If you live in Costa Rica or are just here on vacation it is important to be aware of the international calling options you can available to you. If you have contacts in North America that you need to communicate with, you no longer have to use "regular" phone lines. Obviously everyone knows about Skype to Skype video calling, or that Skype allows you to call land lines, but for this service you h...

Smartphone users in Costa Rica far outpace tablet users, and until now the wireless carriers have been shy about providing valuable offers of interest and benefit for owners of iPads and their counterpart Android-powered devices. Movistar is taking the lead in with two new wireless data plans specifically designed for the fledgling tablet segment in Costa Rica. The two wireless data plans are c...

The burgeoning digital animation and software development industry sector in Costa Rica has produced a new mobile video game, and this time it is based on an animated television series also created in our country. The game features Ivick Von Salza, an animated child lumberjack who is the star of the eponymous TV show. According to an article by journalist Monserrath Vargas of national newspaper ...

Top Costa Rica News Venton Medical in Costa Rica developed a new multi-layer extrusion technology for the next generation of catheter based medical devices. These new thin walled, large bore, multi-layered tubes are ideal for emerging therapies in the treatment of diseased heart valves. On May 30th, President Laura Chinchilla Miranda reaffirmed her support of the International Telegraphic ...

SAN JOSE – Wireless carriers Claro and Movistar will introduce the long-awaited Lumia line of Nokia smartphones powered by the Microsoft Windows Phone Operating System on June 1st. According to Pablo Fonseca, who covers technology topics for national newspaper La Nacion, the two new wireless providers issued press releases on Thursday afternoon announcing their intentions of offering the Nokia...

Support groups, Chess Club, Tuesday bridge groups, addictions support groups along with a plethora of fraternal organizations – the list is endless. Throughout the ages people have gathered to share opinions, council, interests, hobbies and beliefs. The world of the internet is no exception. What used to require traveling to a meeting hall, church or someone’s living room is now accomplished w...

Some smartphones have a built-in receiver for local FM radio stations. Since phones do not include a built-in FM antenna, they use the wire to an external headset as the antenna. While it works, you are limited to FM stations within the range of your mobile phone. Unless your mobile phone provides an option for ignoring the external headset, you must listen to the radio using the corded headset. A...

At any given time in Costa Rica, call center agents working in nondescript buildings located in communities like Rio Segundo and La Sabana take down bets placed by callers who may wager on a number of sporting events like games, matches, races, etc. These are Costa Rica's sportsbooks, an industry that is heavily reliant on advanced computer algorithms to help them manage their operations, and whic...

Can a mobile game created in Costa Rica rise to the stature of one of Japan's most popular fanchises? According to Herberth Castro of the Jugador 1 blog in La Nacion, Micromon could elevate Costa Rica in the world of mobile and casual gaming. In a small office in La Uruca, six Ticos are busy developing a new video game concept they hope will have a pervasive factor similar to the wildly popular...

Top Costa Rica News ICE/Kolbi dramatically reduced the postpago incoming rates for International Roaming. Incoming calls are now billed at a flat-rate of $0.60 USD per minute, and incoming SMS messages are free. These rate changes apply to 90 countries. The incoming maritime SMS messages are also free. All other rates remain the same. According to an article in El Financiero, a special com...

One of the duties of Nazareth Cascante Madrigal as Miss Costa Rica 2012 is to be well-versed in everything that our country has to offer to the world. Miss Cascante is our ambassador, and her representation of Costa Rica goes well beyond her beauty and charms. Miss Cascante recently met with Don Carlos Alvarado Briceno of the Central American Aeronautic and Space Association (ACAE in Spanish) t...

For the past eight years, Export Promotion Agency of Costa Rica (PROCOMER) and Costa Rican Chamber of Information and Communication Technologies (CAMTIC) jointly hosted the annual Costa Rica Technology Insight conference. This years conference is on June 19 and 20 in San Jose, Costa Rica. Costa Rica Technology Insight (CRTI) draws participants from Panama, Central America, Dominican Republic, T...

If you have visions of storing your Android device in a cloud, you need to come back down to earth. Cloud storage is a form of virtual storage for the data on your Android device. Virtual storage merely means that you are allocated a specific amount of space, without knowing the details of the storage platform. Cloud storage provide a number of services: Extend the storage capacity of your mo...

