Samsung launched a virtual store for its clients in Central America, and the same is now available for Costa Rica, Panama and the Dominican Republic. According to Adolfo Fermo, online business manager for Samsung Electronics, many consumers in Central America were forced to purchase their Samsung devices through a foreign platform which meant additional charges, long waiting times and issues to...

The mayor of San José, Costa Rica, Johnny Araya, is promoting the creation of a hi-tech city that would not only generate foreign investment but also organizational linkages and the promotion of “start-ups” with great potential. The project, which is just in the beginning stages, could be ready in the next five years,”We have already been working since over a year ago in promoting San José as a...

U.S. Embassy officials traveled to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica this week with a delivery of equipment and resources to bolster opportunities for students in Limón to learn about robotics and computer skills, said the U.S. Embassy press office. The American Corner at Limón's Thomas Lynch Public Library was the recipient this week of US$12,000 in new equipment for students to develop their ...

Costa Rica's first attempt at an unmanned space mission is entering its final phase of development of a space satellite, said a report in the digital Costa Rican Spanish-language news site ElMundo.cr. Scientists working on Project Irazú are programming and verifying the satellite's systems, as well as the terrestrial stations that are the final steps to readying the satellite. The satellite wil...

Regulations for drones in Costa Rica went into effect on August 13, and drone users have a 6-month window to comply, or face penalties, reported the Civil Aviation department last week. The regulations establish guidelines for the use of drones for recreational, institutional and commercial purposes. Those using drones must be do so in open areas, and ensure they are not within an 8 km radiu...

Late last year the Ministry of Science, Technology and Telecommunications (MICITT) in conjunction with Aprender Haciendo (Learn Doing) announced that Costa Rica would be hosting the 14th edition of the World Robot Olympiad November 10 to the 12th. The event is now confirmed and scheduled for these dates at Parque Viva in La Guácima, Alajuela; this is the first time that this event will be held ...

Accenture, named this year by Fortune Magazine as the world's most admired information technology services company, will be establishing a new delivery center in Costa Rica for the 70+ Search Technologies big data engineers based in the country, said a company press release. The Fortune 500 company announced earlier this month their acquisition of Search Technologies, a Herndon, Virginia-...

Ad Astra Rocket announced today through social media the arrival of the hydrogen-fueled bus to the Port of Limón. “Attention Costa Rica: #Nyuti has arrived in Costa Rica. The first fuel cell hydrogen electric bus in Central America is located in Puerto Limón. #Nyuti comes from the indigenous Chorotega language of Guanacaste and it means 'Star". The stars are composed mainly of hydrogen. We'r...

Engineering for Kids and the Costa Rican Chamber of Technology, Information and Communication are opening the course “Design and Programming of Video Games” for children between the ages of 4 and twelve in Costa Rica. The classes will begin in August in La Uruca where Engineering for Kids is located, every Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. starting August 5 and concluding October 28. ...

Cable television keeps losing ground to streaming services, and this is only natural since the streaming service is a lot more convenient for our hectic life. Costa Rica has not been the exception and every day this option wins more and more adepts as more options become available in the country. Amazon Video, Netflix, HBO Go, Fox Play, Crackle and Crunchyroll are now available in the countr...

Shared work between humans and robots is on the horizon as a way to potentially reduce costs and errors, and to improve productivity and quality. Are service centers in Latin America ready to make this leap? This is one of the central themes being discussed at a regional meeting this week in San José of Latin American shared services center leaders. The event, organized for the fifth cons...

Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) has moved on from the beach communities on the northern Nicoya peninsula, to the central Pacific region of the Manuel Antonio National Park and its nearby small city of Quepos, for the country's second rural fiber optics installation project, reported the agency this week.   The project will benefit at least 1,087 customers will be move from the c...

Photo: Playa Penca Carrillo, Guanacaste Carlos Alpízar and José Pablo Alfaro decided to create a tool to help tourists that wish to explore the many Costa Rican beaches. “It all started as a personal project, we both always liked visiting the different beaches. At one point in our life we thought we had run out of beaches, and ended up going to the same places because we didn’t have informa...

The London-based company, OpenSignal, which studies coverage and performance of the wireless industry throughout the world, has published its most recent State of Mobile Networks Report for Costa Rica. The company analyzed 32,689,810 datapoints collected from 2,688 users during the period July 31 - October 30, 2016, according to the information on their website. The main deficiency among all t...

