Digital Incubator: MTV’s 5 Web Prodigies

mtvu

Apparently, MTVU and Cisco have opened a joint business venture which is quite an interesting start up incubator, or as I call them, start up factories. The newly launched digital incubator primarily focuses on seed investment and support for young students all across the US. Each year they offer students up to $250,000 in grants and a national platform to shine. The reason I’m sharing all this business mumbo jumbo with you is because they’ve just unveiled their 5 prodigies for the season on www.digitalincubator.net.

There’s some interesting stuff, here’s the info:

RapHappy – New York University
www.RapHappy.com
Online and mobile-phone-based hip hop community enables members to easily record, collaborate on, search and listen to freestyle or written raps, without any need for software or file uploading.

Osiris – Brown University
www.Launchosiris.com
Few technologies have ever tackled the visualization of music. Osiris is a first-of-its-kind MP3 visualizer using song lyrics to dynamically generate music videos, using images pulled from Flickr and a user’s own hard disk.

Casablanca – New York University
http://casablancathegame.com
Free online and mobile-phone-based ice-breaker party game combines elements of social networking, espionage and alternative- reality gaming. In Casablanca, two teams square off, with members messaging each other online and off, making friends and forming alliances as they vie for control of a virtual city. Anyone can start their own game at http://casablancathegame.com.

Selectricity – M.I.T.
www.selectricity.org
An online communal ranking technology, Selectricity focuses on preferential decision-making, shifting away from a winner-take-all paradigm to a more democratic standard. Using a drag-and-drop mechanism, users rank choices in order of preference and the Selectricity application generates a winner that is most acceptable to the group as a whole. Anyone can set up a Selectricity question in under 30 seconds and tap their friends to help settle daily dilemmas such as, “which restaurant should we eat at tonight?” “What bar does everybody most want to go to?” and, “who are the best indie rock bands out right now?”

How Do I Say This? – UCLA
www.HowDoISayThis.com
The site is an interactive Web-based advice wiki, where users help script and create video messages for people with problems that have left them at a loss for words. A new topic is selected every month and members weigh in with advice and suggestions, in the form of user-generated videos, illustrations, photos, prose, poetry and cartoons. HowDoISayThis.com was so successful last year it has been greenlighted as an mtvU series, and short-form content from the first season – “How Do I Say This? I’m Gay” – is scheduled to start appearing on the channel in October.

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Posted on September 7, 2007