In just under two weeks, CNN will be airing Black In America 4, about that rarest of breeds: African-American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Already the topic has generated controversy with an interview of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington by CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. When asked if who his favorite black entrepreneur is, Arrington was stumped.

“I don’t know a single black entrepreneur,” stumbled the extremely well-connected blogger-turned-VC. From there, a heated online debate ensued — largely triggered by provocative post written by Arrington (“Oh Shit, I’m A Racist”) where he claims he was set up by CNN (whose parent company AOL coincidentally just fired Arrington over some conflict-of-interest aka politrix issues) and that his inner database isn’t racially indexed. O’Brien herself dove into the fray, claiming the interview was anything but a set up.

For longtime but still rare afrosomething new media executives like me, the discussion has been an intriguing change from the usual navel-gazing myopia that often characterizes much of tech journalism. It’s fascinating to see technologists like Mitch Kapor train their formidable sights towards a social issue that, for once, doesn’t involve unfriending or Like buttons.

While most thinkers like Kapor rightly admit one reason black geeks are scarce in Silicon Valley is because the industry is more a “mirror-tocracy” than a meritocracy, there is another side to this burdensome scenario: historically, African-American kids have been conditioned to aspire to becoming superstar athletes, platinum-selling artists and other role models far “cooler” than a serial entrepreneur or a PHP coder. Where being a brainy student among Asian, Indian and Jewish kids is not generally viewed as a negative, in too many black schools you’re viewed as a “pointdexter.” The situation wasn’t helped much by Hollywood whose past portrayals of atypical black males were too often represented by feckless fictional characters like Steve Erkle or Carlton Banks.

The good news is that, indirectly, Silicon Valley is already changing this scenario. In the past decade, technology itself has become “cool” thanks to ubiquitous breakthrough platforms like mobile tech (from the SideKick to the iPhone) and social networking — starting with MySpace and now with Twitter where a disproportionate percentage of users are African-American. Coupled with increasingly low barriers to entry, the fundamentals of network and application layers are being understood and embraced by young black America. It’s only a matter of time before the culture that produced bebop and hip hop discovers a profitable twist on new media much like DJs reinvented turntables. Any enlightened investor knows this.

And, as the obviously non-racist Arrington pointed out in his blog, good things are underway: “At Google Zeitgeist I sat with Will.i.am, Ron Conway, Larry Page, and others over lunch. Will.i.am was proposing an ambitious new idea to help get inner city youth (mostly minorities) to begin to see superstar entrepreneurs as the new role models, instead of NBA stars. He believes that we can effect real societal change by getting young people to learn how to program, and realize that they can start businesses that will change the world.”

It's Cool To Be A Black Geek

In the meantime, Silicon Valley should not let itself off the hook and should instead continue to resolve this anachronistic lopsided situation. As the digital world becomes increasingly dominated by China and India, America will need all the diverse brain power it can get to compete in the global, electronic marketplace where no one knows you’re a dog, let alone a certain color. — MG

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Philip K. Dick Got It Right

“ I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.” – Roy Batty, Blade Runner

For those of us who are lucky (read: middle-to-upper class, Westerner, decent health habits), there may not be a time to die. At least not for a very long time. Maybe even a thousand years if British author and gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is correct.  De Grey and scores of researchers around the world have been working on reversing the aging process through various means including regenerative medicine. Indeed, De Grey famously quoted in 2008 “the first human who will live up to 1,000 years is probably already alive now, and might even be today between 50 and 60 years old.”

Similarly, noted Futurist/author/inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts humans will eventually live forever, through a mix of what he refers to as GNR (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics). “My cell phone is a billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer we all shared when I was an undergrad at MIT,” wrote Kurzweil in 2009. “And we will do it again in 25 years. What used to take up a building now fits in my pocket, and what now fits in my pocket will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years. ”

In this MIT lecture Kurzeill remarks “Say goodbye to cancer and heart disease within 15 years, and hello to living way past 80.”