The Facebook IPO and the marriage of Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO of Facebook) dominated technology news for the week. Many top stories got buried in the traffic. Top Costa Rica News My Babilon launched a new Costa Rican grown social network, with President Laura Chinchilla present at the launch event. With My Babilon, you don't need Google Translate to translate message between member...

Call centers are often linked to telemarketing, but this is just one of the many business functions performed by call centers. Call centers may focus on one of the following business functions, or operate campaigns that cover many different functions: Inbound sales, where customers are responding to an advertisement. Outbound sales using client provided call lists. Lead generation through q...

SAN JOSE – President Laura Chinchilla was present at the launch of My Babilon, a new online social networking platform developed entirely in Costa Rica. My Babilon aims to connect users in their native language, regardless of the languages the rest of the social network members choose to communicate in. At the inaugural event, the President stated that the new social network is a product of the...

Every new app that challenges a well-established app, such as Evernote, has to prove that it is better. Every new social network needs to offer something to attract users, and keep their interest. Evernote achieves its status through the number of mobile devices supported, number of browser extensions, number of hardware devices that integrate to Evernote, and the number of add-on apps, such as...

The Ministry of Science and Technology (MICIT in Spanish) of Costa Rica opened three more Smart Community Centers (CECIs) this past Friday in the canton of Los Chiles, in the Northern Zone, province of Alajuela. The three new CECIs are located in the communities of La Virgen, Las Nubes and Santa Fe. A total of 18 desktop computer systems were installed among the three Smart Community Centers, e...

Top Costa Rica News Kolbi prepago customers just went through their first week of “Semana Kolbi.” Semana Kolbi now has double days every week. Your double day is based on the last digit of your phone number. Monday is double day for numbers ending in 1 or 2, Tuesday 3 or 4, Wednesday 5 or 6, Thursday 7 or 8, and Friday 9 or 0. You still must make a minimum charge of 1,000 colones to get th...

When laptops offered more features (such as Webcams, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi), the sales of desktops began to decline. Before netbooks could gain a significant market share, smartphones and tablets grabbed their mobile market share. The change is so rapid that it is hard to find reliable statistics. Studies performed in 2011 are now outdated. Studies made this year will be ancient history next year...

Many Internet users turned to Microsoft's Bing search engine yesterday, entered Costa Rica in the search bar, and checked the results presented by what the tech giant called "the most significant update to Bing since we launched three years ago." Microsoft chose Costa Rica as an example of Bing's new powerful Sidebar feature. Sidebar is a direct response to Google's "Search, Plus Your World" fe...

With high-end smartphone prices starting at 365,000 colones (about $730) for a Samsung Galaxy SII, we are talking about a serious investment in a mobile device. How many of us can afford to replace the smartphone, if it is accidentally damaged, lost, or stolen? If you purchased your phone, you are faced with purchasing a replacement. If you acquired your phone on a postpago contract, you are still...

According to SUTEL, there are about 4 million active cellphones in Costa Rica. A study performed by Unimer for La Nacion shows that 35% of the cellphone users have Internet access on their phone. This represents a dramatic increase from 14% in 2010. According to the survey, 26% of the users say they have smartphones. In raw numbers, this translates to 1.4 million users who use their phone for Inte...

A group of researchers from the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (TEC in Spanish) is working on redesigning solar panels as we know them. Within two years, the researchers expect prototypes that yield the following results: Realistic production of electrical power in tropical climates. Certification of the new panels in order to make Costa Rica a hub for clean power technologies. The TE...

Fuerza Publica officers assigned to the Northern Zone in Upala, working in conjunction with the Office of Judicial Investigations (OIJ), recently announced the recovery of four cows found in farm that served as a hideaway for rustlers. Officers cited the support from the border security police and members of the community as they conducted door-to-door (or barn-to-barn) interviews to find the ...

The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report was officially released for Latin America earlier today. According to the report, the number of vulnerabilities decreased by 20 percent while the number of malicious attacks increased by 81 percent. Coordinated attacks are expanding to different types of business and individual users, and there is a strong focus by malicious hackers and cybercrimina...

Until recently, the authors of malware used Android apps to infect Android devices. Starting in January of this year, Google started aggressively scanning apps in the Google Play Store. In addition, Google scanned new apps and upgrades for malware. While not perfect, Google's efforts greatly reduced the number of malware infected apps in the Google Play Store. With one door closed, the authors of ...

