WebProNews » Spanish

Spanish Kindle Store Launches with 22,000+ Titles

Josh Wolford — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:12:28 +0000

Amazon has just launched their Spanish language Kindle Store today, and it’s starting with over 22,000 titles. Over 1,000 of these titles are free e-books, as they are part of the public domain.

The Spanish Kindle Store contains most of the bestsellers from Spain – both fiction and non-fiction. Amazon also boasts that the store has the most complete selection of Catalan, Basque, and Galician titles around.

“We are excited to introduce the new Spanish Kindle Store which features the most best sellers in Spain, the leading selection of titles in Catalan, Basque and Galician and also includes unique and exclusive titles from Rosa Montero,” said Gordon Willoughby, Director, EU Kindle. “Kindle is already the best-selling e-reader in the world. It comes with an electronic ink display that reads like real paper, with no glare, even in bright daylight and it offers the convenience of downloading books in less than 60 seconds. Kindle is so small and light that it disappears in your hands, which is just what you want when you are reading a great story like ‘El puente de los asesinos,’ by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

“El Puente de los asesinos,” one of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s Captain Alatriste novels, will run readers 9.49 Euros or about $13.

The Spanish Kindle Store’s vast selection of content in a wide range of categories includes popular titles from best-selling authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Navarro and Carlos Ruiz Zafón, as well as short form content from El País and La Vanguardia, uniquely available on Kindle. In addition, the store will launch with three exclusive self-published books from award-winning author and journalist Rosa Montero, using Kindle Direct Publishing.

Amazon also unveiled the first Spanish language Kindle, which is available for 99EUR (about $133).

¡Lee!

YouTube Launches its Univision Channel

Chris Crum — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:39:26 +0000

In November, YouTube announced that it had struck a partnership with one of the top Spanish-language broadcast networks in America, Univision. The partnership would see YouTube providing both short clips and full shows from the network. YouTube has now announced the official launch of the Univision channel.

The channel contains content from Univision’s three major networks: Univision, TeleFutura and Galavisión.

"Some of the most popular shows on the channel include Univision’s morning show Despierta América (Wake-Up America); TeleFutura’s entertainment show Escándalo TV (ShowBiz TV), and Galavisión’s home decorating series Decorando Contigo (Decorating with You), among many others. The Univision channel on YouTube will also premiere weekly show recaps made just for YouTube viewers," says Shanna Preve, Strategic Partnerships at YouTube. "These videos will feature top Univision talent summarizing the best moments from Univision shows in the last week."

"The partnership provides more premium, current, monetizeable content for our advertisers interested in reaching the growing online Hispanic demographic; Kraft Foods is the channel’s exclusive launch sponsor," adds Preve.

The Univision YouTube channel represents the first time Univision programming has been made available on the Internet outside of the network’s own properties (at least legally).

Related Articles:

> YouTube, Univision Announce Partnership

> YouTube Getting Serious About This Video Rental Thing

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Twitter Expands Into More Languages

Chris Crum — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:53:24 +0000

Update 4 : Twitter is now supporting the German language.

Update 3 : Twitter is now supporting the Italian language.

Update 2 : Twitter is now supporting the French language.

Update: Twitter is now supporting the Spanish language.

Original Article: Twitter announced that it intends to roll out the service in the French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages. Currently it’s only available in English and Japanese.

Expanding into more languages should have a profound impact on Twitter’s growth in new users. The company doesn’t plan to stop there either though. Co-founder Biz Stone says that’s just a starting point.

Twitter is taking a cue from Facebook and calling upon users to help with translations. The company has launched a tool for people with experience in different languages to suggest translations for the Twitter site itself. "Then, we’ll follow up technically," says Stone.

"We are inviting a small group of people to become volunteer translators at first," he explains. "As more folks volunteer, the translation suggestions should accumulate faster and we’ll have enough material to respond by making Twitter available not only in English and Japanese but also French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We will distribute the translations to Twitter platform developers making it easier for them to offer multiple language support as well."

Our latest numbers have shown that new user registrations have declined slightly for Twitter. The more languages that Twitter supports, obviously the more useful more people will find it. It has a long way to go to get Facebook-like numbers, but this would be a huge step in the right direction (along with the forthcoming "lists" feature) to step up the game.

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Yahoo Launches Spanish Version of Mobile Home Page

Chris Crum — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:31:50 +0000

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Mobile in Spanish. This is a Spanish-language version of the Yahoo Mobile home page, which is customized specifically for U.S. Hispanic consumers, and is available on over 1,900 devices.

"By bringing together U.S. Hispanic consumers’ favorite content and services from across the Internet, Yahoo! Mobile en Español enables users to create both culturally and personally relevant mobile experiences," a spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebPronews.

"Yahoo! Mobile en Español targets a significant addressable set of influential and increasingly mobile U.S. Hispanic consumers," she says. "According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are 46 million U.S. Hispanics, making it equivalent in population to the second largest country in Latin America behind Brazil. According to comScore, mobile Internet usage among Hispanics is outpacing that of all other groups, with 88% of Hispanics consuming content on their mobile phones."

Yahoo says Yahoo! Mobile en Español will give users the ability to:

- Discover via results from Yahoo!’s award-winning mobile Search, editor-selected content, and U.S. and global news content presented in Spanish, including the “América Latina” news section, which provides relevant content from the Latin American region.

- Stay connected through access to email and social networking accounts from the most popular Web providers, as well as instant messaging, address book, and calendar functions.

- Stay informed by bringing favorite Web content —sports, news, local information, RSS feeds, weather, stocks, horoscopes, and more — to a single location.

Users can find Yahoo Mobile en Español at espanol.yahoo.com. There are more details in Spanish in this blog post from Yahoo.

Related Articles:

> Yahoo Adopts Mobile Advertising Guidelines

> Twitter Expands Into More Than Just 2 Languages

Mexican .MX Domains Becoming Widely Available

Chris Crum — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:03:02 +0000

Until now, the .MX country code top-level domain of Mexico has only been offered to a few select institutions. Now the country is making it available for wide use – starting September 1.

Naturally well-known domain registrar GoDaddy has jumped at the occasion to announce its own availability of the ccTLDs extensions. Actually, the company opened registration for the sub-extension .COM.MX back in May. Anyone who owned a sub-extension before March 1 can participate in .MX domain pre-resistration.

"We realize many of our customers will want a dot-MX domain," said Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons.
We plan to help them get it the same way we do everything at Go Daddy – easily and affordably."

GoDaddy cites Internet World Stats, claiming that the number of Spanish-speaking Internet users has grown 619% in the last eight years. Now over 130 million Spanish speakers use the Internet. This makes Spanish one of the top three languages on the Internet.

Ola! Craigslist Goes Bilingual

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 18:28:39 +0000

Spanish-language sites have been in Craiglist’s plans, and some of the online classified’s websites now have those sections online.

Craigslist dipped a toe into the waters of bilingual services, but it’s a very small dip at this time.

The cheerful folk at Classified Intelligence (CI) spotted the otherwise quiet change at Craigslist. In their client email, CI said Craigslist launched these sections in a large number of mostly international cities.

“All of the cities in Mexico and many in South and Central America also have the new “Espanol / English” toggle at the top right of the page,” said CI.

The push looks limited to international sites currently. CI noted there were no Spanish options for US cities, even for Miami and Los Angeles, which are noteworthy for their substantial Spanish-language communities. That had not changed as of press time.

Craigslist sites like this one for Buenos Aires show the Spanish/English toggle in place. CI spotted few posts made by Craigslist users in Spanish, but considering the recency of this change, that’s to be expected.