One issue De Grey, Kurzweill and other anti-aging soothsayers seldom discuss, however, is self-identity. Even at the age 20, human beings are not who they were when they were five — completely different epidermis, different blood and scant if any memory of themselves as five year olds. Imagine at 300 years old; you will be a complete stranger to the person you are now (unless, of course, total Singularity happens). All of which begs the question: what is the point of immortality if you are essentially “reincarnated” as a complete stranger?

Enter the cloud. Storing your digital identity in a social cloud service like  Facebook or G+ will serve as a personal time capsule if you live to 200, 300 years and beyond. Everything that comprises your personality — your tastes, thoughts, friends, family, images, career — is often now digitized in the form of photos, videos, blogs, emails and short form text like Twitter or SMS. As the Nexus 6 replicants of Blade Runner showed, the difference between being a synthetic cyborg and human being ultimately comes down to memories. It’s the essence of what makes us unique individuals. Lose your memories, however, and you become whatever you are programmed to be.

This is your future...in bits.

While there are several reasons to be wary of loading your entire life  on a platform like Facebook, including privacy, the fact of the matter is that a cloud-based digital backup of your life is a much safer, convenient bet than ever-changing storage devices like optical discs or hard drive. Technology is always changing as any graybeard who has owned a Zip drive or  720MB CD ROM burner knows; it’s a pain in the ASCII to migrate personal data like email every five years or so – a bigger hassle than learning how to tweak the granular privacy settings of Facebook even if they seem to change every few years.

Sure there are dozens of options including memorials websites like Remembered.com, e-Forever and MyHeartWill, but the chances of those services surviving for hundreds of years is considerably  lower than Facebook who, capitalized to the tune of $2 billion and counting, is poised to become the IBM of social media in terms of longevity. If you want to electronically  ”live forever” then Facebook is probably your best bet. Google too — especially Gmail. With its new Timeline feature, however, Facebook has already shown the value of the personal time capsule: your life in an easy, navigable snapshot.

It’s almost inevitable humans will live well into their hundreds so we may as well start storing our self-identity now for the future. Unless, a solar flare, EMP or energy shortage sets us back to a digital Stone Age.  Maybe you should store a hardcopy back up too. — MG

An example of why identity matters in the future.

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Sammy Davis Jr
(203 followers, 163 tweets)
Not only is the Candyman a pretty decent Twitterer (163 tweets so far), he’s updated his hipster lingo as evidenced in this tweet: “Snuck into Brooklyn to see @questlove last night. All that & the company of @faraichidea. As the kids say, “full of win!”

William S Burroughs
(485 followers, 14 tweets)
For a great author, William S Burroughs surprisingly isn’t the most productive dead twitterer but among his 14 tweets are a couple of gems worthy enough to attract 462 weirdos followers. My favorite is this one: “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.”

Jimi Hendrix
(2,907 followers, 149 tweets)
Sure he’s been dead for almost 40 years but that hasn’t stopped Jimi Hendrix from amassing nearly 3,000 followers with tweets like “my fingers are hurting, time to take a break from playing and light myself up a joint.”

GG Allin
(95 followers,  51 tweets)
The scatological punker only has 95 followers and hasn’t tweeted since Nov last year because “I got piss in my PC and for some reason it stopped working” but late punker GG Allin is alive and well on the social platform. With tweets like “Ate some chilli with my hands then fingerbanged myself. Felt GOOD too, real hot and spicy up my hole,” Allin takes NSFW to new levels.

Joan Crawford
(11 followers, 11 tweets)
Admittedly Joan Crawford is not the most prolific dead twitterer with only 11 tweets posted in over a year but her inaugural tweet ensured this faux diva a place on this list with the dismissive observation: “Busy with housework!” (followed by a series of drunken accounts involving vodka befitting the Hollywood star).

Sylvia Plath
(340 followers, 15 tweets)
The Bell Jar author took her own life in 1963 by sticking her head in an oven. Decades later on Twitter, Plath is still haunting her 340 followers with chilling entries like “Cleaning the oven.”

Michael Jackson
(26,075 followers, 0 tweets)
Although he hasn’t posted a single tweet and another MJ account has been verified, TheRealMichaelJackson gets props for gaining over 26,000 followers without lifting a single sequined finger.

