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Interactive Spanish Website for Celebrity Look-Alike Babies!

Leading Sperm Bank Now Offers Interactive Spanish Website

California Cryobank (CCB), an international sperm banking leader, announced today the release of their upgraded Spanish website www.criobanco.com. Criobanco.com offers all the features of CCB’s English website www.cryobank.com including online ordering, donor search capability, and extensive information on using donor sperm.

“California Cryobank has been servicing Latino communities all over the world for many years,” stated Cappy Rothman, MD, Co-founder. “Our goal is to make the process of selecting and using a sperm donor as easy as possible for our Spanish speaking clients.”

CCB offers Spanish speaking representatives available to assist clients over the phone at 866-927-9622 Mon-Fri from 6am-6pm (Pacific Time).

CCB is well known for their recently released celebrity Donor Look-a-Like website feature. “We have a wide selection of Latino donors who resemble celebrities such as Oscar De La Hoya, Javier Bardem, and Gael Garcia Bernal,” said Rothman.

California Cryobank also provides fertility preservation services to men who are faced with cancer treatments, vasectomies, or those in the military or other high-risk occupations.

Contact: Scott Brown of California Cryobank, +1-310-496-5681

Source: California Cryobank

First Bilingual Educational Toy Brand, Ingenio(TM), Hits the U.S. Market

Alpharetta, Ga.-based Smart Play, LLC has launched Ingenio(TM), the first entirely bilingual educational toy brand and games in the United States. The product line features 10 portable, affordable toys and games that teach a comprehensive range of early learning skills in English and Spanish – fine motor, reading, writing, math, vocabulary, geography and problem solving.

First Bilingual Educational Toy Brand, Ingenio(TM), Hits the U.S. Market

First Bilingual Educational Toy Brand, Ingenio(TM), Hits the U.S. Market

Ingenio’s bilingual product line ranges from electronic learning toys and puzzles to educational games. All products emphasize English and Spanish equally to enable the child to learn a second language easily. The light-weight, travel-friendly products offer children dynamic, “unplugged” playtime, free from the chain-and-drain of a computer or television.

Unlocking a world of opportunities, Ingenio helps preschool and grade school children (ages 3-8 years) learn both languages in the context of fun. Smart Play’s products are bilingual by design(TM) to facilitate learning at an early age, which research indicates is the prime time for language acquisition.

The proven benefits of bilingualism include greater cognitive flexibility, improved powers of concept formation and enhanced creativity. Spanish is the second-most prominent language in the country, and nearly 25 percent of all U.S. children between the ages of 3 and 6 are of Hispanic origin (a number that is quickly on the rise). This makes Ingenio an ingenious tool to form future leaders.

“Finally, a foreign-language educational toy company!” said Liza Sanchez, founder of Escuela Bilingüe Internacional, in response to Ingenio. “As a parent, I am thrilled to finally be able to provide toys that represent our home language. As a teacher, I have been looking for years for products that can help my young students advance their Spanish education both in and outside of the classroom. The cognitive and social benefits of becoming bilingual have made many parents realize the importance of learning a second language.”

In addition to recognition from educational leaders, Ingenio has already garnered accolades from the toy industry. Ingenio recently received the 2009 Dr. Toy’s Best Vacation Product and Creative Child Magazine 2009 Top Toy of the Year.

Not only is Ingenio innovative and educational but also budget-friendly. Eight of the 10 products are less than $ 15 and all products are available at Amazon.com and will soon be available at Toys “R” Us.com.

About Smart Play

Smart Play provides safe, affordable, innovative and educational products to enrich your child’s mind. Play is the perfect way to reinforce and extend the skills children learn at home and at school. Many of our products are designed to grow with your child by offering age-appropriate activities with progressive levels of difficulty.

For more information about Ingenio products, please visit our bilingual site: www.smartplay.us.

Source: Smart Play, LLC

Quepasa Launches Developer Interface and Open Social Sandbox

Quepasa Corporation (Pink Sheets: QPSA), one of the world’s fastest-growing Latino social networks, today announced the launch of its Developer Interface and Open Social Sandbox. The launch of the Developer Interface is part of Quepasa’s overall strategy to open the site to third party Open Social developers who would like to develop applications for its global audience. The Company believes that this new Developer Interface and Open Social Sandbox will become an easy mechanism for developers to test and submit their applications for inclusion in the site’s Application and/or Games sections and thus enhance the overall user experience and drive site traffic and monetization.

