Urban DevelopmentProfile of urban subculture site Platform Network

Damn, Tina Imm's a lucky duck. Entranced by everythinghip-hop growing up, Imm, at 25, is director of operations ofPlatform Network Corp. (www.platform.net), a portal where allwalks of the urban subculture can buy clothes, link to sites likeUrban Latino (www.urbanlatino.com), get ane-mail account, download MP3s and find out who's spinningwhere. With offline properties in the works and a compilation CDdue out this fall, she and creative director Ben White, 30, hopethe Brooklyn, New York, company they started with a sharedPowerBook 540c will surpass MTV in terms of its impact on youthculture.

它是这样的:乡下女孩寻找她的年代pot in theentertainment world "got tired of going to school" atBrown University and moved to Los Angeles a year shy of graduationto work for International Creative Management. (She got her diplomavia mail in 1997.) Imm met White, a composer for commercials and TVseries, and, in 1995, the emerging techies commenced theircollaborative efforts by erecting a Web site for a friend'sL.A. music publication. "We took code from existing Web sites,downloaded it and started teaching ourselves everything," saysImm. Soon, AOL and Capezio were paying them for Web development,but, by 1996, they wanted their own gig.