The Howard-Apps-Dev Group -- A Progress Report, April 2012

A. Howard University's High-Tech Incubator for Students
In early March 2012 a few colleagues at Howard University joined me in starting a high-tech incubator for Howard's students, who are mostly black. Our initiative's full name is the Howard University Applications Developers' Group, or Howard-Apps-Dev for short. We are currently focused on encouraging black students to become founder/entrepreneurs in the market for mobile apps, i.e., consumer applications for smart phones and tablets.

This note presents a progress report on our first eight weeks of operation. It's posted on the public HBCU-Levers blog so that it can be used by other HBCUs, MSIs, and colleges & universities having substantial black enrollments in their efforts to establish similar incubators on their own campuses. Additional progress reports will be posted on this blog from time to time, perhaps quarterly.

Moses, Joshua, and Instagram

In one the first speeches he made after he declared his candidacy for the U.S. Presidency in March 2007, then Senator Barack Obama -- addressing a congregation in Selma, Alabama -- summoned the post-Civil Rights generation to take up the challenges still facing black America with the same courage as the Civil Rights giants who had gone before them.

Washington, Du Bois, and Silicon Valley

One hundred plus years ago, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois  engaged in a protracted dispute:

High Tech Incubators for (Black) Students

The "black" in the title of this note may prove to be irrelevant to its content, but is central to its purpose. On the one hand, academia's steady production of non-black, high-tech superstars provides ample evidence that American colleges and universities somehow manage to stimulate non-black students to become successful high-tech entrepreneurs: