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- Fernando Espuelas is an American entrepreneur, author, media personality and philanthropist. Espuelas is one of the pioneers of the consumer Internet. He is the founder of Starmedia, the first pan-Latin Internet portal, launched in 1996 and now part of Orange, France Telecom's Internet services company. Starmedia was the first venture-capital backed Latin Internet company and also the first IPO in the Latin Internet industry. By the year 2000, Starmedia was the leading Latin portal, serving over 25 million Spanish and Portuguese speakers every month across the Latin world, making it one of the top sites in the world. According to the Harvard Business School case StarMedia: Launching a Latin American Revolution, "by the fall of 1999,StarMedia had sprinted to a sizable lead in the race to acquire Latin American Internet users. Its pan-regional, horizontal portal was the first to target Spanish- and Portuguese-language speakers on the Internet, registering 1.2 billion page views in the third quarter of 1999. Thirty-three-year-old StarMedia co-founder Fernando Espuelas was the toast of "Silicon Alley" and a recognized hero throughout Latin America. A picture of him on the cover of Internet World magazine--ripping his shirt open to show the StarMedia logo, like Superman, summed up the spirit of the company. " Many years before social media would play a leading role in the Arab Spring, Espuelas presaged that the Internet would provoke an "uncontrollable wave of democracy" and give "the power of information and communication to the individual, not to institutions. " Time and CNN named Espuelas as one of the “Leaders of the Millennium”, and he was recognized as a “2000 All-Star” business leader by Crain's New York Business magazine. The World Economic Forum includes him among its "Global Leaders of Tomorrow," and he was also a recipient of Latin Trade Magazine's Bravo Award, being named "CEO of the Year" by the magazine. Hispanic Business magazine gave Espuelas its Hispanic Entrepreneur Award in 2000. He received a New York Award in 1999. He was also named a "Latin American Leader of the Internet" by CNN en Español Espuelas is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Espuelas has been part of the "power-list" of such diverse media as The Hollywood Reporter, The Industry Standard, Latino Leaders Magazine, Red Herring Magazine, Silicon Alley Reporter, Hispanic Business Magazine, CNN, Upside Magazine and Hispanic Magazine. Espuelas was also named "Immigrant of the Day" by Immigration Daily in 2008. Espuelas was the co-founder and Chairman of the StarMedia Foundation which, in partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank and Microsoft, built technology training schools in poor neighborhoods in Brazil, Colombia and Uruguay. Espuelas served on the Board of Directors of the Educational Broadcasting Corporation, operators of PBS' New York flagship television station THIRTEEN (WNET) and WLIW, as well as on the Board of Trustees of Connecticut College. In 2009, Espuelas became a spokesman for the Los Angeles Parent's Union, also known as Parent Revolution, a non-profit group that seeks to reform public education across the United States. In 2010, Espuelas was elected to the Board of Directors of Parent Revolution. In 2003, Espuelas wrote Life in Action (published by Penguin Books in 2004), an auto-biographical book describing his philosophy of self-actualization, framed through historical examples such as Winston Churchill, Espuelas' personal hero, to Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.. Life in Action recounted Espuelas' story from childhood in Uruguay, through his early years in the United States, to his business success and struggles after the Internet industry collapse of 2001. Espuelas created VOY in 2004, a digital media company focused on "Latinos and those discovering Latin culture". VOY's portal was launched in 2005. Forrester Research's study "Hispanic Social Computing Takes Off", published in June 2007, ranked VOY's portals as the leading Latin pure-play social network in the United States. In 2007, Espuelas was named a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Latinvision. com selected Espuelas as one of the "Top 50 Who Matter Most!" list of Latino media executives in 2008. The U.S. Hispanic IT Executive Council (HITEC) named Espuelas in 2009 and 2010 to its HITEC 100, the list of "Most Influential Hispanics and Rising Stars in Information Technology". Espuelas' video biography is available here: "The Fernando Espuelas Story". In 2008, Espuelas created The Fernando Espuelas Show, a primetime, daily bilingual talkshow broadcast on the Univision Radio Network, and online at espuelas. com Espuelas also blogs for the Huffington Post, espuelas. com and is a frequent commentator on television, online and in print across the world.
- Fernando Espuelas, empresario y filántropo estadounidense de origen uruguayo. Fundador de la empresa de Internet Starmedia, el primer portal de Internet en español.
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