Ames Within four days, Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend saw their latest iPad game downloaded 200,000 times. Then they were forced to give up their homes. Boxleiter and Wohlwend form Ames-based Mikengreg Games Company. They put two years into the development of Gasketball, and even though the game has found popular success — it was in the top five free iPad games for the better part of a week, and has been downloaded around 450,000 times since its release on Aug. 9 — that hasn't translated to financial security for the developers. The Penny Arcade ….  read more

Ames Shoplr doesn't care what you like, whether that means a casual affection or the click of a button. Shoplr cares about what you love. "What was truly in our hearts and minds from the beginning has come out," said Sam Schill, one of three co-founders of the Ames-based company. Shoplr (think shopping and Doppler) hopes to cut through the clutter of old and … read more

Ames Historically, if farmers wanted to check their crops for insects or disease, it was a tedious, inaccurate process. They would carry a couple of guidebooks, hundreds of pages each, to try and identify what they saw, recording observations with handwritten notes and sketches of the field. After completing a crop scouting internship in rural Iowa, Michael Koenig (left) decided to change that. "Crop scouting is kind of cumbersome, and just not fun," Koenig said, "we wanted to make the process a little easier to manage." ScoutPro … read more

Ames After recieving $100,000 from the Iowa Economic Development Authority one week and closing a $17 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz the next, California-based ag-tech startup Solum is planning to build a laboratory in Ames and staff it with local talent. Solum develops technologies for field sampling and analysis that aim to help farmers increase their yields. "We believe … read more