The Developer Interface consists of a toolbox that developers use when submitting an Open Social application for inclusion on any social site. The toolbox includes documentation of the interfaces available, a news area, a community built for the developers where they can communicate and interact with other application developers as well as with Quepasa’s development team, and the Open Social Sandbox where they can test completed applications with valid test data. The Open Social Sandbox also includes details of how to include Quepasa’s new virtual currency, QDollars, as the payment mechanism for premium applications and virtual goods.

“Having an open platform that allows access to Quepasa members through the Open Social framework is imperative to the growth of rich functionality for Quepasa.com and its growing user base,” said Louis Bardov, CTO of Quepasa. “The activity on Quepasa.com is based on user interaction and our users like to play social games with other members on the site, especially when there are possible rewards in the form of contests and virtual currency. While these contests have been very popular on the site, we are now going to invite and encourage Open Social application developers to build interesting and fun applications for the Quepasa community and we hope and anticipate that these developers will make the minimal modifications required to get adoption of their applications from our rapidly growing user base on Quepasa.com.”

Quepasa’s release of the Developer Interface and the Open Social Sandbox is the latest news in Quepasa’s growing success story. Since its launch as a social network focused on the growing Latino population just over 16 months ago, Quepasa has seen its user base grow to over 5 million registered users. This number continues to grow at an impressive pace because of Quepasa’s differentiated strategy of premium Latino content and entertainment. To date, this growth has been achieved solely through the viral acquisition, powered by Quepasa’s user base.

About Quepasa Corporation

Quepasa Corporation (Pink Sheets: QPSA), headquartered in West Palm Beach, FL with offices in Los Angeles, CA; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Scottsdale, AZ; Miami, FL; and Hermosillo, MX, owns Quepasa.com (www.Quepasa.com), one of the world’s largest, trilingual, Latino social networks. Quepasa.com is an authentic Latino community that provides fun, interactive, and easy to use social tools, and rich multimedia content in English, Spanish and Portuguese to embrace Latinos everywhere, and empower them to connect online, compete in contests and games and share their interests, ideas, and activities.

Contact:
Mike Matte, Chief Financial Officer
Quepasa Corporation
(561) 491-4186

Source: Quepasa Corporation

First major U.S. bank to offer mobile banking in Spanish

Hispanic consumers now have even more options when it comes to their everyday banking. Citibank has just launched Citi Mobile en Espanol to enable customers who prefer to bank in Spanish to do so from their smartphones. The Spanish-language service lets customers manage their accounts, pay bills, locate Citibank branches and more – all from the convenience of their cell phones. Citibank is the first major U.S. bank to offer mobile banking in Spanish.

“Citi Mobile en Espanol offers our Spanish speaking customers the ability to bank anywhere, anytime on their smartphones,” said Liza Landsman, Executive Vice President, North America Internet & Mobile, Citi. “With Hispanic customers making up almost one-quarter of our customer base, the service makes banking even easier for this important and growing audience.”

Hispanics are among the most active mobile Web users in the United States. According to a recent independent report on Wireless Internet Use from Pew Research, nearly one-half of English-speaking Hispanic consumers reported accessing the Internet via a handheld device in 2009.(i) Of these consumers, about 29 percent reported going online “on a typical day” through a mobile device.(ii)

Citi Mobile en Espanol mirrors the functionality of the English-language Citi Mobile for Smartphones. It is accessed via the same convenient URL as the English version, www.citi.com, from any mobile device. Using Citi Mobile en Espanol, users of web-enabled mobile devices including BlackBerry® smartphones, Palm® devices and iPhone(TM) devices can easily do all of the following in Spanish:

  • View Citi account balances and account activity
  • Pay bills and set up recurring payments
  • Make transfers between Citi accounts
  • Locate Citi branches and ATMs
  • Connect to Customer Service

Citi Mobile en Espanol provides easy navigation on virtually any recent device that has a mobile browser and an internet connection. And signing in is easy — customers enter the same personal User ID and password they would use on their home computer.

Citibank was also the first major U.S. bank to offer Spanish-language online banking, in 2004. Today, with the introduction of Citi Mobile for Smartphones en Espanol, Citibank’s fastest-growing customer segment gains even greater access to quick, easy and highly secure banking.

