natural disaster or power outage is one thing. But when the government has the authority to shut down networks without due process when it deems necessary, the possibility for abuse is immense.  You can’t help but recall the case of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak shutting down Egyptian cell phone networks as the uprisings in Tahrir Square gained momentum. (The largest Egyptian telco is owned in large part by UK-based Vodafone).  So while the abuse of power is seldom imminent,  successive administrations may or may not have the public interest as their primary concern, and the private sector cannot be relied upon to act other than in its own self-interest, regardless of the public good they are serving or facilitating. Furthermore, in case of emergencies such as injuries, contacting family or contacting law enforcement itself, the idea that shutting down networks during crises will make people safer is a dubious argument. 

As we become ever-more reliant on personal communication technology to express ourselves, the course that governments take in balancing free speech with national security concern will be extremely important.

After having an amazing time at our first SXSW Festival in March, we’re super excited for number two in March 2013.

We’re also hoping our panel makes it through the panel picking process. 

We are teaming up with Kety Esquivel from Ogilvy and Estuardo Rodriguez of the Raben Group to talk about empowering the Latino community in the mobile era. If this interests you take a moment to vote for the panel here: 

Latinos y Mobile: A Silver Bullet?

Description

As the numbers of Latinos in the US continues to grow, we have heard that mobile will solve the digital divide in empowering the Latino population but what does that mean are we making the correct assumptions? Our panel brings in experts from all sides to explore the impact of the Hispanic voice on technology and, in turn, the impact of technology on the Hispanic voice. The panelists bring experience in politics, caused based organization, commercial campaigns and mobile in order to uncover trends in issue identification and activation around the Latino community as a whole and the subsets within that whole. Much like the consumer today can choose between various tablets and smartphones for functionality and personal identification the Latino Community is not one size fits all community. The Latino community in the U.S. today is one of the most dynamic and diverse of all communities from a socioeconomic, racial, political and country of origin perspective. We explore this diversity.

Questions Answered

1. Is mobile empowering the Latino community?
2. What information can we glean on the Latino community its preferences and trend lines from the “hard” data in this rapidly changing landscape?
3. Is mobile and broadband the panacea that some have suggested?
4. What can mobile connectivity do to help us locate the thoughts and trends within this powerful and dynamic group?
5. How effectively is mobile currently being leveraged to understand and activate the Latino community?

Remember. Give us a thumbs up here while you browse other cool SXSW panel suggestions. 

For Lou Aronson, inspiration struck four years ago during the heat of the 2008 campaign. He listened as his neighbors traded complaints about the overwhelming number of robocalls streaming into their phones—all except one who proudly proclaimed that since he no longer had a landline, he hadn’t endured a single political call all year.

“I turned to one of my neighbors, who’s a political consultant, and suggested he open a mobile phone based polling company,” recalls Aronson. “He laughed and told me it was the dumbest idea he’d ever heard.”

Four years later, Aronson has left behind a career as an attorney to launch Votifi—a company he hopes will eventually fill a void left by traditional survey research as smartphone use continues to soar. [READ MORE]