AOL Latino Preens For Fashionista Finale

Vicky Mendez, Anna Fong, and Claudia Diaz have a big day ahead of them. On Friday, their travels around New York City, and designs for a runway show, will be featured on AOL Latino as a trio of online shows, or webisodes.

Only one of them will nail the grand prize, designing a gown for a major show taking place in Los Angeles, Eduardo Lucero

Along with the launch, AOL Latino worked with actress Roselyn Sanchez to create a bilingual site for her upcoming movie "Yellow". The site offers trailers, behind the scenes footage, photo galleries and a blog.

"We’re excited to partner with Roselyn to launch this new service and to showcase this latest facet in her career as an actress and a producer," said Miguel Ferrer, director of programming, AOL Latino.

"With the unique customization features found in Latino AIM Pages, we are confident that Hispanics will find this to be the best place online to express their creativity, showcase ideas and share their thoughts with others."

"I’m honored to work with AOL Latino to create a website for my new film," said Sanchez. "Today’s Hispanic is rapidly embracing the Web – logging on every day for hours. Teaming with AOL Latino is the perfect way to promote my picture and connect with my fans."

MySpace Launches Spanish Site

"We’re moving rapidly to build communities that reflect and respect the lifestyles of our diverse members," said Travis Katz, Senior Vice President and General Manager of MySpace International.

"MySpace en Español  opens the community even wider, giving our Hispanic members the choice to share their experiences, connect with family members, and plan their social lives in either Spanish or English. We look forward to getting their feedback as we build out these new cultural communities."

The MySpace en Espanol site will feature content, programming, artists and users in the U.S. Hispanic MySpace population, along with a Spanish language version of the MySpace IM client.

MySpace will be working with local teams to create programming and partnerships for its beta launch of MySpace Latinoamérica . In addition, MySpace has plans to launch a Brazilian site this summer and will officially launch the beta version of MySpace Mexico in the coming months.

MySpace is visited by 43 percent of all U.S.- based Hispanic Internet users and the site is the top 5 most visited sites by the Hispanic online population, according to Nielsen//Netratings.

In a decision benefiting their ad-based websites, AOL has recently given away services to increase traffic, including Spanish-language portal AOL Latino.

AOL Latino, which was made a free service today, had previously been unavailable even to users who paid up to $26 a month for their internet access.

The Associated Press reported that David Liu, AOL’s senior vice president said, “This launch represents another phase in the evolution of the U.S. AOL.com Web portal.”

Launched in 2003, AOL Latino is a, “service for the U.S. Hispanic community. The new service provides AOL features and services such as Toolbar Navigation and Parental Controls in Spanish,” say representatives of the website.

Spearheaded by David Wellisch, the Vice President of the site, AOL Latino established content partnerships with over 15 companies including the Latin GRAMMY Awards, Heineken, American Express, and the Latin Recording Academy.

Features of the portal include a Spanish Welcome Screen, which leads into five Spanish language-programming areas, and content geared specifically toward the Hispanic market.

Enid Burns of Clickz Stats reports that, “within the U.S., the online Hispanic population numbers over 16 million, or 55 percent of the total Hispanic population. Among those 16 million, 77 percent have broadband access.”

Key findings from a cyberstudy conducted by AOL also found that, “Hispanic consumers report spending more time online than total U.S. online consumers,” according to the site.

“What better way to tap into them than with a new free portal?” Ralph Rivera, general manager of AOL Latino, stated according to the Associated Press.

The free access to the AOL Latino portal is expected to help rejuvenate the site, which was losing paying subscribers to rival free portals.

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Autmn Davis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering ebusiness and technology.

As I mentioned in FIR #173 last week, I’m returning to the UK after seven years in Amsterdam. New thinking, new ideas, new ventures. More about that later.

Things here are a bit upside down side this week, packing cases and boxes everywhere as we finalize packing for the movers later in the week. I won’t be online here much as I take care of such things.

Anyway, driving back to Amsterdam yesterday, I used the time in the car to catch up with a load of podcast listening. Geek News Central, Managing The Gray, Caribbean Free Radio, The M Show, Ritmo Latino, Across The Sound, Daily Source Code, even a couple of back episodes of FIR that I haven’t had a chance to listen to.

What made the listening experience outstanding was being able to hear the podcasts from my iPod on the car stereo system via the Griffin Roadtrip, a very cool gadget that transmits the audio to the car radio on a spare FM frequency. I picked one up at Schiphol airport on Saturday.

It works with any iPod model except the Shuttle, not only enabling you to listen to your audio but also charging your iPod.

Forget burning those podcasts to CD. Forget earbuds and cables. Forget contraptions like special cassettes (and who has a casette player in their car these days?). Unless you have a car with an in-built iPod connector, this has got to be the only way to listen to audio from your iPod when in a car.

Speaking of podcasting, the third anniversary of this medium passed at the weekend, on Saturday September 23.

According to Dave Winer, widely regarded as one of the two people who made it happen (the other being Adam Curry):

[] Today is, in a sense, the three-year anniversary of podcasting. It wasn’t called podcasting then, but all the essential elements of what would become podcasting were in place. A regular show with a theme (Chris Lydon inteviewing people he finds interesting), a feed that has those shows as enclosures. The enclosures are in MP3 format. And a small number of aggregators that could do something interesitng with all that. A step down the road that would lead to podcasting.

When this became a juggernaut, almost exactly a year after the first Lydon feed, it desperately needed a name. Danny G came up with “podcast” and we liked it, so that was it, the decision was made, a “rough consensus” formed, and from then on we called what we were doing podcasting.

Read Dave’s complete post for more history, especially related to the role the iPod played in the naming (does this explain why Apple wants to own the name?)

I first heard of podcasting on September 30, 2004. Shel and I announced FIR on December 21, 2004 and we recorded the first episode on January 3, 2005.

What a lot of water under the bridge in so short a time.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.

Hispanics Internet Usage Continues To Grow

By “blended marketing,” I mean TV and Internet, English and Spanish. But if you wanted to choose, according to the poll numbers, an English Internet campaign would be the most effective.

Of the 16 million U.S. Hispanics online, which represents more than half of the total US Hispanic population, 77 percent have broadband access. Of that number, 81 percent were defined as “mostly or partially acculturated,” relating to the level of assimilation into the Anglo-dominant society.

The study, conducted by Synovate, reports that acculturated Hispanics tend to prefer English-language online content, though almost 40 percent still appreciate Spanish-language content. From the segment considered unacculturated, representing just 19 percent of online Hispanics, 37 percent prefer both languages. Only 15 percent of the total prefer Spanish only.

Over two-thirds of the total population (68 percent) regard the Internet as the best source for making final brand decisions. AOL says this makes the Internet the most relevant medium for marketers.

“With this new data,” says Mark Lopez, publisher of AOL Latino, “marketers will be able to better understand how to reach the rapidly growing online Hispanic market.

“This study also helps to understand the complexities of U.S. Hispanics, and that marketers seeking to connect with the online Hispanic population must address cultural needs, which differ depending on levels of acculturation.”

The same number that considered the Internet the best source for brand decisions also reported enjoying social networking online: 68 percent use instant messaging; 63 percent share photos online; 52 percent read or post blogs; 43 percent visit social networking sites; and 40 percent use VoIP.

The most popular types of website content and offerings included news (48 percent), maps (43 percent), followed by music, weather, health and travel.

By the numbers:

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