Meet the Tech Titans at 2013 Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference
(Image: Thinkstock)
(Image: Thinkstock)
(Image: File)
Mike Green is a blogger for the Huffington Post and founder and CEO of Epiphany3D, Inc., a digital education 3D immersion gaming company targeting STEM education. He is also founder of The America21 Project (A21), which seeks to leverage existing assets within urban American communities to create new opportunities and ensure competitiveness in the global innovation economy. Green is a panelist at Wednesday's symposium, Today’s Business Crisis: Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce, which is hosted by Black Enterprise in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Follow Green's tweets at @AMikeGreen2 . more
Jarvis Sulcer, Ph.D., is executive director of the Level Playing Field Insitute, a part of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation. Sulcer leads LPFI in expanding the impact of its education programs and institutional research. LPFI received the maximum amount of $25,000 to support the expansion of the computer science courses offered through their Summer Math and Science Honors (SMASH) program, a free, 3-year, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) enrichment program for high-achieving, low-income high school students that come from backgrounds currently underrepresented in STEM fields.
Sulcer is a panelist at Wednesday's symposium, Today’s Business Crisis: Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce, which is hosted by Black Enterprise in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Follow Sulcer at @JDSulcer . more
McKenzie M. Slaughter, a consultant to retail, financial services, and investment management firms, recently launched Beauty & The Bull Magazine as a centralized multi-media platform promoting women’s investor intelligence, connecting women investors to women advisors and analysts.
At 11:00am on Thursday, May 16, she will speak on the panel How to Make Your Money Work for You After You’ve Worked for It! hosted by Nationwide Insurance.
Follow Slaughter at @BeautyBullMag .
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Omar Wasow became one of the first African Americans to develop a social tool to demystify technology and help plug the digital divide between blacks and whites when he co-founded BlackPlanet in 1999. Since he left the organization in 2005, Wasow became particularly interested in the charter school movement and helped launch the Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School in 2003. This month he's finishing a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies along with a master's degree in Statistics and Government at Harvard University.
Wasow will moderate a conversation about education and innovation for Wednesday's symposium, Today’s Business Crisis: Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce, which is hosted by Black Enterprise in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation at 4:00pm. Follow Wasow's tweets at @Owasow . more
Tanisha Robinson is the co-founder of TicketFire, an iOS app that allows ticket holders to scan their paper event tickets, and then share, sell or transfer those tickets to other people. Earlier in her career, after selling her affiliate marketing portfolio, Tanisha became the founder of Fudha.com, a daily deal site focused on locally-owned, independent restaurants. Since its launch in early 2010, this social enterprise contributed over 30,000 meals to the Mid-Ohio Foodbank, supported to local restaurant community, and saved its members over $250,000 on the best independent restaurants in Central Ohio. 614 Media Group purchased Fudha.com in the summer 2011. She is also co-founder of Print Syndicate and LookHuman.com, e-commerce platforms providing well-designed, socially relevant, high quality products to consumers, on-demand.
Follow Robinson's tweets at @TanishaRobinson . more
Navarrow Wright is the chief technology officer of Interactive One, the digital media arm of RadioOne focusing on the African-American and urban market. As CTO, Wright is responsible for the technical strategy of all the Interactive One online properties which include Hellobeautiful, The UrbanDaily,NewsOne, Elev8 and BlackPlanet. He is also responsible for the technical management of the Radio OneNetwork’s radio sites. Wright also launched the “Close the Divide for Me†project. Wight’s vision for the initiative is build awareness among underserved communities (minorities and women) about the opportunities that technology can provide in key areas such as education, healthcare, career growth and entrepreneurship.
Wright will be one of the judges at Black Enterprise's Elevator Pitch Competition hosted by Pepsico. Follow Wright's tweets at @NavarrowWright . more
Lynn Cooper is founder and principal of SociallyAhead, a digital communications firm based in Washington, DC. Cooper's firm offers robust and proven strategies for integrating social networking activity into their promotional and brand building campaigns. Cooper is a serial entrepreneur who has built three successful companies and worked with a diverse client base on technology and marketing solutions. She is also a BlackEnterprise.com contributor, penning articles on branding and social media strategies.
Follow Cooper's tweets at @SociallyAhead . more
Lauren Maillan Bias (Image: File)
Jonathan Gosier,a TED senior fellow alum, founded MetaLayerwith business partner Matthew Griffiths in 2011 to help non-technical users perform data-driven research such as trend spotting in big data sets, predictive analytics, and visualization using drag and drop data science technology. Â As an open-source product, the Philadelphia-based company works seamlessly with other data management platforms. Since its inception the product has helped customers in the intelligence community, government solutions, global crisis response, and public safety, visualize real-time sentiment of people in distress during Hurricane Irene, build products for countering violent extremism in Somalia, and use social media channels to monitor health trends and patterns using the online discussions of combat veterans.
Gosier, an alum of the accelerator DreamIt Ventureswill join Thursday's panel entitled Tech Startup Fast Track: Launch Code: S.U.C.C.E.S.S., where he and other early-stage tech entrepreneurs will discuss ways to leverage incubators and accelerators.
Follow Gosier's tweets from #BEEC at @JonGos. more
Jeff Clanagan is president and CEO of Code Black Entertainment, the first independent, vertically integrated African-American-owned film studio, actively engaged in the business of feature film production, film distribution, worldwide DVD and digital assets distribution, urban marketing consulting and a production of programs for television broadcast and syndication. CodeBlack Interactive is also the creator and developer of CodeBlackTV, the world's first on-demand broadband network devoted exclusively to serving fans of black film.
Follow Clanagan's tweets at @TheCodeBlackLife. more
Hajj Flemingsis the founder of Brand Camp University, which runs the largest personal branding conference in the Midwest. He is also the author of “The Brand YU Life: Re-thinking Who You Are Through Personal Brand Management†He has been featured on NBC, Fox News, ABC, and ESPN.com; and travels nationally speaking as a brand strategist enabling personal and business brands to remain relevant. His clients include Walt Disney, Ford Motor Company, Skechers Footwear, and the U.S. Department of Defense (Telecom Division).  In 2012 at SXSW interactive, he launched a tech startup called gokit a company that develops identity kits.
Follow Flemings tweets at @HajjFlemings. more
(Image: File)
Charlie Tribbett is co-founder of Bolstr, a dynamic revenue generating engine that allows 'main street small businesses' to connect with potential investors. Bolstr democratizes and simplifies the process of raising money through a private offering. By utilizing the technique of "crowdfunding," Bolstr enables small businesses to reach out to their networks and communities to raise smaller investments from a larger group of people. Prior to co-founding Bolstr, Tribbett interned at JPMorgan and then spent three years at Morgan Stanley in New York working in both the Investment Banking Division and Global Capital Markets.
Follow Tribbett's tweets at @Charliefour. more