Lincoln (Left: Undergraduate division winners Alex DeBrie and Mike Ritner of Kid Safe-D Net) This past Friday night, University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) students brought their ideas out in force, from an engineering firm to a software as a service (SaaS) startup monitoring and limiting children's internet access. In all, nine students representing eight teams… read more

Des Moines Last night, what must have been an over-capacity crowd – more than 100 attendees – turned out for the latest Dwolla Meetup at Mars Cafe in Des Moines. Similar to their past meetups, this one featured free T-shirts and discussion about the payment transfer platform. Unlike other meetups, this one was also a launch event for Dwolla's service across the U.S. (previously, it was only available to residents of Iowa and California) as well as the debut… read more

Des Moines Tickets are still available for BarCamp Des Moines 2010. Tickets will remain on sale at barcampdsm.com through Friday of this week, but only those purchased by 5 p.m. today will be guaranteed a T-shirt. BarCamp kicks off with an opening party at 7:30 p.m. this Friday night at the Des Moines Social Club (1408 Locust St). Doors open to the main event, taking place at the Des Moines Central… read more

Omaha With this Wednesday's Dwolla Meetup on the horizon, an event which promises to deliver "a few huge announcements," we thought it timely to release Ben Milne's five-minute presentation from Cornstalks this past September. Milne is the founder of Dwolla and the event, Cornstalks, is a monthly gathering for high-growth entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs hosted by the Greater Omaha Chamber… read more

Omaha Following the conclusion of last Friday's Invest Nebraska East-2-West New Venture Competition at the Old Mattress Factory, I spoke with the winner of the event, Scott Kleeb of Energy Pioneer Solutions. I asked him about the backstory of his new endeavor (if Kleeb's name rings a bell, it's because he's ran for public office twice in the last four years, most recently in 2008 for one of Nebraska's two… read more

Omaha As I wrote in a post earlier today, BarCamp Omaha 2010 was an exclamation point to a great week on the Silicon Prairie. After startup funding and acquisition news this past week, we inside the Silicon Prairie News office were riding a high, and Dusty Davidson, co-founder of Silicon Prairie News was hustling like the rest of BarCamp Omaha team… read more

Omaha BarCamp Omaha opened things up last night with a party at the same venue the un-conference is being held at today, Nomad Lounge (1013 Jones Street) in Omaha's Old Market district. Local mobile app developer Andy Peters, co-founder of Ninth Division, doubled as a professional photographer last night and took some great party shots. Below are a few and then head on over to his Flickr account… read more

Omaha BarCamp Omaha kicked off this morning around 9 p.m. as just about 200 gathered at Nomad Lounge (1013 Jones Street) in Omaha's Old Market district. From 9 to 10, attendees enjoyed some hot drinks, donuts, muffins and more while those who felt compelled to give a talk wrote the title of their talk on a sticky note and stuck it to the "schedule board." read more