CNN's Black in America / Silicon Valley: Aftermath
In the summer of 2011, New Me, the first technology accelerator focused on African American's was launched. The inaugural class was covered by the CNN documentary "Black in America" along with an exploration of the issues underlying low minority representation in the tech industry. This panel will discuss the issues raised, things not seen in the documentary, and the aftermath of its airing. Panel participants will include Soledad O'brien, the documentary reporter, and Anchor of the CNN Morning Show, Jason Samuels, the producer of the Black In America Documentary, and New Me Participants Hajj Flemings, Hank Williams and New Me co-founder Wayne Sutton.
Presenters
Hajj was featured in CNN’s Black In America 4 - The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley, which aired 11/13/11, which was viewed by over 1 million people. He is the Founder of Brand Camp University the largest personal branding conference in the Midwest and author of “The Brand YU Life.
Hajj is also, the CEO/Co-Founder of Gokit an online identity platform that enables users to manage, organize and curate their story.
He has been featured on CNN, CNN Tech Money, The Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch. His clients include Walt Disney, the U.S. Dept of Defense and numerous Fortune 500 companies, Universities and Colleges around the nation.
Hajj is also a BlackEnterprise.com columnist who writes about technology, social media and branding for small business.
Hank is a technologist and entrepreneur currently serving as CEO of Kloudco, a startup developing a new cloud information management
platform. Hank writes at his own blog, whydoeseverythingsuck.com about data storage, the semantic web, system scaling, and intellectual
property in the internet era.
Before Kloudco, Hank operated Elroy Networks, a development and consulting company focused on Internet media related technologies. From 1998 to 2001, Hank was Founder, Chairman, and CEO of ClickRadio, one of the Internet's first interactive radio services. Along with raising $40 million dollars in capital, as lead architect, he conceived many of the concepts and technologies that that underpin the current interactive music space. In 1995, Hank co-founded Cybersonic, a technology consulting firm which provided Internet development and broadcasting services to most of the major music labels, and pioneered the concept of large scale live cybercasts. From 1988 to 1994, Hank served as President and CEO of Pastel, where he developed DayMaker, a best selling and award winning personal information manager.
Jason Samuels is an Emmy Award-winning documentary news producer, and an associate professor of journalism at New York University.
Currently Jason produces documentaries for CNN.
Before joining CNN Jason spent 15+ years as a senior producer for ABC News and as a long-form producer for NBC News.
Wayne Sutton is an entrepreneur, advisor and technology journalist.
Wayne helps individuals, startups and businesses succeed in understanding how to communicate on the social web via web development, user experience, brand strategy and marketing (Mobile and Social). With 10 plus years of experience in internet technology, he has provided counsel to business leaders ranging from founders of small startups and representatives of nonprofit organizations to CEOs of large and small corporations.
Wayne has been featured on CNN.com, BBC, Mashable, BlackEnterprise.com, Web Pro news, The Atlanta Post and various media outlets. His blog SocialWayne.com has been ranked one of the 50 best technology and social media blogs in the world by Evan Carmichael and Simply Zesty.
Recently Wayne helped co-launch the NewMe Accelerator, the first minority led startup accelerator/incubator in Silicon Valley which was featured in CNN Black in America 4 documentary that aired November 13, 2011.
Wayne has spoken at various internet/technology focused conferences and events such as O’reilly Web 2.0 Expo, NY, SXSW, Pubcon Austin, WordCamps, Social Media Breakfast, The Triangle Chapter of the American Marketing Association(TAMA),Triangle Interactive Marketing Association(TIMA), Public Relations Society of America Conference (PRSA), FutureM/GEOM and Blog World.
Friday, March 9
