Blacksoftware.com

Name: Blacksoftware.com
Address: 867 Boylston Street, Fl 5th, Boston, MA, 02116, US
Telephone: (617) 942-1301
Price range: $

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Blacksoftware.com

Our BlackSoftware is the Afro-Am, African-made new software genre replacing the multicultural word.

Address

867 Boylston Street, Fl 5th
Boston, MA
02116

Telephone

(617) 942-1301

Website

https://www.blacksoftware.com/

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blackSoftware, the new genre

black film. black movies. black art. black fashion. black music. black literature. black software established 1989. The origin of blackSoftware is pre-internet. The genre is older than the commercialized-in-1995 Internet. MAVIS BEACON could have been the one that inspired it all. “Mavis Beacon Typing Tutor” was a Top 10 Best Selling software title on all the consumer software industry charts for year after year. Imagine how many millions of people she taught how to type on a QWERTY keyboard. Her face on the box became as familiar as Aunt Jemima - the pancake mix brand. Mavis Beacon was not a real person. The original photo of Mavis Beacon was that of Renee L'Esperance, a Caribbean-born model who met a guy in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Beverly Hill, California. He was head of a software company on a shopping trip where she worked. Her first name was taken from a Staples singer you probably know.

I learned a thing or two about branding at the time. In 1990, I bought into a franchise named Laptops, Etc., of Falls Church Va. Together we opened a laptop boutique store in Cambridge, Ma between Harvard and MIT University. Our phone number was (617) 527-8677. The letters spelled the words LAPTOPS. It was a smart move. We owned the market for a while, then competitors with bigger pockets rushed in to compete. blacksoftware became a branding agent. As the independent Afro-American programmers created Black artwork image collections and DOS/Windows software games such as TONK, BidWhist, Crazy 8, Checkers and so on, they had all kinds of names for the packaging but it was undefined as a category. “blackSoftware, the category was a natural fit.” The assortment needed definition, in my mind. But no software programmer was into being defined and I didn’t press it upon them..

There were many titles. Nobody cared what to call it as long as it was selling. The first twoBlack consumer software makers I worked with lived in California. Arthur Crump and Kamal Al Mansour had software works. The LADY LAPTOP brand, from an entrepreneur in Brooklyn New York previewed her multi-set catalog of Black clip art organized by themes. Her selection was extensive, low-res but usable none the less. Word started getting around that blacksoftware.com was a go to for distribution. Reselling was a field I knew very well, being that I had a computer retail brick and mortar operation running on the other end of my life. The only thing we “made” was “labor billings.” Everything else we sold we bought from the makers. The blackSoftware.com site I owned was a side gig. Store staff had no idea what to do with blackSoftware. I guess it all was strange to the world Novell Networking, relational database and operating system consultants.

Keith Coleman of AfroCentrex Software in Chicagobrought his hit collection of higher res Business, Church Fashion, Latino and Lifestyle images depicting people of color. The OKARA Software company was another sophisticated packager of AfroCentric clip art. His brand packaging was the coolest I had seen. Then he abandoned doing software like this to take a job in the Philippines. These birthers of the work had other things to do. But in my mind, the genre of blackSoftware had been born. It remains.

“Thanks for the blackSoftware, but do you have any Vietnamese, any Jamaican, any other ethnic stuff?,” asked the Harvard University cafeteria manager. She managed employees who were immigrants from countries far and wide and used clip art in her staff newsletters.

The artist Betye Saar had her “Digital Griot” work released by Voyager a major software publisher. Artist Paul Goodnight and actor Billy Dee Williams released Black Fine Artwork they created on the screensaver platform. City Lights Software Inc assembled more Black fine art in a screen saver format and sold it. Numerous Black programmers created educational software and biographical multimedia titles such as “HEROES OF THE PAST.” Black software publisher Quickthinking Software debuted perhaps more AfroCentric software educational titles than anyone else I knew at the time. He recently attended the Grove Hall African American Business Tech showcase meetup. A publisher distributed the multimedia story “Mumia Jamal, Live from Death Row”; the Race Relations Institute (UK) created the “HOMEBEATS” story on CD ROM; the Hallmark Greeting Card company digitized its “MAHOGANY” cards and shipped its short lived greeting card maker kit by the same name for Windows PCs.

But way way back -- back to the time a week or two after the website BlackSoftware.com was published (1989), an African uploaded his SUNGO game - the first made-in-Africa product for DOS we received. SUNGO is a software game of chance. I may be wrong but it is possible that it predates KENO. This is likely because in the early 90’s, the computer store joint ventured with a prime contract to win the State of Mass master contract to supply 3,300 retail locations around the state with equipment that made the KENO gambling game system work. It was the first ever roll out of KENO in Massachusetts. We handled the TV sets setup. I remember the deal well. The White prime contract in Chicopee was refusing to allocate us 1/3 the bid work on the project we had teamed to bid on. Thanks to the SOMWBA department and their legal might, he ultimately shared the orders.

Blacksoftware - a potential headwind, maybe?

In 1999. Harvard Professors DR. Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, and Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy at Harvard University made W.E.B. Du Bois’ dream a reality by publishing a much-anticipated comprehensive multimedia encyclopedia of Africans and people of African descent throughout the world. Cambridge’s computer superstore COMPUSA held a major launch of the product after the two appeared in New York at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Their product didn’t have long enough coat tails to pull the blackSoftware genre forward. Today 2019, and for the foreseeable future, blackSoftware genre creation is strong, thanks to the mass adoption of mobile phones, devices and the low cost of do-it-yourself app making and Internet distro via Google Play and the Apple ITunes store. It is a very fragmented marketplace though.

Never before has there been the diversity of blackSoftware titles available. The genre used to have the perfect market fit -- people would pull it off the shelf if you had what they wanted. What has changed?

The challenge of the blackSoftware genre today is to become the top one, two or three things a person wants when they go to buy a software item. That’s not happening now but it is the only thing that will guarantee survival of the genre. And when the title doesn’t solve an urgent need or problem, the blackSoftware genre will remain invisible.