(i) Horrigan, John, Wireless Internet Use, Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 2009,http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/Wireless-Internet-Use.pdf., accessed Sept. 30, 2009. Page 14.

(ii) Horrigan, John, “Going online with a handheld by race,” Wireless Internet Use, Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 2009, http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/Wireless-Internet-Use.pdf., accessed Sept. 30, 2009. Page 18.

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First major U.S. bank to offer mobile banking in Spanish

About Citi Mobile and Citibank

Citi Mobile for Smartphones is a mobile banking application built by Citibank with support from Mobile Money Ventures, a joint venture of Citi and SK Telecom that provides mobile financial services applications globally. Citibank was the first major U.S. bank to launch a downloadable mobile banking application in 2007.

Citibank is a member of Citi, the leading global financial services company, which has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 140 countries. Through its two operating units, Citicorp and Citi Holdings, Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, and wealth management. Additional information may be found at www.citigroup.com or www.citi.com.

Citi, Citibank and Citi Mobile are registered service marks of Citigroup Inc.

Palm is among the trademarks or registered trademarks owned by Palm, Inc. The Trademark BlackBerry is owned by Research In Motion Limited and is registered in the United States and may be pending or registered in other countries. Citibank is not endorsed, sponsored, affiliated with or otherwise authorized by Research in Motion Limited. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc.

SOURCE Citibank

Interactive Spanish Website for Celebrity Look-Alike Babies!

Leading Sperm Bank Now Offers Interactive Spanish Website

California Cryobank (CCB), an international sperm banking leader, announced today the release of their upgraded Spanish website www.criobanco.com. Criobanco.com offers all the features of CCB’s English website www.cryobank.com including online ordering, donor search capability, and extensive information on using donor sperm.

“California Cryobank has been servicing Latino communities all over the world for many years,” stated Cappy Rothman, MD, Co-founder. “Our goal is to make the process of selecting and using a sperm donor as easy as possible for our Spanish speaking clients.”

CCB offers Spanish speaking representatives available to assist clients over the phone at 866-927-9622 Mon-Fri from 6am-6pm (Pacific Time).

CCB is well known for their recently released celebrity Donor Look-a-Like website feature. “We have a wide selection of Latino donors who resemble celebrities such as Oscar De La Hoya, Javier Bardem, and Gael Garcia Bernal,” said Rothman.

California Cryobank also provides fertility preservation services to men who are faced with cancer treatments, vasectomies, or those in the military or other high-risk occupations.

Contact: Scott Brown of California Cryobank, +1-310-496-5681

Source: California Cryobank

First Bilingual Educational Toy Brand, Ingenio(TM), Hits the U.S. Market

Alpharetta, Ga.-based Smart Play, LLC has launched Ingenio(TM), the first entirely bilingual educational toy brand and games in the United States. The product line features 10 portable, affordable toys and games that teach a comprehensive range of early learning skills in English and Spanish – fine motor, reading, writing, math, vocabulary, geography and problem solving.

First Bilingual Educational Toy Brand, Ingenio(TM), Hits the U.S. Market

First Bilingual Educational Toy Brand, Ingenio(TM), Hits the U.S. Market

Ingenio’s bilingual product line ranges from electronic learning toys and puzzles to educational games. All products emphasize English and Spanish equally to enable the child to learn a second language easily. The light-weight, travel-friendly products offer children dynamic, “unplugged” playtime, free from the chain-and-drain of a computer or television.

Unlocking a world of opportunities, Ingenio helps preschool and grade school children (ages 3-8 years) learn both languages in the context of fun. Smart Play’s products are bilingual by design(TM) to facilitate learning at an early age, which research indicates is the prime time for language acquisition.

The proven benefits of bilingualism include greater cognitive flexibility, improved powers of concept formation and enhanced creativity. Spanish is the second-most prominent language in the country, and nearly 25 percent of all U.S. children between the ages of 3 and 6 are of Hispanic origin (a number that is quickly on the rise). This makes Ingenio an ingenious tool to form future leaders.

“Finally, a foreign-language educational toy company!” said Liza Sanchez, founder of Escuela Bilingüe Internacional, in response to Ingenio. “As a parent, I am thrilled to finally be able to provide toys that represent our home language. As a teacher, I have been looking for years for products that can help my young students advance their Spanish education both in and outside of the classroom. The cognitive and social benefits of becoming bilingual have made many parents realize the importance of learning a second language.”

