Marketers know that it is smart to target US Hispanics. The nation’s fastest-growing minority group, Hispanics wielded over $1.02 trillion dollars in purchasing power in 2010, and will spend $1.48 trillion in 2015, according to data from the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business.

Until recently, I was living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a war ravaged country among the poorest in the world. Just around the time when iPhones and apps were becoming fashionable among the tech-savvy, I was experiencing life stripped of all luxuries: I bathed with a bucket of water and spent my evenings reading by flashlight. The idea that mobile apps could ever benefit the millions of poor Congolese, many of whom lack electricity and are illiterate, seemed very far-fetched.

There's a powerful black digital and social networking world going on and many marketers and digital gurus don't have a clue. The value that most of these black platforms and social networking groups provide is a comfort level not experienced in some commercial mainstream platforms. They tend to deliver a FUBU affect (For Us By Us) in that visitors feel safe to be "real", and have a closed conversation.

The story I’ve been telling so far is one where minorities either trail (or are at parity with) whites, but the story is much different when we look at the use of mobile technologies—especially mobile phones. Both blacks and English-speaking Latinos are more likely to own a mobile phone than whites. Foreign-born Latinos trail their Native-born counterparts in cell phone ownership, but this gap is significantly smaller than the gap in internet use between these groups.

Earlier this year I wrote about how language barriers are creating a new digital health divide and I suggested that the single biggest barrier to successfully connecting patients online internationally is language. On the one hand, the Internet has broken down many boundaries and has changed the geography of healthcare, uniting patients and healthcare stakeholders all over the world so that people are not constrained by information available in their own country alone.