Cyril's Press Pass

Investigating on Mexico’s Holy Death

Cyril — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:52:14 +0000

In the rough Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito, known for its huge illegal market, past boxing glories, drug dealers and gangs lies a strange cult that unites hundreds, if not thousands of people the 1st of every month. The Santa Muerte, as she is known, or “Holy Death” in English, is a morbid adaptation of the [...]

On Downloading

Cyril — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:56:53 +0000

After reading the following Techcrunch article on music downloading, and analyzing the huge number of comments, I thought it would be well worth the time to write my own views on downloading. Since the internet has been public, individuals have been able to share files. With the advent of applications like Napster though, massively sharing files [...]

Fwix brings local news to your iPhone

Cyril — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:39:08 +0000

Techcrunch yesterday covered the release of Fwix for iPhone, an application that allows you to recevice news feeds from wherever it is you are. The application is a new development from the social news website and a smart way of showing how news can be pushed to users. In your Fwix app you have your [...]

ICANN conference in Mexico City

Cyril — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:34:35 +0000

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) held its 34th conference in Mexico City in the beginning of March. More than a thousand people from around 100 countries turned up to the different speeches for a chance to hear how the Internet was going to evolve in the near future. High level domains was [...]

Phoenix turning into a kidnap capital

Cyril — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:10:02 +0000

Mexico City may be infamously known as the kidnap capital of the world, but Phoenix, USA, is right behind it. According to Latina Lista, over 370 kidnappings occured in the last year in the Arizona capital. While most of the victims of kidnappings still are criminals themselves, their families or illegal immigrants, they could soon [...]

Mexican journalists seek simpler political asylum in US

Cyril — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:16:09 +0000

Periodismo para periodistas reports on how a group of Mexican journalists have united with immigration lawyers to simplify the process of seeking political asylum in the US. The journalists have the peculiarity of having been threatened to death in Ciudad Juarez, a city in the north of Mexico. Not only do they suffer from being [...]

The future of CMS

Cyril — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:04:45 +0000

I find it fascinating to follow discussions on the evolutions of newsrooms. The internet has really disrupted how news is presented to people, and even though we master it well, we are still grappling for the best ways to integrate new technology into newsrooms. One very interesting discussion I recently read on Martin Stabe’s blog [...]

My neighbor the narco

Cyril — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 20:11:22 +0000

The lively and family friendly Condesa neighborhood isn’t where you’d expect to run into trouble. We were unlucky to live next to, what we very much believe, was a narco. The apartment we rented for the past six months was in a quiet part of the neighborhood. The owner had divided a large house into [...]

Mozilla working on open video format

Cyril — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:14:42 +0000

As if aiming to dominate the browser market wasn’t enough, Mozilla has set its sights on developing an open video format. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great initiative, as anybody whose suffered through encoding videos and finding the right codec can tell. According to Techcrunch, Mozilla will give a $100,000 grant to the [...]

Dealing with information overload

Cyril — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:47:43 +0000

The greatest challenge that new technologies have brought on to us is probably information overload. So many news sites, tv channels, papers, opinions to read and so much information being churned out constantly makes it a mammoth task to try to stay on top of everything. You simply can’t. I use Google Reader and remember [...]