We're thrilled to see Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People in Business" list released on Monday. This year's list features four faces familiar to the Silicon Prairie community as introduced to us through Big Omaha and Thinc Iowa over the last year. … read more

Omaha Brian Wong, the founder of mobile rewards network kiip, pulled from his personal and professional experience as an entrepreneur to convince the Big Omaha 2012 audience that people can create their own luck. "I'm here to say that you can control it," Wong said Friday. "And I'm going give you 10 steps to do that that's based on sort of the last few years of sort of trial and error – a lot of error – but I hope … read more

Omaha Charles Best created DonorsChoose to make it easy for anyone to help students in need. Last week, the crew from What Cheer made it a little easier Best spoke Friday morning at Big Omaha about DonorsChoose, the website he founded that allows public school teachers to post classroom project requests and, in turn, lets donors pick specific projects they want to support. When Best mentioned the DonorsChoose API during his talk, it captured the imagination of … read more

Omaha From Big Omaha 2012 opening to closing party, morning to afternoon speaker and serious to silly photo booth pose, here's the round-up of the thousands of photos snapped by our stills and motion content partner, Malone & Company of Omaha. You've already been seeing Malone's work featured in our Big Omaha coverage, and in the next couple of months, you'll see their one-on-one video interviews … read more

Omaha Back by a combination of popular demand and this editor being a glutton for awkwardly asking, "Can I, um, take a picture of your T-shirt?" (OK, mostly the latter), it's another edition of the Silicon Prairie Startup Swag Roundup®. Last May at Big Omaha, the first installment of The Roundup left you wanting more. In October, we delivered with the sequel from Thinc Iowa. Today, we make it a startup tee trilogy. And, like the protagonist of another epic three-part series … read more

Omaha Ben Lerer once had his sights set on the grand finale, the part in which he thought his company would receive enough money to "crash planes into boats, or other awesome stuff like that." But over time, he learned that what's more important than the destination is the daily work, the entrepreneurial journey on the way to the destination. With that in mind, at Big Omaha 2012 Lerer shared his story of personal growth that coincided with the growth … read more

Omaha Let's get this out of the way. Big Omaha isn't just a conference. It's much more. Big Omaha is a family. This is not hyperbole. "Who makes you better?" This is the question I posed to attendees as we kicked off an amazing two days of speakers, best practices, laughs, tears, hugs, high-fives, shoulder shakes, relationship building and more. To answer this question all we had to do was look around … read more

Omaha In what has become somewhat of a post-Big Omaha ritual, I'm camped out in the back of a local coffee house attempting to start processing what has taken place over the last week. I know much has already been said and shared, and it will take me a few more days (and coffees) to fully and truly comprehend everything that took place, but I wanted to write down a few of my initial thoughts, reflecting on the experience and giving recognition … read more