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.

One Million Plus (non-black) Apps

Here's a disturbing headline from an article that was published in Information Week, (Eric Zeman,  September 19, 2011)

Android + iOS = 1 Million Apps

Closing the Digital Divide -- Another Opportunity

The Persistence of the Digital Divide

The Digital Divide appears to morph, to shift its shape from time to time; but deep down it remains the same. Unfortunately, its changing skins-of-the-day have distracted attention from its underlying structure, i.e., the stronger communal networks that sustain increasing affluence on the "white" and "yellow" sides of the Divide vs. weaker networks associated with the shrinking shares of the nation's income and wealth on its "black" and "brown" sides.