In addition to recognition from educational leaders, Ingenio has already garnered accolades from the toy industry. Ingenio recently received the 2009 Dr. Toy’s Best Vacation Product and Creative Child Magazine 2009 Top Toy of the Year.

Not only is Ingenio innovative and educational but also budget-friendly. Eight of the 10 products are less than $ 15 and all products are available at Amazon.com and will soon be available at Toys “R” Us.com.

About Smart Play

Smart Play provides safe, affordable, innovative and educational products to enrich your child’s mind. Play is the perfect way to reinforce and extend the skills children learn at home and at school. Many of our products are designed to grow with your child by offering age-appropriate activities with progressive levels of difficulty.

For more information about Ingenio products, please visit our bilingual site: www.smartplay.us.

Source: Smart Play, LLC

Quepasa Launches Developer Interface and Open Social Sandbox

Quepasa Corporation (Pink Sheets: QPSA), one of the world’s fastest-growing Latino social networks, today announced the launch of its Developer Interface and Open Social Sandbox. The launch of the Developer Interface is part of Quepasa’s overall strategy to open the site to third party Open Social developers who would like to develop applications for its global audience. The Company believes that this new Developer Interface and Open Social Sandbox will become an easy mechanism for developers to test and submit their applications for inclusion in the site’s Application and/or Games sections and thus enhance the overall user experience and drive site traffic and monetization.

The Developer Interface consists of a toolbox that developers use when submitting an Open Social application for inclusion on any social site. The toolbox includes documentation of the interfaces available, a news area, a community built for the developers where they can communicate and interact with other application developers as well as with Quepasa’s development team, and the Open Social Sandbox where they can test completed applications with valid test data. The Open Social Sandbox also includes details of how to include Quepasa’s new virtual currency, QDollars, as the payment mechanism for premium applications and virtual goods.

“Having an open platform that allows access to Quepasa members through the Open Social framework is imperative to the growth of rich functionality for Quepasa.com and its growing user base,” said Louis Bardov, CTO of Quepasa. “The activity on Quepasa.com is based on user interaction and our users like to play social games with other members on the site, especially when there are possible rewards in the form of contests and virtual currency. While these contests have been very popular on the site, we are now going to invite and encourage Open Social application developers to build interesting and fun applications for the Quepasa community and we hope and anticipate that these developers will make the minimal modifications required to get adoption of their applications from our rapidly growing user base on Quepasa.com.”

Quepasa’s release of the Developer Interface and the Open Social Sandbox is the latest news in Quepasa’s growing success story. Since its launch as a social network focused on the growing Latino population just over 16 months ago, Quepasa has seen its user base grow to over 5 million registered users. This number continues to grow at an impressive pace because of Quepasa’s differentiated strategy of premium Latino content and entertainment. To date, this growth has been achieved solely through the viral acquisition, powered by Quepasa’s user base.

About Quepasa Corporation

Quepasa Corporation (Pink Sheets: QPSA), headquartered in West Palm Beach, FL with offices in Los Angeles, CA; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Scottsdale, AZ; Miami, FL; and Hermosillo, MX, owns Quepasa.com (www.Quepasa.com), one of the world’s largest, trilingual, Latino social networks. Quepasa.com is an authentic Latino community that provides fun, interactive, and easy to use social tools, and rich multimedia content in English, Spanish and Portuguese to embrace Latinos everywhere, and empower them to connect online, compete in contests and games and share their interests, ideas, and activities.

Contact:
Mike Matte, Chief Financial Officer
Quepasa Corporation
(561) 491-4186

Source: Quepasa Corporation

First major U.S. bank to offer mobile banking in Spanish

Hispanic consumers now have even more options when it comes to their everyday banking. Citibank has just launched Citi Mobile en Espanol to enable customers who prefer to bank in Spanish to do so from their smartphones. The Spanish-language service lets customers manage their accounts, pay bills, locate Citibank branches and more – all from the convenience of their cell phones. Citibank is the first major U.S. bank to offer mobile banking in Spanish.

“Citi Mobile en Espanol offers our Spanish speaking customers the ability to bank anywhere, anytime on their smartphones,” said Liza Landsman, Executive Vice President, North America Internet & Mobile, Citi. “With Hispanic customers making up almost one-quarter of our customer base, the service makes banking even easier for this important and growing audience.”

