Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is one of the most dynamic technological areas in Costa Rica. It includes more than 900 companies, 95 percent of which are SMEs, becoming an interesting sector with important challenges related to international collaboration and partnership. Joining this strategic sector with national priorities and inter...

By Hanonimas - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons By Antonio Hermosin Can an android awaken human empathy and remedy loneliness? The maker of popularrobot 'Pepper', Kaname Hayashi - who is now working on a robot to play that role and aspires to make it a household name - certainly thinks so. Hayashi's Pepper was the first robot capable of interpreting human emotions and language, ...

Flickr Commons Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson today announced that four individuals have been variously charged in a 57-count indictment with running a massive Internet-based sports gambling ring that operated all over the United States and controlled an offshore office. The billion-dollar operation allegedly catered to thousands of bettors, accepted $927 million in wagers on NFL game...

Source: USTDA San José, Costa Rica – Today, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency awarded a grant to Costa Rican electric utility, Compañía Nacional de Fuerza y Luz, S.A. (CNFL), for a feasibility study to support the deployment of networked light emitting diode (LED) street lights throughout CNFL’s service territory. By installing nearly 100,000 “smart” street lights, including LED luminar...

Safran Identity & Security, the global leader in identity and security, has announced it is expanding its business activities in Central America. The company has acquired the former office location of the Colombian-based Carvajal Group in Costa Rica. For Safran Identity & Security, this new location marks another important strategic development for its business activities in Central Ame...

Japanese multinational Hitachi has developed an artificial intelligence system to measure levels of happiness in individuals engaged in certain tasks and to offer recommendations to boost efficiency. The company hopes to market the technology this year, Hitachi had said in a statement. Around 600 employees of Hitachi will be part of the trial, which will be conducted by the company, to test ...

By Wendy Anders Cleaning out your closets might provide you with some trade opportunities; bartering, human’s oldest form of economic transaction has gone digital. A new App, available for both iOS and Android, facilitates bartering in Costa Rica. Over the past four months the platform has aided close to 6,000 transactions. “Su Canje” currently has some 7,000 App users and over 22,000 lik...

Agents from the Office of Judicial Investigations (Spanish initials: OIJ) arrested a 30-year old man for allegedly attempting to sexually extort her on social media in Costa Rica. According to a recent news report filed by Allan Chacon Soto of daily tabloid Diario Extra, the arrest took place at a public park in Hatillo, a series of populous districts located just south of the capital city of C...

Source: Xiaomi Chinese tech firm Xiaomi unveiled Thursday its first smart bicycle, an electric and foldable prototype that comes with its own navigation system, on social media. The "Mi QiCycle", one of its most anticipated products, is priced at around $456 and has a 250-Watt, 36-Volt high speed motor; a navigation system that measures distance and speed and a Torque measurement method bel...

CALGARY, Alberta--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Calgary Scientific Inc., a company known for creating innovative technology for the medical industry and beyond, announced that ResolutionMD® medical imaging software is registered by the Ministry of Health in Costa Rica for diagnosis using both web and mobile devices. The Costa Rican Ministry of Health regulates the healthcare industry and acts as the regula...

Wikimedia Commons One of the most mysterious and dangerous crime figures in the world is currently in the custody of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and his life of crime may have been encouraged by an attorney from Costa Rica. The life of Paul Calder Le Roux, a 43-year old Caucasian man born in the former African nation of Rhodesia, seems to have been envisioned by...

ISS. Source: Wikimedia Commons Moscow, Jun 18 (EFE).- The descent module of Russian spaceship Soyuz TMA-19M, with three crew members of the International Space Station, or ISS, aboard, successfully landed Saturday on the steppes of Kazakhstan, Russia's Space Flight Control Center reported. Returning to Earth in the module were Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, U.S. astronaut Tim Kopra and...

Huawei P9 China State Council Information Office - Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei launched Thursday its new dual-lens P9 smartphone in Costa Rica for the Latin American market. Huawei unveiled its new P9 at a shopping center in west San Jose, where potential buyers and the press also got a chance to view an exhibit of photographs taken with the smartphone's innovative Leica-made ca...

Flickr Commons STOCKHOLM--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Millicom, the telecommunications and media company dedicated to emerging markets in Latin America and Africa, today announced a strategic partnership with Netflix, the world’s leading Internet television network, that will bring Netflix app preloads to Android smartphones from TigoSmart and provide promotions to TigoStar and TigoSmart customers in Lat...

