Des Moines When you're out picking up a copy of this week's Juice in your local central Iowa coffee shop or restaurant, make sure to flip to page 33 to see our latest partnership in ink, literally. We're excited to announce that from this issue forward, we'll be providing a profile of one area entrepreneur to the magazine each month to be published in both their print and online editions (found at dmjuice.com). For those that don't know, Juice is a lifestyle magazine published by the Des Moines Register and distributed at no charge throughout central Iowa in the aforementioned coffee shops… read more

Des Moines Dwolla founder Ben Milne says it like it is: "We're trying to do anything we can to get in front of the Facebook people, Twitter people…we're just trying to get into the rest of the tech world." Just over an hour ago, that "anything" was the posting of a YouTube video titled "Send Money To Sean Parker" (above). If you're unfamiliar with Parker, here's a quick bio: one of the two founders of Napster, founding president… read more

Des Moines Yesterday afternoon, local entrepreneur and startup enthusiast Christian Renaud (left, photo from christianrenaud.com) gathered a group of 20 or so people in the back half of Java Joes coffee house in downtown Des Moines. The focus of the gathering, which I attended, was to explore the need as well as judge the interest level of creating a startup incubator in Des Moines. Today, in a post on his blog, ChristianRenaud.com, he officially announced that he's moving forward with the idea, which he's calling Startup City Des Moines, for several a very personal reasons. "I watch new entrepreneurs struggle with the central Iowa ecosystem… read more

Des Moines If you're following people from the Silicon Prairie on Twitter, you may have a noticed an influx of tweets encouraging a vote for Dwolla for a "Crunchie," the award of an annual competition co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. Now in its fourth year, the Crunchies recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet… read more

Des Moines In preparation for her upcoming trip to the LeWeb conference this week, TechCrunch writer Alexia Tsotsis tried out the service of one of the conference's partners, Planely, a web-based app designed to help you connect with other passengers on your flight. After signing up and entering her flight details, a match was made. She learned that another LeWeb attendee was going to be on the same flight (screenshot above). Tsotsis shared her success story on TechCrunch… read more

Des Moines Yesterday, I published a post covering the latest announcement from SmartyPig: the addition of their SmartyPig Cash Rewards PrePaid MasterCard (left, image from smartypig.com). I neglected to call that out, however, and instead only labeled it a "prepaid MasterCard." (Note: I've updated yesterday's post: "More Options: SmartyPig rolls out prepaid MasterCard.") In the past… read more