Friday, November 05, 2010

Call me a start-up junkie, but it is always exciting to see a project come together.

Six months ago, the Black History Mobile app idea was just that - an idea. What if I could use the Augmented Reality technology to guide people to places of interest and significance in black history in Washington, D.C., and other major U.S. cities? That was the premise. Today, I have the reality in my hand. Looking through the camera lens of my iPhone as I cruise around downtown and central Phoenix, I see a dozen or so significant moments of Arizona black history pop up.  There on the corner of 8th and Washington Streets is where a group of black Phoenicians in 1886 founded what would become Tanner A.M.E. Church back. And here, at Old Main on the Arizona State University campus, Benton James walked across the stage in 1924 to become the first African American to get a degree from this great institution. And right here at LoLo’s Chicken and Waffles, the app tells me I can dine like a Harlemite on some fine southern cuisine. And there in this urban neighborhood, cotton fields grew as late as the early 1970s.

Next week, while I am at the Women’s Entrepreneurs Summit, sponsored by J-Lab, I can’t wait to break out and test all of the augmented reality markers in Washington, D.C., that I’ve put together, from the hotel where Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the “I Have a Dream” speech to the house where Benjamin O. Davis, the first black five-star general lived and raised the second black five-star general, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., to the arsenal where the conspirators who plotted and carried out the Abraham Lincoln assassination were put to death by hanging.

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