The Costa Rican Ministry of Public Works and Transport (MOPT) announced the third phase of its solar conversion project, whose ultimate goal is to have all traffic lights running on solar power in the year 2022, said the institution in a press statement yesterday. This year, an additional 76 stop lights will have photovoltaic systems. The project has received US$1 million in funding from the Co...

HBO GO is now available in Costa Rica and other Latin American countries. The subscription can be done online directly with HBO GO without having to go through a third-party company. For those that register the first month is free of charge, and starting the second month the subscription will generate a charge of US$10.00. If you already have a cable service with the package that includes HBO ...

Even a place called Pocosol (literally, “little sun”) is sunny enough in Costa Rica to support a solar energy project. Thus the Costa Rican consortium of electricity producing cooperatives, Conelectricas R.L., is investing in two solar energy generation plants in Costa Rica's central-western region that will benefit 7,000 homes. The first is a project with Coopelesca R.L., in Santa Rosa de P...

The project started with the idea of creating alternative, unconventional, sources of electricity; this led researches from the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (TEC) to develop e.Wave, which uses the ocean waves to generate electricity. Christopher Vega, Juan Luis Guerrero and Julio Rojas, engineers at TEC’s Electro-Mechanic School along with a group of students led by Iván Segura, developed...

Former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang Díaz, current director of Ad Astra Rocket Company, expected to have the country’s first hydrogen-fueled bus running in May, there was a slight delay, but the prototype should be ready to go in June. According to the Costa Rican physicist and mechanical engineer, the importance of this achievement is that it opens the door to a new transportation system, a cl...

The Costa Rica Ministry of Science, Technology and Telecommunications (MICITT) is inviting current high school students between the ages of 15-17 to register for the Science and Technology camps they are being offered this 2017. Renewable energies, application of robotics in the areas of science and technology, conferences and recreation activities are part of the options offered for teenagers ...

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun a criminal investigation into Uber Technologies Inc's use of a software tool that helped its drivers evade local transportation regulators, two sources familiar with the situation said. Uber has acknowledged the software, known as "Greyball," helped it identify and circumvent government officials who were trying to clamp down on Uber in areas where its s...

Costa Rica’s busiest airport, the Juan Santamaria International Airport (SJO) in Alajuela, 20 minutes northwest of San José, has selected SITA to implement its ground-breaking control center technology solution. SITA, a global information technology provider to the air transport industry, will operate its ControlBridge which will provide Aeris Holdings, the airport operator, with a centralized ...

UPDATED: 5/3/17 4:50 pm WhatsApp is now operational again in CostaRica : At around 2 p.m. Costa Rica time the instant messenger system WhatsApp went down affecting millions of users all over the world. When the users first noticed the problem the messages were simply taking a while to go through, but eventually they either wouldn’t go out at all or were left in the screen with just one ch...

Since February, the Osa Peninsula has finally had regular Internet connectivity thanks to a new 60-foot radio tower installed on Cerro Osa, or Mount Osa, by the state-owned Costa Rican Electric Institute (ICE). The tower is linked by microwave with Mount Adams (Cerro Adams) in Golfito, and improves communication and connectivity for local residents, tourists, as well as government institutions ...

May 15 at the Real Intercontinental Hotel the Hacking Challenge 2017 will take place: the event organized by Soluciones Seguras (Safe Solutions), Techday, Radware and Check Point will bring together experts in cyber-security that will compete to hack a corporate website in a simulated environment. The objective of the event is to help institutions, companies and organizations identify their netw...

Meet Edna, the smart assistant for Facebook messenger created by a Costa Rican company, Edna is a smart virtual assistant based on artificial intelligence, “like a hybrid between a robot and human being”, and created by Costa Rican company Throne Tech. The system will be available starting May for use in Facebook Messenger, but its creators are already considering making it available for Whatsa...

A petition challenging restrictions on Internet usage approved by Sutel was brought before the Costa Rican Constitutional Court by the National Ombudsman’s Office (Defensoría de los Habitantes) earlier this month. The court has asked for further clarifications before reaching a decision as to whether to suspend or uphold the new policy, called "uso justo" or "just use", approved by the telecomm...

The construction of Technological Park La Ceiba, located in Orotina, Alajuela will begin in June of this year. The data center is hoping to attract clients for technology services to this area by offering cloud storage, hosting services and disaster recovery. Although the building of the facility is just about to begin, investors assure that by the time they inaugurate the park they will have e...

The Costa Rica Electricity Institute’s (ICE) Internet Data Center (IDC), located in Cartago, has consolidated throughout the last years as the best in Central America and the Caribbean, thanks to the redundancy and services offered to its corporate clients. The technological infrastructure offers first level comprehensive solutions for the processing, hosting and safeguard of corporate and bank...

The Global State of the Internet Report generated by Akamai, the world’s leading Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider,  shows that Costa Rica has dropped seven spots in the ranking going from the position 109 to 116, losing 1.2% of internet speed. Twelve countries actually increased their speed in the last four months of 2016, while only three countries went in the opposite direction, Costa ...

The Costa Rican Ministry of Economy, Industry and Commerce (MEIC) joins an international campaign in March to increase awareness of consumer fraud, and ways to protect yourself, whether online or otherwise. This year's theme is Internet fraud, one of the most common fraudulent business practices today. Various online ploys can compromise your personal information that then allows access to your...

The Nintendo Switch began selling officially this past March 3, it's Nintendo's first console in four years, the seventh in the company's history. This time the console is a hybrid of a home and portable device, the battery will last between two and six hours and it has an auxiliary charger. The Nintendo Switch will be sold in at least eight electronics stores in Costa Rica: ADN Store, eShop...

The number of individual cellphone subscribers across the globe is set to surpass 5 billion by mid-2017, according to a report presented at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona on Monday. The figures, compiled by the cellphone industry representative GSM Association, suggested that the global number of cellphone users would hit 5.7 billion people by 2020. "Mobile is a global platform that ...

Hollywood actor and tech investor Ashton Kutcher urged U.S. legislators on Wednesday to drum up government support for the development of new technology to fight online sex trafficking. Kutcher's comments to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee follows heightened scrutiny of classified advertising websites such as Backpage.com for carrying ads that offer children for commercial sex. "Te...

The Costa Rican State Electricity Agency (ICE, its Spanish acronym) is working to get the Pacific surf towns of Mal País, Santa Teresa and El Carmen better connected, said the company yesterday. With a team of 50 technicians, the country’s fiber optics network is being expanded in this region of the Costa Rican Pacific located on the southern end of the Nicoya Peninsula. The improvements wil...

Continuum Datacenter is being built in trade free zone in Tilarán, Guanacaste and is a project considered of public interests by the administration of President Luis Guillermo Solis. According to international parameters a project of this kind has to be at a distance of no less than 50 kilometers from the capital, which is why Tilarán is a strategic zone, that also offers security, human reso...

By Wendy Anders Tigo (Millicom) is preparing to enter the Costa Rican mobile market by bidding for spectrum in the country’s forthcoming tender, reported Costa Rica's business daily El Financiero, citing the company’s director of corporate affairs Norman Chaves. The operator, which provides cable and TV services under the Tigo Star brand in Costa Rica, expressed an interest in the tender for...

By Wendy Anders Universities in the U.S. are stepping in the fill needs of foreign companies with branches, plants and offices in Costa Rica to train their workers in specialized technologies and digital innovations, reported Costa Rica’s business daily El Financierio. From 2015-2016, for example, at least 40 Costa Ricans attended the University of Wisconsin Stout’s specialization program in...

WATERBURY, Vermont, U.S., Jan. 7 — Single-serve coffee machine manufacturer Keurig will partner with brewer Anheuser Busch-InBev to create an in-home cocktail and beer maker, the companies said. The as-yet-unnamed device will be able to dispense beer, spirits, cocktails and mixers, the companies said in a joint press release Friday. Keurig has already begun experimenting with cold drink disp...

Costa Rica began a battle in favor of social inclusion. In this fight, one of the axes is the National Strategy CRDigit@l, which has as an end the reduction of the digital gap in the country. In May, Costa Rica was awarded with the WSIS Prize 2016 of the World Summit on the Information Society in the category of Access to Knowledge and Information, thanks to the project Connected Homes, one o...