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| Friday, September 29 02:18 PM |
| AKA Stays Because Of Adam Kidron and UBO Pay Day. |
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Playwright turned Websmith Randy Wiener partnered with Stuart Hirsch to start Internet Music Corporation. Their flagship product AKA.com had hip hop websites signing up for the chance to be tied to record-industry style life-time contracts, give their content away for free, and make their sites billboards for AKA's unfilled ad inventory.
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| Thursday, July 20 03:31 PM |
| I Told You To Turn Down The Volume, NOW TURN IT OFF! |
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Volume.com it seems may never get to turn it up. Its original strategy was to build a flashy urban portal with no clear strategy other than to have puff pieces and video clips of celebrities. Before they even launched they were ordered to scrap all the content they had and build a blackplanet-esque community site. AOL's merger with Time Warner put Volume.com under intense scrutiny. Evidently AOL wasn't impressed.
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| Tuesday, July 18 10:06 PM |
| 88hiphop On The Highway To Heaven. |
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Randy Nkonoki-Ward and Mark Kotlinski started 88hiphop on a 900 number. They found the ultimate partner in Pseudo. For a 50 percent stake in 88hiphop, Randy and Mark now drew 6 figure salaries, access to a studio, web servers to stream content, and a staff to control. The possibilities seemed endless after some key successes and the deep pockets of Pseudo backing it up. All things are not as they seem, as the well eventually ran dry.
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| Tuesday, August 15 11:10 PM |
| SAR Tries to Pick Urban Stars, Flatiron Funded Sites Get Marred. |
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Silicon Alley Reporter is best known as a high school yearbook of everyone who has eaten at Nobu's with Jason McCabe Calacanis rather than as a new economy industry magazine. Following the lead of other trade journals such as Inside.com and the Industry Standard, Jason decided to do a cover story on urban content sites. The story snubbed UBO and Hookt, and tries to play nice to Jason's newest friend, 360hiphop.
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| Monday, June 19 05:27 PM |
| Darien Dash: Race for Cash |
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Darien is preparing to launch "Places of Color". Sounds more like a smarmy romance novel by Terry McMillan than a co-branded ISP play involving AOL. The site currently consists of the ubiquitous Flash intro -straight from a Macromedia tutorial- and a grating sound track guiding us through uninspired visuals. The press for this deal sounds great: AOL working with a company called Digital Mafia, to bring poor black people Internet service at $19.95 when many ISPs are giving away service for free!
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| Tuesday, September 19 04:45 PM |
| Digital Don Darien Dash Burns Through Staff and Cash |
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What do you do when your company is burning through more then half a million dollars a quarter, you've fired over 60% of your staff and your much hyped AOL deal is a dud? If your Digital Mafia CEO, Darien Dash, you dub yourself the "Digital Divide Pioneer" and go on a speaking tour of government offices and ivy league colleges. All this time we believed Bobby Hemit's conspiracy theories about economic disparities and corporate greed causing the digital divide, thanks for clearing it up Darien.
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| Thursday, October 26 05:48 PM |
| Urban Internet Smackdown: Some Were Quiet; Others a Riot. |
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The Urban Impact conference at Internet world has come to and end. The most popular panel brought together the heads of all the major sites on the urban space to battle it out. Bo Kemp isn't quite Sydney Lumet. They expected it to be like twelve angry men. Instead it became a sly jousting match between the heads of the black community sites. We bring you a UE dissection of the panel.
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| Wednesday, August 30 04:59 PM |
| Was The Source Hip-Hop Awards Edited By Golden Harvest or Ocean Video? |
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UPN aired what they could of the 2000 Source Hip-Hop Awards, last night and besides shots of Lil' Kim's g-string, it wasn't much to see. Pressed to fill two hours of allotted network time and fulfill it's commitment to sponsors such as Sony and Sprite, UPN used the show as a hip-hop soundtrack to their shameless infomercial of new shows for their first and most likely, last season. We've seen Kung Fu flicks with better continuity.
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| Sunday, June 11 02:17 PM |
| Digital Divide by Four and Take Away Millions. |
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The Digital Divide has become the new media code word for anything black online, creating a tremendous boon for black new media CEOs. These shameless self-promoters use every panel on the Digital Divide to advance their own company interests, regardless of whether they are actually doing anything to help black people get wired.
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