Riddhiman Das took the golden Analog for Technologist of the Year at the second annual Silicon Prairie Awards.

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 Technologist of the Year finalists

They could be a developer, engineer or programmer on staff, or they could be a freelancer. But a startup’s product wouldn’t have been quite the same without them.

	Adam England, Knoda Has helped create groups within Knoda’s sphere of predictions Nomination: “They have built out an entire tech stack, including iOS, Android and web apps in the last year. Their service never goes down, and he has hired and built a team of developers from scratch. They use cutting-edge technology and move extremely, extremely quickly. We see them updating their apps all the time, and they are always better than the versions before.” Read more: SPN, Twitter, LinkedIn, KCBJ
	Caitlin Bales, Bulu Box Was hired as CTO after less than five months as a developer intern Turned down a job at Microsoft to work at Bulu Box Previously had her own startup, Locabal, in 2013 Nomination: “Since she took over in May, our “Web Team Wish List” task in Asana has been crushed. She’s led two talented Raikes School interns to glory, creating excellent new customer profile surveys, creating a social login and setting up recurring subscriptions for our monthly boxes.” Read more: SPN, Twitter, LinkedIn
	Chris Davis, Travefy Helped create an easy-to-use group travel planning platform. Facilitates dev meetups in Lincoln. Instilled a lean mentality into the entire Travefy team and is always committed to mentorship and team development. Nomination: “Nobody writes cleaner code as fast as he does keeping the customer in mind in ALL he does to facilitate development of a stellar product that is consumer friendly.” Read more: SPN, Twitter, LinkedIn
	Timothy Braun, opendorse The CIO at opendorse is responsible for developing the platform disrupting the athlete endorsement industry. Helped create a white label version for the NFL Players Association Nomination: “His deep data analysis forged a path for opendorse to release their research platform, showing in-depth analytics on the marketing power of 8,000+ professional athletes worldwide.” Read more: SPN, Twitter, LinkedIn
	Zach Hilbert, CouponCloud CouponCloud, a SparkLabKC alum, cuts down on the excess processes within the billion-dollar coupon industry. Zach is the lead behind that tech. Nomination: “Zach is a highly talented full-stack engineer who leads the development at CouponCloud. Their platform had been built from the ground up to process billions of coupon transactions annually in a real-time environment through direct integration with retail point of sale systems. The CouponCloud management platform being used by companies like AWG, P&G, Kraft, Kellogg’s, General Mills and many more, contains full GS1 databar encoding and decoding capabilities which is an industry first for a coupon management software. Zach reverse engineered the entire GS1 from the ground up and built this functionality into the platform in less than a week. He has experience developing complex security systems and applications for the US Marines and Commerce Bank as well as payment platforms for MultiService Corporation.” Read more: SPN, Twitter, LinkedIn