Click the image to hear reflections about the conference from host Angela Benton

This past week I attended the NewME(New Media Entrepreneurship) Conference presented by Black Web Media and Innovation Generation. The two day conference was held in Washington, DC at Hotel Monaco and focused on increasing online minority entrepreneurship through policy, capital investment, and strategies to decrease the barriers to market.

The conference brought together entrepreneurs, policy makers, and private equity firms. Attendees included Navarrow Wright, Founder of Global Grind, David Sutphen co-chair of the Internet Innovation Alliance, Carmen Ortiz-McGhee, President of The Marathon Club, and the discussion moderator Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee, Vice President of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies to name a few. One very notable speaker, Robert Townsend gave an energized keynote presentation on “The Perfect Pitch”. He stressed the importance of being knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and thinking out of the box about ideas. Later that afternoon winners of NewME’s online Pitch Competition were given the opportunity to present their business concepts to a panel of venture and private equity attendees who gave them live feedback. During the second day attendees of the conference had an “Action Planning” session where we broke into groups to share some action items for how to increase the success of minorities in the new media marketplace. Some of the solutions ranged from increased new media literary, broadband access in schools and communities, and increased visibility of online minority entrepreneurial resources.

The conference was organized by Angela Benton, Founder of Black Web Media and Black Web 2.0 and Kristal Lauren High, Co-Founder of Innovation Generation.  Benton was recently named one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Media.

This was the first NewME conference and Benton gave me her reflections in the video below.

Angela Benton speaks about the NewME Conference from Sojournals on Vimeo.

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