Source: Christie CYPRESS, CA (PRWEB) JUNE 15, 2016 - Christie®, a leader in creating and delivering the world’s best visual and audio experiences, is proud to announce that its Christie Duo® projection system was installed in Nova ONE, Costa Rica’s biggest film screen. Nova ONE is the main screen at the Nova Cinemas multiplex the newly opened Plaza Real Alajuela shopping mall, not far from San...

Source: BlackBerry On June 1st, Canadian tech giant BlackBerry launched a beta period of video calling through its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) platform in Costa Rica and across 26 countries in Latin America. According to an official blog post published by BlackBerry, video calling is almost ready for primetime; it was launched as a beta feature for Android and iOS, as part of the latest vers...

Source: Green Lava Microsoft Xbox Media Release - On January 1st, 2013, a three-man team started a project named Project Phoenix. Little did they know, this project would be one of the longest journeys for the Costa Rican development team, Green Lava Studios. For our team, those 3 years, 5 months and 7 days were totally worth it, as our dream of bringing a video game on a major video game con...

Earlier this week, technology giant Google announced some exciting new features that improve the way users can control their accounts in Costa Rica and anywhere else in the world. The new features come exactly one year after the introduction of My Account, a powerful dashboard that allow users to control their apps and services such as Gmail, Google Play, Drive, Docs, Hangouts, Google Plus, And...

Flickr Commons Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson announced last Friday that six men from Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island have been variously charged in a 37-count indictment for running an illegal Internet gambling operation that took over $13 million in wagers on various professional and collegiate sporting events and wired payments to an off-shore location. District Attorney Thom...

HINGHAM, MA--(Marketwired - May 24, 2016) -  DigitalX Limited is pleased to announce that Telefónica Internacional S.A.U. ("Telefónica") is the Company's first strategic partner in Latin America following the successful integration of the DigitalX AirPocket App into Telefónica's network. The mobile phone giant signed a marketing, distribution and sales agreement with DigitalX, which was announc...

Source: Google Google has not enjoyed the success it hoped to get from its Chromebook line of portable computers powered by the browser-centric Chrome OS, but that could change very soon. In a move that could eat into the market share of Android tablets, Google announced that Chromebooks will soon offer extensive support for Android apps; in fact, the Google Play store will be fully compati...

An emission nebula similar to N55. Wikimedia Commons Berlin, May 18 (EFE).- The European Southern Observatory on Wednesday released an impressive image of "stellar ornamentation," a peculiar pink and blue optical effect detected in a nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy some 163,000 light years from Earth. The ESO said in a communique that the detailed photo of the LHA 120-N55 neb...

Cielo Google Play COSTA RICA (PRWEB) MAY 16, 2016 - Itellum, a Costa Rica-based, privately owned and operated international telecommunications, Internet and technology company with a focus on US and Central American markets, announces that its Cielo unified communications application has surpassed 12,000 registered users in Costa Rica, making it the leading and fastest growing application of its...

Source: Wikimedia Commons BATON ROUGE, LA - United States Attorney Walt Green announced today that a federal grand jury has returned an indictment charging CHRISTOPHER G. YOUNG, age 53, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with distribution of child pornography and possession of child pornography. According to the Indictment, YOUNG was the part-owner of a hotel in the country of Costa Rica, where he ...

(Courtesy/WhatsApp) The most popular mobile messaging app in Costa Rica is now available for the desktop and with full end-to-end encryption. Use of WhatsApp in Costa Rica is estimated to grow by 228 new users each week, and the total number of active users is approaching that of Facebook, which happens to be the owner of WhatsApp. In the last two days, WhatsApp has made a couple of importa...

Source: NASA Washington, May 9 (EFE).- The planet Mercury on Monday made its first transit of the Sun in a decade, an unusual event that NASA broadcast live on its Web page. For about 7 1/2 hours, Mercury was visible from Earth as a tiny black disc crossing in front of the fiery Sun, a spectacle recorded for the first time by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a telescope launched in 2010. ...

Source; EFE file photo How do you use the Internet? Do you browse the Web to get a quick answer or to complete a certain task without leaving comments or opinions about your experience? Are you concerned about revealing your identity online? If you answer the questions above in an affirmative manner, you may be a digital visitor. If you, on the other hand, live out your life openly on the I...

Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Leslie R. Caldwell, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, announced that ARTHUR BUDOVSKY, 42, was sentenced today in Manhattan federal court to 20 years in prison for running a massive money laundering enterprise through his company Liberty Reserve, a virtual currency once used...

Workers at the Miravalles geothermal plant in the province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica, March 14, 2016. TRF/Fabíola Ortiz By Fabiola Ortiz MEXICO CITY/SAN JOSE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Mexico and Costa Rica aim to build on their position as Latin America's leading producers of geothermal power to help meet the challenges they face of curbing planet-warming emissions and making their ene...

Source: Verizon TravelPass NEW YORK, May 3, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- A new survey reveals one in three Americans is planning to travel outside of the U.S. in the next year. Of those traveling internationally, a whopping 80 percent plan to use their phone and data on their phone with 65 percent checking in with loved ones at some point during their trip, according to a new survey released today by ...

Zika map. Source: CDC Washington, May 3 (EFE).- The first human trials with a vaccine against the Zika virus will begin this autumn, but it will be two or three years before researchers will know if it is successful against the disease, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said Tuesday. Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke at a press conference at the Washington...

SAN FRANCISCO, April 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Nearshore Nexus 2016, the premiere outsourcing conference focused on Latin America IT Services and BPO, is being held in San Francisco, on May 11th-12th, 2016.  This is the first time the conference has been hosted on the west coast, bringing to focus executive-level dialogue surrounding the opportunities, risks, and advantages of developing ...

Wikimedia Commons By Steve Carr — University of New Mexico Throughout the centuries, volcanic eruptions have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives due in part to the lack of accurate signs indicating imminent eruptions. One type of a volcanic eruption, a phreatic eruption, which involves external water, is particularly energetic causing a disproportionate number of fatalities. Phreatic eru...

Source: BellComm Madrid, Apr 22 (EFE). Spanish aerospace company BellComm is globally marketing its C-44 Medevac autogyro, a safe, practical and effective flying machine that can be adapted to multiple civilian or military uses, including the emergency airlifting of victims of highway accidents or the evacuation of wounded soldiers from combat zones. Its operating cost per flight hour of ar...

Miss Costa Rica 2015 Brenda Castro smiles as she arrives at a charitable event. Facebook By Manuel Fuentes. Antofagasta, Chile, Apr 11 (EFE).- Looking at a beautiful picture or listening to pleasant music trigger the human brain, which also intensifies its activity in the presence of "moral beauty," British neurobiologist Semir Zeki said. "Which neuronal systems get activated when we con...

Source: ACAE The first space program for satellite development in Central America is being developed in Costa Rica with the help of small, private donations. According to a news report published in March by international news agency EFE, the Central American Aeronautics and Space Association, or ACAE, has kicked off a Kickstarter campaign to collect the $75,000 needed to launch the first sa...

Flickr Commons Netflix recently posted its Internet Service Provider (ISP) index for March 2016, a monthly update on the international status of the ISPs providing the best -and worst – prime-time video streaming experience. As has been previously reported by The Costa Rica Star, the main ISP firms in our country such as ICE's Kolbi Hogar have long scraped the bottom of the Netflix list, an...

Wikimedia Commons London, Apr 12 (EFE).- Observations from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope have revealed the existence outside the solar system of planets whose atmosphere has been completely stripped off by radiation from the star they orbit, an article in the journal Nature Communications said. Scientists from Britain's University of Birmingham used a technique known as asteroseismology to ...

Wikimedia Commons San Francisco, Apr 14 (EFE).- Microsoft Corp. filed a lawsuit Thursday against the U.S. Justice Department, challenging so-called secrecy orders that bar the company from notifying its customers when the government has reviewed their e-mails and other data. The tech giant says in the suit that it has received 5,624 requests from the government for customer information or d...

An Uber driver in Bogota. Wikimedia Commons Buenos Aires, Apr 13 (EFE).- Ride-sharing service Uber, which has started operating in the Argentine capital, is "failing to follow regulations" and providing a service "that is illegal," the Buenos Aires city government said. Uber rolled out its alternative to traditional taxi service on Tuesday, prompting officials to warn that it would be subje...