February 2012

  • Prairie Portrait: Nate Allen of 4 First Names

    Bio: Kansas City native, resident and enthusiast. Hacker, gamer, entrepreneur and philosopher. | Title: Managing Member and Data Viz Guy | Age: 26 | Residence: Mission, Kan. | Twitter: @neight | Linkedin: linkedin.com/pub/nathan-allen | Intro music: “Embody” by SebastiAn | Silicon Prairie News: You recently sold your share of your game development company, Vicinity Games.…

  • Check out the complete State of Entrepreneurship Address (Video)

    As promised last week when we published an initial recap of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s State of Entrepreneurship Address, we now have the full video of the proceedings for your viewing pleasure. At the event, which took place on Thursday in Washington, D.C., Benno Schmidt, the Kauffman Foundation’s interim president and …

  • Bruce Mau, Peter Kageyama to headline YP Summit on Feb. 29

    The 2012 Young Professionals Summit, an event produced by the Greater Omaha Young Professionals, will return this year on Wednesday, Feb. 29 at CenturyLink Center Omaha. Seeking to inspire ideas and creativity, the day-long conference will bring together young professionals interested in contributing to both the business and community dimensions of Omaha. Throughout the day,…

  • PrairieCast: Live at 2 p.m. Tuesday with Chris Snider and Thad Langford

    Tune in Tuesday at 2 p.m. for Episode 74 of PrairieCast streaming live from Des Moines. Guests this week are Chris Snider, a multimedia journalism instructor at Drake University, and Thad Langford, the former president of Zave Networks and current executive in residence at OpenAir Equity Partners. …

  • Events: AIM event featuring Hudl, TechBrew, Startup Spouses and more

    Every Monday, look for our events post to keep you in the loop on the happenings of the week. From meetups and conferences to workshops and pitch sessions, if it’s happening in the Silicon Prairie, you’ll find it here. For more, visit our events page for a calendar of upcoming events from us and others…

  • Sunday Video: Steve Blank on small business versus startup

    Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur turned professor, offers a succinct and excellent answer to the commonly asked question, “What’s a startup?” Presented as a part of Sprikle Labs’s “Now I Know” series, Blank frames his answer around his parent’s entrepreneurial story of opening a grocery story and how a small business differs from a startup,…

  • Turn your socializing into networking

    (This is a guest post by Jeff Beals.) Three-quarters of all jobs are never advertised! They are part of the “hidden job market,” and they go to people who are promoted from within, know the right persons or have jobs specially created for their unique skills. In order to get one of these hidden jobs,…

  • Weekly Startup Links: ‘Eric Ries explains the 5 whys’ and more

    Every day I comb through my Google Reader reading sites like Hacker News and others, and star articles that are especially interesting about startups, entrepreneurship and miscellany.

  • Dwolla’s Series B: Three things it means for Des Moines (Part 2)

    On Thursday, I offered three reasons why I believe Dwolla chose Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures to lead its Series B round, which was announced on Tuesday. In this post, I look at how the Des Moines startup community could be affected by Dwolla’s milestone. 1. They’ll continue to ‘Dwolla in DSM’ Dwolla co-founder Ben…

  • Not a techie? Not a problem. Finding the ‘write’ fit at the Startup Job Crawl

    (This is a guest post by Riane Menardi.) In early November, I had no idea that the Midwest had a startup presence — heck, I think I had to look up what exactly a “startup” was after I saw a tweet about the Startup Job Crawl. I was clueless, but intrigued about this four-hour, tech-industry…