Top Mobile Device News The Samsung Galaxy S III was announced at special event in London on May 3. The Samsung Galaxy S III contains a Exynos 1.5 GHz quad-core processor, a larger 4.8 inch 720p screen, an 8 megapixel camera, 1 gigabyte of memory, 16, 32, or 64 gigabytes of internal storage, and up to 64 gigabytes of external storage. All this is packed in a phone that is only 8.6 mm thick, an...

The Ministry of Science and Technology (MICIT in Spanish) continues its initiative to support the Smart Community Centers (CECIs) across Costa Rica by donating new equipment and recognizing the efforts of the members of the community who take advantage of them. Vice Minister Keilor Rojas traveled to the CECIs in Siquirres and Limon on Friday with new hardware and certificates of achievement. Th...

Born out of their frustration with news reading apps for mobile devices, Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari created Pulse in May 2010. Pulse is available for the iPhone, iPad, and Android. While all news readers depend on RSS feeds from news sources, Pulse took a different design approach. Pulse organizes news sources into pages, with a maximum of twelve sources per page. The default setup provides...

A recent press release issued by Banco Nacional on April 27th announced that its new partnership with American online payments giant PayPal was finalized after months of testing. The partnership will allow both Banco Nacional and PayPal to develop e-commerce payment solutions for small-to-medium business owners in Costa Rica. The most prominent marketing point that Banco Nacional makes on i...

The National Center of Food Distribution (CENADA) in Barreal de Heredia may seem like an unlikely location for a computer classroom. The CENADA is essentially a farmers market on steroids: a place where farmers, brokers, dealers, grocers, wholesalers, and the public converge to negotiate, bargain and otherwise haggle on the prices of produce. Information technology has crept into the vast CENAD...

I receive hundreds of tweets everyday on technology changes. The goal of this new column is to bring the top stories to you every week. The focus is on technology news that applies to Costa Rica. Top Costa Rica News SUTEL stated that the maximum charge for calls, established in 2006, has not changed. The maximum full rate is 33.9 colones (roughly 6.8 cents US) per minute, and 25.9 colones ...

Today, Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. announced their return to Costa Rica, with the launch of the Motorola RAZR XT910. The phone will be available through Claro beginning in early May. The Motorola RAZR seeks to displace the Samsung Galaxy SII as the hottest smartphone on the market. It will priced around 370,000 colones ($740 USD), which is close to the current Samsung Galaxy SII price of 365,...

The next time you take a trip to one of our national parks or volcanoes; do not be surprised if you see a group of young men and women hunched over portable gaming systems, engaged in furious button-mashing with incredible thumb dexterity.  They are members of the growing Nintendo StreetPass 3DS community in Costa Rica, video game enthusiasts who break the tired stereotype of the lone gamer si...

"Science and technology depend on people, and Costa Rica's future depends on her young people's affinity for science and technology. In this regard robotics is a medium, an instrument, a path to opportunities to develop on a personal and professional level, with improved value-added employment prospects that can make a difference. The Ministry of Science and Technology (MICIT) is very happy to sup...

Dropbox is an Internet file sharing service, that allows you to share files across multiple devices. Dropbox is not a social network. Rather, it is a private remote file service. While it is useful as a backup file service, its primary purpose is to act as a hub for sharing files across multiple devices. Although there is a degree of overlap, Dropbox and Evernote serve different purposes. Just ...

On Tuesday, April 24, at 12 noon Motorola will unveil its newest smartphone for the gadget-hungry Tico market at an event at the Luxe Lounge in Escazu. Based on preliminary reports, Motorola is hailing its new personal communications device as "Thinner, Faster, Smarter." Not much else is known about the smartphone. Since Motorola Mobility is currently in the process of being acquired by Inte...

On April 3, Garth Wright reported his discovery of a Facebook security loophole on his iPhone. The security problem centers on the .plist file used by apps to store settings. Grath Wright discovered that the iPhone Facebook app not only stores the Facebook token (used by apps to access your Facebook account) in the .plist file, but also stores the OAuth key and secret key in plain text. Simply cop...

Banco Nacional and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MICIT) will hold a press conference to mark the official announcement of the National Robotic Olympics on Monday, April 23rd at the stately and upscale Club La Union in the heart of Downtown San Jose. The Robotic Olympics this year will be coordinated by National Instruments, University of Costa Rica, the Technological Institute of Cost...