Hispanics are among the most active mobile Web users in the United States. According to a recent independent report on Wireless Internet Use from Pew Research, nearly one-half of English-speaking Hispanic consumers reported accessing the Internet via a handheld device in 2009.(i) Of these consumers, about 29 percent reported going online “on a typical day” through a mobile device.(ii)

Citi Mobile en Espanol mirrors the functionality of the English-language Citi Mobile for Smartphones. It is accessed via the same convenient URL as the English version, www.citi.com, from any mobile device. Using Citi Mobile en Espanol, users of web-enabled mobile devices including BlackBerry® smartphones, Palm® devices and iPhone(TM) devices can easily do all of the following in Spanish:

  • View Citi account balances and account activity
  • Pay bills and set up recurring payments
  • Make transfers between Citi accounts
  • Locate Citi branches and ATMs
  • Connect to Customer Service

Citi Mobile en Espanol provides easy navigation on virtually any recent device that has a mobile browser and an internet connection. And signing in is easy — customers enter the same personal User ID and password they would use on their home computer.

Citibank was also the first major U.S. bank to offer Spanish-language online banking, in 2004. Today, with the introduction of Citi Mobile for Smartphones en Espanol, Citibank’s fastest-growing customer segment gains even greater access to quick, easy and highly secure banking.

(i) Horrigan, John, Wireless Internet Use, Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 2009,http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/Wireless-Internet-Use.pdf., accessed Sept. 30, 2009. Page 14.

(ii) Horrigan, John, “Going online with a handheld by race,” Wireless Internet Use, Pew Internet & American Life Project, July 2009, http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/Wireless-Internet-Use.pdf., accessed Sept. 30, 2009. Page 18.

Culture Code for Money - The Insider’s Guide
Economy crisis impact on Latinos examined in new Radio Bilingue series
New Study Reveals Significant Challenges Hispanic Americans Face in Preparing for Retirement
First major U.S. bank to offer mobile banking in Spanish

About Citi Mobile and Citibank

Citi Mobile for Smartphones is a mobile banking application built by Citibank with support from Mobile Money Ventures, a joint venture of Citi and SK Telecom that provides mobile financial services applications globally. Citibank was the first major U.S. bank to launch a downloadable mobile banking application in 2007.

Citibank is a member of Citi, the leading global financial services company, which has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 140 countries. Through its two operating units, Citicorp and Citi Holdings, Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, and wealth management. Additional information may be found at www.citigroup.com or www.citi.com.

Citi, Citibank and Citi Mobile are registered service marks of Citigroup Inc.

Palm is among the trademarks or registered trademarks owned by Palm, Inc. The Trademark BlackBerry is owned by Research In Motion Limited and is registered in the United States and may be pending or registered in other countries. Citibank is not endorsed, sponsored, affiliated with or otherwise authorized by Research in Motion Limited. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc.

SOURCE Citibank

Día de la Raza or Columbus Day?

Día de la Raza - Columbus Day

Día de la Raza – Columbus Day

What do you really know about Día de la Raza? Where was it first celebrated? Why Raza and Columbus Day? How do they celebrate it in Spain? Read on and find out.

The date of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas is celebrated in many countries in Latin America, although not in Brazil, (and in some Latino communities in the United States) as the Día de la Raza (“day of the race or breed”), commemorating the first encounters of Europeans and Native Americans. The day was first celebrated in Argentina in 1917, Venezuela in 1921, Chile in 1922, and Mexico in 1928. The day was also celebrated under this title in Spain until 1957, when it was changed to the Día de la Hispanidad (“Hispanicity Day”), and in Venezuela until 2002, when it was changed to the Día de la Resistencia Indígena (Day of Indigenous Resistance) by President Hugo Chavez. Día de la Raza in many countries is seen as a counter to Columbus Day. It is used to resist the arrival of Europeans to the Americas and is used to celebrate the native races.

Día de la Raza in the U.S.

In the U.S. Día de la Raza has served as a time of mobilization for pan-ethnic Latino activists, particularly in the 1960s. Since then, La Raza has served as a periodic rallying cry for Hispanic activists. The first Hispanic March on Washington occurred on Columbus Day in 1996. The name has remained in the largest Hispanic social justice organization, the National Council of La Raza.

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Thought of the Day

small minds

small minds