Frank Zappa
(1,533 followers, 30 tweets)
Music virtuso Frank Zappa not only tweets, he knows who “A list blogger” Robert Scoble is and accurately notes, “Scobleizer twitters more often than I release live albums….”

Corey Haim
(0 followers, 0 tweets)
Okay this one is clearly too soon — the heartless freak who runs the DeadCoreyHaim Twitter account hasn’t even posted a single character but the compelling content here isn’t his tweets; it’s the solitary person Haim is following. Classic conspiracy fodder.

Abe Vigoda
(2.328 followers, 8127 tweets)
Okay the dude’s not dead and every single of his 8,000+ tweets reminds you of that. Apparently over 2,000 followers need to be reminded regularly.

Dishonorable Mention

John Wayne Gacy. Not sure who is more disturbing, this serial killer imposter or his followers.
Jay Leno. Yeah he’s not dead but his career should be, judging by his non-stop shilling tweets. I’m with Coco.
Adolf Hitler. 1,800+ people follow a doofus who tweets things like “Attention Twitter. Jew’s have furry nipples. That is all.” Real funny.
J Edgar Hoover. No followers, no tweets, not following anyone. Just a big zero like the guy was in real life.

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I met Malcolm McLaren in 1993 when I was an artist manager. I had been developing a singer/songwriter named Kobe James; he was kind of a blend between Seal and Eddie Vedder. At least that was the plan as I had been searching for an artist who could redefine the concept of a “black artist” much like Hendrix did in the 60s and make money while doing it. Kobe was hugely talented and together, we did unprecedented things like achieve regular video rotation on MuchMusic (Canada’s MTV) without having a demo deal let alone a record deal.

Naturally we generated a lot of music label attention and jumpstarted the PR/fame cycle but things started to go awry for various unsavory reasons typical of young artists in the early stage of buzz building. The last straw was at a Canadian Music Week showcase where my artist left a dozen label “A&R men” waiting while he showed up a hour late for the performance. I finally gave up and ended our contract on the spot. In that painful moment, a lot of my work – producing videos, countless meetings, generating hype, raising capital — went down the drain.

Broken and spent, I headed off to a CMW party to rightfully drown my angst in booze. At the bar, I recognized a dapper-looking fellow who had been chatting with various well-wishers but at that moment was alone. It was Malcolm McLaren, the legendary manager of the Sex Pistols. Feeling like shit, I felt he was the one sage who would understand the thankless nature of artist management and would perhaps be able to provide useful advice in light of what I had just experienced.

“The labels don’t care about your artist, they care about you!” insisted McLaren after I told him my story.

“They trust the manager, ” he explained. “You can always go back with another artist. Those doors will still be open.”

Although I didn’t believe him at the time, I was grateful for the much-needed encouragement from this legend. And later that evening, after telling some music execs what happened, McLaren was proven right. Unbeknownst to me, just about every A&R exec thought my artist was, quite honestly, insane in the membrane. They only took those meetings because of me, I was surprised to hear.

I ended up leaving the music business anyway, having been unable to stomach that level of risk ever again. But I’ll never forget the words of support from one the best in the game.

Rest In Peace Malcolm McLaren. This is one stranger who will never forget you. — MG

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I know we’re still in the raging iPad hype era and the debate between Android vs iPhone OS is nothing new, but having recently switched to a Google NexusOne smartphone over the past two weeks, I felt compelled to share my two cents on the experience. In short, the NexusOne kicks ass over my iPhone 3G except in one area: number of available applications (and that’s changing quickly as I’ll explain later).

Before I dive into the reasons why I prefer the NexusOne over my iPhone, note that my iPhone is a jailbroken, older generation 3G model. That means its 620MHz ARM chip is inherently slower than the blazing 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip found in the  NexusOne. That said, even the latest iPhone (3GS)  and its 833MHz chip is still slower than the Google phone. Jailbreaking often makes iPhones even slower.

