This is the first year Best Creation will be awarded to a Silicon Prairie startup.

It won’t be long until we’re all looking elegant and dapper August 21 at Midland Theatre in Kansas City, celebrating another year of growth and success across the region at the Silicon Prairie Awards.

We’ve seen unique storylines unfold in our three core regions—an influx of code schools in Nebraska, Iowa’s foundational growth of accelerators and spaces for collaboration, and Kansas City’s attraction as a hub for testing out new technologies.

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Everyone plays a part, which brings us here. Before we can celebrate, we need all of you to help us determine which individuals and companies we’ll be crowning. It’s a two-week voting period that ends at 11:59 p.m. on August 11. That means you have loads of time to spread the word.
Cast your vote for the Silicon Prairie Awards!

Join us for the Silicon Prairie Awards: We have an exciting evening of community celebration planned for Aug. 21 at the Midland Theatre in Kansas City. Tickets are still available for the event, which includes an opening reception, keynote talk by N3TWORK co-founder Erik Lammerding, awards ceremony and closing party. Purchase your tickets today.

Meet the five Best Creation finalists

This is the first year we’ll give out this Silicon Prairie award to an incredible project—marketing campaign, physical product, hardware, app, website, anything—that innovates or re-imagines.

	Bawte Bawte allows users to tag purchased items and receive product manuals or service information. (Des Moines) Relaunched in January with a focus on customer service Placed second at SXSW ReleaseIT pitch competition Launched automatic integration with Amazon purchases Accepted into Techstars’ Boulder accelerator Class of 2014 Awarded a $25,000 grant from the Iowa Economic Development Authority’s Proof of Commercial Relevance Fund Read more: SPN, TechCrunch, NBC Chicago
	Blumoo Blumoo is a hardware and software combo that lets your mobile devices control all of your home entertainment equipment from anywhere in the house and adds music-streaming capability to existing home audio equipment. (Kansas City) Exceeded their Indiegogo goal of $30,000 by more than $1,500 Works with all iOS and Android devices App is able to control more than 200,000 devices The parent company, Flyover Innovations, plans to create more products for the connected home Read more: SPN, Huffington Post, TIME magazine, Their list of press
	Ocuvera Ocuvera uses Microsoft Kinect camera technology and pairs it with advanced artificial intelligence to help prevent patient falls in hospitals. (Lincoln) Ocuvera hopes to change the way hospitals and care facilities mitigate costly (in both dollars and in human life) falls by predicting them before they occur Able to monitor patient activity in the room anonymously, consistently, constantly,allowing nurses and doctors to get a complete picture of the patient Built with machine learning capable of predicting a fall and alerting a nurse, giving the nurse time to intervene before a fall happens Nomination: “Ocuvera could vastly improve hospital safety with impressive their monitoring technology.”
	ShotTracker ShotTracker is the first piece of affordable, wearable tech for basketball players who want to improve their shooting, automatically tracking shot attempts, makes and misses. (Overland Park, Kan.) Uses a net sensor, wrist or sleeve sensor and app to compile data about where shots are being taken and whether they go in or not Can compete with others on a team or friends Set daily goals for shots to take Nomination: “This is the coolest technology I’ve seen in a long time, and they are getting tons of interest from basketball players everywhere. If they make it big, and I think they will, Kansas City will have something huge to be extremely proud of.” Read more: SPN, TechCrunch, Fox 4
	Social Media Monitor by Social Assurance Social Assurance is social media management solution for financial services. (Lincoln) Over 1,000 community banks started using the platform overnight to find mentions of their bank, executives and competitors across the web and on social media Social Assurance built a product in partnership with the Independent Community Bankers of America Nomination: “It was built in a very short time by one developer and has led to webinars with more 300 bank exec attendees and high conversion rates to Social Assurance’s more premium products.” Read more: SPN