Tweet This is the first in a series of profiles of entrepreneurs on The Huffington Post, a preview of my forthcoming book, Pursuit of the American Dream: Success Stories of Today’s Immigrant Entrepreneurs. Luis von Ahn’s new company, Duolingo, has set two very large goals: help users learn a language for free while simultaneously translating the Web. The start up may very well transform both the translation and language-learning industries in the process. Needless to say, von Ahn has a stellar track record for Internet

Tweet Are you (or do you know) an immigrant entrepreneur or immigrant executive that has a great success story to tell? If so, I would love to hear it. I am collecting stories for my forthcoming book, Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Pursuit of the American Dream. Please leave a comment on this post or email me at joe {at} kutchera.net with your contact information and the details about your company. Immigrants have moved to the U.S. for centuries to escape persecution, create economic opportunity, and pursue

Tweet This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post. Immigrants have sailed to American shores for centuries to escape persecution, create economic opportunity, and pursue the “American Dream.” They bring an extraordinary hunger to succeed and a strong belief in our flexible economic system. Some of our country’s largest companies were founded by immigrants including Proctor & Gamble, Intel, Pfizer, eBay, Yahoo! and Google. Collectively, these businesses generated over $235 billion in 2010 revenues and employed 375,800 people globally. Who are today’s immigrant entrepreneurs and

Tweet Since moving to Chicago, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Aaron Goldman, one of the leaders in digital marketing in the Midwest…and soon to conquer the rest of the English-speaking world with the launch of his book, Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned From Google. Aaron is a board member of the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association as well as the founder and principal at Connectual, a digital marketing consulting and matchmaking firm that helps with practice development, recruiting, and partner sourcing.

Tweet Following is a preview of Latino Link: Building brands online with Hispanic communities and content from Paramount Books. A few weeks ago, while having a very American lunch of cheeseburgers and milk shakes, my goddaughter Madeline, 11, and her brother Ricardo, 13, asked me, “so, what’s your book about Uncle Joe?” “Well, it’s about how families like yours use the Internet and what is the best ways for companies to communicate with people who speak Spanish,” I responded. Madeline and Ricardo speak Spanish with

Tweet This article originally appeared in Yorokobu, a Madrid-based marketing and design magazine, in December, 2009. [And it's translated from the Spanish by yours truly and appears in my book, Latino Link] by Pedro Mujica, CEO of interactive map consultancy wecolab These days, we all know and use online maps, the most well known of which is Google Maps. Thanks to these online maps, we find the places and the directions for all of our day-to-day needs: trips, shopping, leisure activities, cultural events and so

Tweet Chris Fleissner of Translations.com shared this video with me about how you can open up your site to the world and go after different markets. In it, Matt Hauser, the Director of Technology Sales at Translations.com, presents a new product of theirs and shows how it can help you capture new customers and grow revenue in new markets. Even if you want to grow your business domestically with U.S. Hispanics, for example, you should consider translating your web site into Spanish. The U.S. Hispanic

Tweet This article originally appeared on MediaPost and is an early preview of Latino Link: Building brands online with Hispanic communities and content from Paramount Books. Put yourself in the shoes of a bi-lingual or Spanish-preferring U.S. Hispanic and try searching in Spanish on Google, Yahoo or MSN and what do you find? A good portion of the results, sometimes approaching 50%, come from sites based in Mexico, Spain, and other Spanish-speaking countries. Let’s look at some examples I found recently on the first page

Tweet This article originally appeared on MediaPost and is an early preview of Latino Link: Building brands online with Hispanic communities and content from Paramount Books. In a recent report from Pew Hispanic Center, U.S. Hispanics represented over 50% of the U.S. population growth since 2000. In our current economic climate, one would think that that be the kind of growth that marketers would aggressively seek out. While Hispanic media investment overall has grown considerably, especially television, the online ad segment has under-indexed relative to

Tweet Recently, an architectural firm in SF contacted me about using this photo of mine from Flickr: View from the Miyako Hotel in Japantown. Initially, I was really excited. Cool! Someone is willing to pay for a high-res version of my photo. Then, after sleeping on it, I realized…wait, who ISN’T paying for my photos? This of course scared me. I checked the license that I had established on my flickr account as well as the sharing capabilities on my account settings. At the time,