“Most housing growth will be driven in the future by immigrants and Hispanics,” predicted James Johnson, professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

This will result in non-white residents rising to almost half of the U.S. population by 2050, Johnson said at a seminar in New York sponsored by the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit real estate research and education organization.

Read more

The ability to recognize patterns in the sound of speech is considered fundamental to the development of spoken language. Only two species of mammals, humans and tamarin monkeys, were known to possess this ability — until now.

New research has identified a surprising third — rats.

Read more

PhatWare Corporation, a leading provider of software products and professional services for mobile and desktop computers, announces the new version of PenOffice, handwriting recognition software for Microsoft Windows Powered Tablet and Desktop PCs. Some new features this improved version of PenOffice includes are: a customizable keyboard with 13 predefined layouts; Auto Corrector, which improves the quality of handwriting recognition; and support for multi-monitor systems.

PenOffice 2.6 is available in two editions: English and Multilingual. While both editions have the same feature set, the Multilingual Edition offers handwriting recognition in eight Western European languages. In addition to Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, the new version adds support for Swedish handwriting recognition.

Read more

In addressing the seminar on “Combatting Islamophobia,” U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan called for the distinction of the politically-motivated violence from the religiously-motivated one.

“Islam should not be judged by the acts of extremists who deliberately target and kill civilians. The few give a bad name to the many, and this is unfair,” he said.

While addressing an audience of scholars, senior United Nations officials, and representatives from civil society organizations, Annan meant to address the Christian West at large. America in particular?

Read more

HMW Online, the Hispanic Marketing Source, has upgraded its Market Profiles section and expanded its geo-demographic population and household data from 21 to 40 selected DMA’s. HMW Online now provides the latest and most complete information including population, language, economics, origin and education. The information, prepared by Geoscape International, provides data for 1990 and 2000, and projections for 2005 and 2010.

Read more

Leadership quality, customer focus and the unremitting pace of globalization are among the top challenges facing competitive organizations in 2005, according to a panel of eight business management experts interviewed recently by BetterManagement, the comprehensive Internet resource for decisive leadership.

“We asked thought leaders from around the world to describe the most significant challenges facing competitive organizations in 2005,” said Jeanette Slepian, President of BetterManagement. “The panelists agreed that globalization continues to radically transform the business environment. As a result, leaders everywhere face unrelenting pressure to achieve more with less, to maximize the value of customer relationships and to realize the full potential of human capital investments.”

John Brandt of the MPI Group predicted that managing globalization will continue to create headaches for corporations throughout the world. Relationships between stakeholders become more complex. Increased global trade often causes local problems, said Brandt.

Read more

Univision’s dominance of the U.S. Hispanic TV market isn’t deterring Spanish- and English-language competitors. More than five dozen cable and broadcast networks now are vying for a share of the market, according to industry reports, with the most recent new offerings aimed at an increasingly acculturated community.

The entrepreneurs behind the moves are banking that English-dominant Hispanics will prefer culturally attuned English-language shows over Spanish-language and mainstream network fare.

And the market continues to be increasingly attractive. Ad spending targeting Hispanics on all network and local TV is expected to reach nearly $2 billion this year – up almost 22 percent over last year. Many industry watchers see a growing market for relevant English-language programming to capture younger, acculturated Hispanic viewers.

Read more

Census respondents could choose from six racial categories, including an interesting option listed as “some other race,” and could choose more than one category. That meant that there were 63 possible combinations of the six basic racial categories.

The Census Bureau recognized that in a diverse country, Americans should be given the liberty to identify themselves on their own terms, not the government’s.

Tafoya found that of those choosing to identify themselves as Hispanic, 48 percent identified as white and 42 percent saw themselves as “some other race.” In fact, the vast majority of Americans choosing “some other race” were Hispanics.

In Texas, where Latinos experienced both Southern-style racial segregation and the civil rights movement, 63 percent of U.S.-born Latinos identified themselves as white. In the rest of the country, particularly California, 45 percent of native-born Latinos identified as white.

Tafoya explored the differences between Hispanics who described themselves as white and those who did not. Through a 2002 National Survey of Latinos, she found that those who are more educated, affluent and involved in their communities and who consider themselves Americans are more likely to identify themselves as white.

Millions of Latinos who were younger, less educated, poorer and less likely to speak English tended to find themselves socially and economically marginalized and chose “some other race.”

Tafoya’s report highlights the danger of viewing Latinos as a homogeneous population.

Read more

Influenced by the growing Spanish community, the importance of Spanish food in the cuisine of other Hispanic groups and more aggressive marketing by Spanish food manufacturers, more and more South Floridians are discovering the taste of Spain.

