50 Cent owns a record label and clothing line, acts and writes books, and now he is adding film production to his multimedia empire — promoting his new venture this week at the Sundance Film Festival.

50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, has launched Cheetah Vision, and he told Reuters at Sundance, the top U.S. independent film festival, that he was not concerned about starting a new business during the global financial crisis.

“I don’t think it will affect me as much as it will the other people that are out there because I’m not afraid to finance some of these things myself if I have to,” he said.

The rapper, who takes his name from a “stickup kid from Brooklyn,” was ranked No. 26 on Forbes 2008 list of top 100 richest celebrities with estimated earnings of about $150 million between June 2007 and June 2008.

50 Cent had a stake in Glaceau, which makes Vitaminwater, and the bulk of his earnings came from the sale of the company to Coca-Cola Co. Forbes estimates the rapper banked about $100 million after taxes from the deal.

He said Cheetah Vision had already bought eight scripts and among the first to be produced would be “The Dance,” starring himself and Nicolas Cage.

“(The script) was previously passed around a little bit but both me and Nicolas Cage had an interest in the film so it will still happen. He plays the founder of a boxing program, and I play a fighter who goes to state prison,” 50 Cent said.

“They are all different types of movies that I bought the rights to, and we’re developing projects. You will see different things from me in the future,” he said.

The rapper, who was a teenage drug dealer in the New York City borough of Queens, also makes his debut as a director this year, giving away his feature film, “Before I Self Destruct,” free with his latest album of the same name, which is due to be released in late March.

“It’s an opportunity to make sure my fans get to see my first piece,” he said of the film, which he also wrote and produced. “It actually allowed me to show cause and effect to some of the actions that I wrote about on the album.”

“Because I have three minutes to create a song its not enough time for me to give an explanation for a person doing these things. It’s just saying the action and not giving a description of the circumstances they are under,” he added.

The film, in which he also stars, tells the tale of an inner city youth whose mother is shot to death so he takes up a life of crime in order to support his younger brother.

While 50 Cent has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide, he also has picked up steady film roles since appearing in 2005’s semi-autobiographical “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” also the title of his 2003 debut album.

Later this year, he will be seen in “Streets of Blood” with Val Kilmer and Sharon Stone, and he is also due to start filming “13″ with Mickey Rourke.

50 Cent, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino all starred in 2008’s “Righteous Kill,” and the rapper said he may work again with Robert De Niro.

Facebook, YouTube, MySpace era. Cyberspace is the place to be, but often not the place to be seen, for student-athletes.

For the past several years on campuses nationwide, coaches and athletic department personnel collectively have cringed at the thought of what can show up in cyberspace on those sites that demonstrates objectionable behavior by student-athletes.

“It is a hot topic in college athletic departments,” said Christine Susemihl, senior associate athletic director at Colorado State. “Even institutions that several years ago were not touching it find they have to. They at least have to have dialogue with their student-athletes.”

The broad question has become, “How to deal with it?”

Administrators at Florida State and Kentucky have issued ultimatums to their athletes to be careful what they post, according to USA Today, and Loyola University Chicago forbids its athletes to belong.

A sampling of Division I schools along the Front Range shows a variety of approaches toward dealing with such sites, though all say it is an issue they are monitoring.

At the University of Colorado, associate athletic director Ceal Barry believes putting the onus on individual sports to nudge their student-athletes toward responsible behavior is the best course.

“I feel like it’s very difficult to legislate,” said Barry, the school’s former women’s basketball coach. “We don’t have a departmentwide policy … what are you going to do, make (offenders) run laps?”

Instead, Barry said, CU’s student handbook features a section outlining guidelines on cyber activities developed by the student-athlete advisory committee. The belief was, “If it came from their peers, it would be more effective.”

In most instances, it has been. But along the way, there have been slip-ups.

Mobile executives at a Silicon Valley roundtable discussion threw down the gauntlet to Symbian, Android and other software platforms to match the impact of the iPhone.

Talking only about two weeks after the introduction of Apple’s iPhone 3G and the App Store, where third-party software for it is offered, heads of some software companies reported huge numbers of downloads and proclaimed a new day on the mobile Internet. The jury is still out on whether the open-source phone platforms coming from Google and the Symbian Foundation will be able to match Apple’s success, according to the panelists at the TechCrunch Mobile Web Wars event in Menlo Park, California, on Friday afternoon.

For example, Pandora Media began offering its Internet radio application for most other mobile platforms, through carriers, about 18 months ago, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad said. That resulted in about 12,000 paid monthly subscriptions to the service, he said.

“In six days, we had 350,000 installs on the iPhone,” Conrad said. A key factor was that the App Store let the company give away its client and support its service through ads. On other devices, Pandora has had to use carriers’ monthly subscription model, he said.

Nearly 1 million Facebook users have downloaded the social-networking company’s application to their iPhones, according to Jed Stremel, director of mobile at Facebook. And Loopt, a location-based social-networking startup, reached 100,000 iPhone downloads only about a week after the App Store opened. The average iPhone user also is 47 times as active on Loopt as those on other types of phones, said Loopt cofounder and CEO Sam Altman.

“You can make such a beautiful app, and it’s so nice to use, so quickly, on the iPhone,” Altman said.