It’s not an easy time to be a journalist in Spain.  Even as the country’s ongoing economic and unemployment woes continue, and a political scandal of unprecedented scale rocks all levels of government, trust in the press – and incentives to produce objective journalism – are at an all-time low. 

Last month, seemingly out of nowhere, the Province of British Columbia announced it would spend $1 million (in Canadian dollars) to address health and safety violations in a number of the single resident occupancy (SRO) buildings it owns in Vancouver. The reason...? Open data. Read More

In many developing economies, while men earn wages outside the household, women are often acting behind the scenes as the money managers at home.  Yet a recent study found that mobile banking and financial services, which have gotten a lot of press as solutions for bringing economic empowerment to citizens in developing nations, has largely passed over women who could be using them.  Could m-banking strengthen women’s financial practices and narrow the digital gender gap? Or will promoting it only line the pockets of telecom corporations?

There are 200 million more men on the Internet than women, according to new figures from the International Telecommunication Union, and the gender gap is even wider in the developing world. Worldwide Internet usage by men currently stands at 1.5 billion, with women users at 1.3 billion. In developing nations, 16 percent fewer women than men are online, as opposed to 2 percent in the developed world. The figures come from the ITU's World in 2013 report on information technology use, released on day three of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday. Read More

If an Internet user sees that their reputation is getting tarnished online, should they have the right to request that the data be removed from search results?  That’s the premise of a case from Spain that the European Court of Justice will be deliberating over the next several months, after the country’s highest court ruled that Google was responsible for the spread of the harmful information. 

Human rights organizers utilize crowdmapping technology for the first time in history to document sexualized violence in Syria’s ongoing war. Read More

The 2013 Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona today, with representatives from over two hundred countries congregating to see what the next year will bring in apps, hardware, and initiatives.  With mobile firmly in place as primary communication platform of the developing world, the focus now turns to bringing next-generation technologies into the hands of these millions of subscribers, by creating cheaper smartphones.