While some stores have long stocked a few Spanish products such as olive oil or the nougat candy turron, now an avalanche of products from la Madre Patria — as Hispanics call the Spanish motherland — are making their way to South Florida homes and there are even stores that carry Spanish foods exclusively.

Imports from Spain more than doubled from $332 million to $679 million at the Port of Miami-Dade from 2002 to 2003, according to the most recent figures available. Food and beverage imports accounted for more than 20 percent of the increase.

Food industry analysts say Spanish delicatessen foods and wines are now competing for the same shelves that French and Italian products have occupied for decades.

Read more

When Jorge Fiterre started his company Condista to distribute Spanish-language television channels in the United States, he had one client in hand and had to hunt down more. Now he’s representing 15 channels and they come to him.

“Five years ago, it was a nice idea to have some Spanish-language programming. Now it’s a must-have for the cable operator,” said Fiterre, who’s based in Coral Gables.

To say Hispanic pay television is booming may be an understatement. There are now 75 networks, both Spanish-language and English-language, catering to U.S. Hispanic viewers, according to Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable.

Nineteen networks were launched in 2004 alone. And they followed 14 new entries in 2003. Still more are coming — five channels are slated to go up this year by the trade journals’ count. The new Hispanic entries represent just a fraction of the hundreds of English-language channels available and going on line, but it’s a hefty number for a market that’s still emerging.

Read more

Living in Puerto Rico and learning of open source made me curious. What is the state of open source in the world? After doing some research, I was impressed with what I found and I now believe that the biggest adoption rates of open source will be in China, India, Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the former Soviet Republic. As an example, today another Chinese Linux group joined the Open Source Development Laboratory (OSDL).

Read more

If you want to be like Dr. Dolittle and talk to the animals, it might help to know that rats can tell the difference between languages.

Spanish researchers found that rats were able to use rhythm and intonation speech cues to distinguish between spoken Dutch and Japanese. This makes rats only the third type of mammal — along with humans and Tamarin monkeys — who have been shown to possess the ability to recognize different speech patterns.

The findings appear in the January issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes.

More information

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has more about speech and language.

Read more

Wealth is soaring among fast-growing Hispanics — yet 56% have no bank accounts

When National City Corp. bank decided to roll out 78 new branches in Chicago two years ago, it went in knowing its market. With Hispanics expected to account for virtually all of the city’s population growth over the next decade, the bank hired dozens of Spanish-speaking staffers and printed thousands of glossy pamphlets, hawking savings accounts to new immigrants and explaining the benefits of IRAs to more established Latinos. This year, the nation’s 10th-largest bank will double its Hispanic marketing budget, targeting middle-class Latinos with direct mail offering mortgage financing and money-market accounts, all written en español. “A simple hello in Spanish,” says Christian Sandoval, vice-president of Hispanic marketing at National City, “can open the door to a Hispanic better than a product with a 4.5% interest rate.”

From Bank of America Corp. (BAC) to Banco Popular, tapping into the growing Hispanic market is increasingly key for U.S. financial institutions. Indeed, U.S. banks may soon go on a shopping spree in search of smaller regional players with ties to Latino communities. They’d better hurry: Foreign banks such as Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria have already snapped up banks in Texas, California, and Florida. Now, predicts Jack M. W. Phelps, senior financial analyst for the the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., “we’ll see domestic banks buying small Hispanic-oriented banks to acquire their skills.”

Read more

“A world of uncertainty” is how the Detroit Free Press introduces its “GM, Asia and the new reality” special section. The four-part series — online at www.freep.com/money/autonews/gm-intro20e_20041220.htm — looks at the General Motors Co. operations in Asia, India and Detroit.

The series covers the potential and hurdles that GM faces and includes reactions from employees, retirees and suppliers. Don’t overlook the graphics, editorials and letters to the editor. For example, the “China statistics” graphic shows a population of 1.29 billion and labor force of 778.1 million. China graduated 325,000 engineers in 2003; the United States had 65,000 such grads. Readers debate economics, business greed, union power and Buy America.

This series is valuable to anyone interested in how business is conducted in China or India, concerned about what it will take to keep the United States strong in the world market and worried about how globalization affects the U.S. middle class.

Read more

Strategic Research Institute announces
the 11th Blockbuster Marketing to U.S. Hispanics and Latin America Conference
scheduled to take place in Miami Beach on January 24-27 at the Wyndham Miami
Beach Resort. The latest addition to the program is Brigadier General
(retired) Bernado Negrete from the United States Army. This comprehensive
agenda includes leading luminaries in the field of strategic planning,
research, advertising, PR, segmentation and target marketing, media planning
and buying, creative, direct marketing and grassroots outreach. This
successful series has a track record of being the premier conference in the
industry in terms of its content, networking opportunities and high-caliber of
attendees.

Read more