Speed aside, however, the reasons why I’ve made NexusOne the new reigning champ of my pocket are:

- Amazing integration with Google Apps. I use pretty much everything Google has to offer (except Picasa and Orkut). The Android OS seamlessly integrates with Google to the extent that Gtalk becomes a better version of SMS text, “push” technology is simply a matter-of-fact and search is far more enhanced thanks to applications like Goggles (search based on photos) and superb speech-recognition.

The Nexus One's Speech Recognition is actually usable!

Gtalk is like free SMS with Android.

- Android Apps Look Better. This surprised me but for some reason, a lot of Android apps seem sharper and more intuitive than their iPhone counterpart. Examples include the live video streaming app Qik, WordPress Mobile, FourSquare and, of course, every Google app especially Earth. You’d probably have to see it to believe it.

- Multitasking. One of the reasons I had to jailbreak my iPhone was to simply have the ability to stream Internet radio while I’m working on another application. Android already does this and does it well. Anyone who’s used a computer post-1988 knows that multitasking is prerequisite for basic computing. With a jailbroken iPhone, apps like Backgrounder allow multitasking on the Apple smartphone but they also make the devices run slower and become unpredictable. Android just works when it comes to running multiple apps.

Notification. This was another unexpected pleasant surprise. With the NexusOne, notification of new events like emails or SMS/Gtalk text shows up in a couple of places: the tool bar of the mobile video screen (which shows a list of events when the menu item is selected) and also the trackball (it flashes when a new event has happened). I found this notification to be far more handy and convenient compared to the badge used by the iPhone — particularly the Quick Reply aspect of SMS notification where you can respond to messages without quitting programs like games or email. There is a slick iPhone app that does the same thing, QuickSMS, but again you’ll have to jailbreak your phone to get it.

iPhone's badge shows you when a new item has arrived.

Aside from a screen icon notifier, NexusOne "blinks" when things arrive.

- Better camera. The NexusOne comes with a crisp 5 megapixel camera that includes built-in flash. While the 3GS is an improvement over the 2 megapixel of my 3G, the latest iPhone only sports a 3 megapixel camera with still no flash. Like the 3GS, the NexusPhone also records video.

- Better desktop and UI. Although it took a couple of days to get used to, the Android OS user interface in my NexusOne is far superior than the UI in my iPhone — mainly because the desktop is vastly more customizable. With the NexusOne, you post specialized widgets on each desktop (they’re like toolbar apps that offer a specific function like Search or Facebook status updates) or “alias” icons that load applications when clicked. Or you can see every single icon for every app you’ve installed with one click. What this means is that it’s easy to configure one desktop for work apps, another for social media apps  and so on. With the iPhone, every single icon is there everytime which means if you have a ton of apps installed like I do, you have to fly your way through multiple desktops in order to find that buried. There’s no rhyme or reason to how they’re arranged unless you’ve put in the time to manually organize your icons. There is an iPhone app to organize our icons into folders but again, you’ll have to jailbreak your phone. And apart from the desktops, the NexusOne overall UI is sleeker and more clever than iPhone OS — probably because Google had a lot of time to study and improve weaknesses in the iPhone.

- FormFactor. This was another surprise. When photos of the  NexusPhone first appeared in the wild, I thought it was homely compared to Apple’s famously elegant smartphone. After getting my hands on it, however, I increasingly grew to enjoy its thinner form factor and curvaceous simplicity. My iPhone actually feels slightly clunky compared to the NexusOne — even when both are without protective skins. Ostensibly, thinner is better when it comes to smartphones and in this metric, the NexusPhone wins again.

Overall, it’s clear Google (and the NexusOne manufacturer HTC) spent a lot of time analyzing and eventually trumping the iPhone. With a new 4G iPhone expected to debut this summer, however, it’s likely Apple will once again raise the bar in the mobile phone market. Especially if the rumored second front-facing camera is true. Imagine Skyping with that, over 3G. And while Apple’s big advantage is still the 100,000-plus iPhone/iTouch applications in its Apple store, there are now over 30,000 apps in the Android Market store. And if latest usage reports are any indication, the Android mobile operating system is quickly catching up, thanks to excellent smartphones like the NexusOne. — MG

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