This Black entrepreneur is on to something. After he says he made over $1 million in under nine hours, music artist and entrepreneur Blakk Tatted knew he had something special with his company Blakk Smoke. Courtesy of Blakk Smoke Unlike other competitors in the market, the brand offers products with real fruit, no-nicotine, and no-tobacco substances. Tatted conjured the idea because he wanted to introduce a product to Hookah lovers that didn’t include a harmful substance. “Hookah is my passion, but anybody that’s an avid hookah smoker knows the feeling that it gives you afterward. It’s just not worth it,” Tatted told AfroTech exclusively. “Being an advocate for hookah and telling people you should try, you would love it, I felt guilty because I know it’s not the best thing to introduce to people. Many people are influenced by me, so if I’m going to do something, I will hope I’m setting the best example possible. That’s when I wanted to create a healthier alternative for people.”

An increasing number of Black men are dying from sleep apnea, according to a University at Buffalo-Catholic Health System study.  

Queen Latifah is debunking the false stereotypes of obesity in her latest campaign with pharmaceutical company Nova Nordisk. AfroTech previously reported that Queen Latifah signed an audible deal to highlight activists in different sectors. Now, her latest venture hits closer to home as she tackles an issue that has loomed over her career for decades. Conceptualized with director Chris Robinson, “It’s Bigger Than Me” allows Latifah to share her experience of living with obesity through four impactful and creative video snippets. View this post on Instagram A post shared by It's Bigger Than Me (@itsbiggerthan) As a star in the industry, Latifah developed insecurities struggling to maintain a healthy weight in the limelight. The Hollywood actress first learned she was obese upon working with a trainer for a movie role earlier in her career. “I fell into the category of obesity, and it took a trainer to educate me about what it was when I was trying to lose weight for a project,”...

Megan Gray —  a former Google employee — has established herself and her startup, Moment AI, as respected names in the (Artificial Intelligence) AI startup world. Gray and the Moment AI team are on a mission to integrate health monitoring into the driving experience so that drivers can be alerted to potential deadly health episodes even before they begin to feel ill. Moment AI has participated in the Softbank and WeWork-backed Emerge accelerator . Gray has also spoken at NVIDIA’s GTC DC and several conferences about the work she and the Moment AI team are doing to make the roads safer for everyone. Moment AI also holds a patent for the technology they’ve developed. For Gray, Moment AI’s mission is all too personal. Where It All Started For The Former Googler When Gray suffered a seizure on a flight one day, she was left completely confused. Up until that day, she had been a healthy young woman with no medical issues. “It felt like something was kicking me in my head,” she explained...

Augustine Diji is no stranger to real estate. He grew up the son of a proud psychiatrist who practiced in Buffalo, New York. Early on, his father planted the seeds of ownership and strategic action. The memory cemented his understanding of property acquisition as a tool for wealth building that would change his own life trajectory. While Diji became an adult and went on to practice law, his understanding of real estate and related issues enabled him to easily acquire several properties to build wealth. However, the economic downturn of the late 2000s found him in danger of losing his very foundation. Over a two-year period, Diji fought desperately to retain all that he had worked so hard to acquire. The battle to maintain his property represented a personal and professional tug of war in other areas of his life. Diji emerged, but not unscathed. Grateful for having overcome his situation, he turned his experience into opportunities to give back. He began coaching friends and...

Time is of the essence when it comes to getting organs to patients who need them, and a recent test may have sparked a breakthrough in how they’re delivered.   On April 19, a drone successfully delivered a donor kidney to surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center . It marked the first time a drone has been used to deliver an organ to a transplant patient. The drone traveled about three miles to deliver the kidney, according to MIT Technology Review .  According to a UMMC press release, the patient was a 44-year-old woman from Baltimore who’d spent eight years on dialysis before the procedure. She was discharged a few days later. Dr. Joseph R. Scalea, assistant professor of surgery at UMSOM, and one of the surgeons who performed the transplant at UMMC, said: “There remains a woeful disparity between the number of recipients on the organ transplant waiting list and the total number of transplantable organs. This new technology has the potential to help widen the donor...

Chinese gay dating app, Blued, has stopped registration for new users for a week after underage users contracted HIV from dates set up through the app, according to reporting by Caixin Global. In September, China reported a 14 percent increase in the number of HIV cases in the country, with 40,000 new cases being reported by the second quarter of the year. Blued, the largest networking app for the LGBTQ community, has been cracking down on underage users and is using artificial intelligence to rid the platform of pornography. “Blued always forbids juveniles from logging on and using the app,” Blued said in a statement on its Weibo account. According to Caixin, Blued’s lack of age verification methods made it easy for underage users to create profiles on the app. Blued currently has 40 million users worldwide, and is also the owner of another popular gay dating app, Grindr.