MTV Networks is licensing a social networking media player centered around building online communities based on similar tastes in online content. The application was discovered by MTV through its mtvU college media network’s Digital Incubator program and was developed by Georgia Tech students David Jimison and Jeff Crouse. With the application, called “Hit! or Sh!t,” users create a profile, log their friends’ contact info and are fed a series of short media clips.  A clip ranked a “Hit” is passed onto friends; other media is dropped from the rotation. MTV and Cisco have are also promoting its second Digital Incubator session and has awarded five student teams with up to $30,000 in grant money. This year’s grant recipients will have the opportunity to submit a detailed business plan and pitch MTV and Cisco executives for a supplemental grant of up to $100,000. The five teams chosen this year are:

-- Selectricity – M.I.T.: A communal ranking technology that tries to engender 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.

-- Casablanca – NYU: An online and mobile phone-based ice-breaker party game that combines elements of social networking and alternative reality gaming.  Players are tasked with building or infiltrating real-world and virtual communities, where everyone’s “allegiance” is unknown. 

-- RapHappy – NYU: An online hip hop destination where users can record, collaborate on, search and listen to freestyle or written raps.  The site will encourage user interaction and collaboration, enabling users to form groups, start battles or rate/comment on the sites’ submissions.

-- Osiris – Brown University: An MP3 visualizer that uses song lyrics to automatically generate music videos using images pulled from Flickr and pictures on the user’s hard drive.

-- How Do I Say This? – UCLA: One of the Digital Incubator programs from last year. This site serves as an advice Wiki, where users help script and create video messages for people with problems that have left them at a loss for words. Release