Last years BET Awards was highly interactive as the award show integrated many social media elements including the social media lounge that provided viewers with up to the second updates from Twitter and Facebook.

This year they are taking it a step further releasing the first mobile app for the award show.

According to Mashable the app features gaming aspects, a clickable timeline of the BET Awards, in-depth artist profiles, curated tweets and videos. In addition a “tweetmap,” will show where app users are tweeting from and let them zoom in to view user profiles and tweets.

The app is heavily interactive with games like Too Big to Pick which allows users to vote for nominees by shooting disks into a moving goal and The Line-Up which lets people predict the order of the show’s performers and compare with friends and celebrities.

This is a great way to keep the audience tuned in and fans who can’t physically be there feel like they are. The mobile app is set to  release in June.  We will see what other digital aspects the BET Awards plan to use this year as we get closer to it’s July 1 air date.

First Jay-Z’s Brooklyn Nets joins popular social app and now Beyonce launched her own. Beyonce launched the BeyHive app in the Apple App Store and on Google Play yesterday and according to its Twitter account has more than 1,000 members since its release.

BeyHive is a new mobile app created to connect with Bey’s fans integrating different social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Die hard Beyonce fans will love this app because it’s not just one-way communications. Users are encourage to create their own content by tweeting about the app, events, or anything that has to do with Beyonce using the hashtags.

Tweets with the #BeyHive hashtag are collected and showcased in a live stream on the website.

In a previous infographic we shared a portion of how African-Americans stay digitally social which included things like blogging and social media engagement. Nielsen also put together another infographic indicating how Black consumers stay active online including e-commerce, video, and news.

From its findings, 48% of African-Americans consume online video on YouTube than any other video site. This may important if you are an online content creator choosing a platform  to cater specifically to a Black audience.

Take a look at other parts of the Web African-Americans are consuming.

After co-owner Jay-Z recently unveiled the hot new logos for the Brooklyn Nets, the team is rolling out more exciting re-branding concepts including joining social video sharing app, Socialcam.

Joining Socialcam is part of a marketing campaign called “Hello Brooklyn.”

The campaign was created in effort to get people excited about the new team. With the NBA being one of the leading examples of social media engagement, the Brooklyn Nets are trying to create the same buzz for their own team.

According to the Next Web, Socialcam currently sits in the No. 10 spot for free apps on the iOS app store, and has 51.5 million monthly active Facebook users, which is No. 1 on the platform. So  if Jay-Z and the Brooklyn Nets are looking to be more socially active, this was probably a great start.

The John S. Knight Fellowships is giving Blogging While Brown attendees and other content creators the opportunity to be a John S. Knight fellow.

Participants spend a year at Stanford utilizing the resources of the university and Silicon Valley as they pursue their own proposals for improving journalism with the program’s focus on journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership.

Director Jim Bettinger will be attending the Blogging While Brown Conference, June 1-2, 2012 in Philadelphia at the Chemical Heritage Foundation to explain more and answer questions about what the program is like and fellows are selected.

“Computer visionary Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it,”  Bettinger said. “At the Knight Fellowships, we predict journalism’s future by inventing it. We give Fellows a chance to re-engineer journalism: to re-invent it, retool it and re-orient it, to recognize all the new realities: economic, technological, social and demographic.”

The John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford University are a returning sponsor for Blogging While Brown Conference . To learn more about Blogging While Brown and to register for the conference visit www.BloggingWhileBrown.com.

Starbucks is currently tech entrepreneur Adrian Grant’s new office. After leaving his position as a product manager at BET, he is working full-time on his entrepreneurial endeavours including most recent project, Wave45.

Wave45 is an online video platform that curates the best urban videos from music to web series; a startup that makes absolute sense when African-Americans are creating more quality content via the web than on any other traditional media outlets.

Grant saw a path for this while at BET. He decided to take on the task and created Wave45.

Now Grant has the opportunity to create his own black entertainment network of the future incorporating technology and the mobile web space.

Earlier this year I talked about how Black web series and online content would be a continuing trend in 2012, therefore it’s safe to say there is a need for a company like Wave45.

Wave45 is curating fun, popular content like the series Awkward Black Girl into one place so users don’t have to go all over the web searching for the latest and greatest.  But, the best thing Wave45 is doing is creating its own original content.

“We are creating our own content too, Grant says.” “Experts like Ash Cash come on to do live streams with focuses on business and finance. We want to provide quality content outside of just entertainment.”

As a young and innovative entrepreneur, Grant understands the latest trends in urban entertainment and technology. Wave45 is already available on iTunes, Android, Boxee, and Google TV. Working on more distribution deals, content partners, as well as seeking funding is what lies ahead for the promising video platform.

We’ve heard it before, African-Americans engage online more than their counterparts. But what exactly are African-Americans doing in the online space?

In an infographic by Nielsen, you can see a short breakdown. Black adults  are 72% more likely than the average U.S. adult on line to build and update a personal blog, making African-Americans creators in this space not just consumers.

It also indicates African-Americans activity on Twitter and other info on social networking sites.

How are you staying socially connected? Are you blogging, do you use Twitter for entertainment, promotion, professionally, etc. Let us know in the comments.

HBCUs are showing off those tech skills! Virginia State University’s Reginald F. Lewis School of Business was awarded the RichTech Technology Innovation Deployment Award for its “Digital at the Core” initiative that developed a new, integrated business curriculum focusing heavily on technological participation and digital content.

RichTech, a Richmond VA-based company that promotes the region as a technology center  recognizes the best and brightest technology stars. Virginia State was the only school selected as a finalist from hundreds of nominations.

In 2010, the school piloted a process approach to delivering nine core courses through licensed, open-source costing $19.95 per license. The fee covers all of the digital products, including digital downloads, pdf files of each chapter, complete digital textbooks, MP3 audio chapters, study guides, quizzes and flashcards. A grant from Dominion Virginia Power gave the business school the start-up capital it needed to launch the initiative.

This isn’t Virginia State’s first recognition for it’s technology achievements. In October, Governor Bob McDonnell awarded its business school the Governor’s Technology Award for Innovation in Higher Education.

Tech boom? That must be focused in the Valley, right? Or at least, you would expect that any such rapid expansion would have the largest impact in that region. However, a new study by the Praxis Strategy Group has outlined a number of critical facts that bust that specific narrative.

Among the highlights: In the Vally, tech employment is down, when compared to the level of year 2000, while other markets have surged. Since 2000, Seattle has seen a 43% growth in its tech employment. Seattle-focused TechFlash explains that growth by citing “Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing [which] are driving that growth through the country’s economic [in] good times and through the bad.” Those three firms are certainly critical to the Seattle-area economy.

Read the rest of this article at The Next Web