Silicon Prairie News

SUBScRIBE

MENU

RAYGUN

  • An excerpt from RAYGUN’s “The Midwest: God’s Gift to Planet Earth”

    Reports of our economic demise have been greatly exaggerated | History can be a crafty fox. It’s misleading because it likes phases and doesn’t often spend time looking back at how silly its old hairstyles once were. In the 1970s, history was wearing bell-bottoms and snorting coke at Studio 54. It opted for hammer pants…

  • Prairie Moves: The World Tri, Proxibid, Medizzle and more

    (Photo by hennasabel via Flickr) The goal of Prairie Moves is to keep our readers informed about career moves, press coverage, and product development from the companies and individuals we cover on Silicon Prairie News. If you or your company would like to submit one of the items below for our next Prairie Moves post,…

  • TEDxDesMoines videos online

    Highlights from last month’s inaugural TEDxDesMoines event are available online. TEDx is a local series of talks that mirrors the format and branding of the larger TED event in California. TEDx events are held across the globe and Des Moines’ iteration took place on May 16 at the State of Iowa Historical Building. Mike Draper…

  • Name changes: SMASH becomes RAYGUN, 8/7 Central

    Last Friday, Des Moines’ creative class success story, SMASH, announced that they were changing names and dividing their clothing store from the web design and screen printing business. The store is now RAYGUN (Twitter: RAYGUNshirts) and the custom design business is now 8/7 Central (Twitter: 87Central) Mike Draper, founder of the two businesses, answered a few…

  • Highlight Midwest keynote anecdotes: Mike Draper

    The 2009 edition of Highlight Midwest ended with a set of keynote presentations from leaders of innovative companies in each of the event’s three core cities: Kansas City, Des Moines and Omaha. These keynotes were my “highlight” of the day and I found them to be informational, identifiable, and even inspiring. I’ve pulled anecdotes from each…

  • Great mentions of Des Moines in today’s media

    While attending Highlight Midwest last Friday, I had the chance to view a few rooms of the Des Moines Social Club, the venue for the event, but I didn’t hear too much about the organization itself. I’m glad I saw a tweet of theirs earlier today: “Listen in NOW. Zachary Mannheimer and Matthew Mciver were…

  • SPN interviews Mike Draper of SMASH

    It took moving out east for Mike Draper to realize the benefits of the local business climate for entrepreneurs in Des Moines. Mike’s endeavor, SMASH, is part retail T-shirt merchandiser, part screen printer and part web designer. Mike came back to Des Moines and opened the doors at SMASH in 2005. He’s grown his operation…