More exciting news for us here at Silicon Prairie News as we round out the year and prepare for 2011. We're expanding our team of writers by four, bringing the team to 10 and upping our presence to five cities across the Silicon Prairie – from East to West, we now have writers in Cedar Falls and Des Moines, Iowa, Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. With the exception of Steven Adams, a recent college graduate, each of our new writers is deeply involved in the Silicon Prairie community. And Adams is on his way as he began writing for us this past September. read more

Omaha At last Thursday's "Pandora Listener Town Hall" in Omaha, an attendee raised his hand and asked Pandora founder Tim Westergren if his service had any future plans to open up their API (application programming interface) to allow developers to build web apps on top of Pandora and user data. The attendee, Omaha developer Gabe Kangas (left, photo from gabekangas.com), said that in Pandora's… read more

Omaha Meeting the needs of the nation's technology and engineering firms, the University of Nebraska's Peter Kiewit Institute (PKI) couples practical challenge and entrepreneurial excitement to mold students into the business leaders of tomorrow. In doing so, entrepreneur-driven students enrolled in one of the… read more

Lincoln Lincolnite Tim Siedell, a.k.a. @badbanana on Twitter, has yet to ink a television deal to turn his tweets into a script for William Shatner (see: "$h*! My Dad Says"). Soon enough, however, his tweets will be appearing in ink with the release of his first book, "Marching Bands Are Just Homeless Orchestras, Half-Empty Thoughts, Volume 1." "I've been approached by a lot of different people about a book, but none of the ideas felt quite right," Siedell wrote in an email interview. "I wanted something that would appeal to my fans, who may have read some of these quips when I first posted them on Twitter. But I also wanted something that would appeal to someone who would never in a million years go to the site." After a short introduction by Siedell, the book, 80 pages in all, is essentially a hand-picked collection… read more

Omaha There's been a change in roles amongst Hayneedle leadership. According to a press release published today, Doug Nielsen (left), chairman, and Carter Cast (right), president and CEO, will exchange their executive management roles. Nielsen, a co-founder of Hayneedle, will… read more

Omaha As seen on TechCrunch today – Delivering Happiness: The Rap Video – we're excited to share the video produced by the Delivering Happiness Bus Team documenting the first stage of their bus trip across America promoting Tony Hsieh's book, "Delivering Happiness." Their stop in Omaha was a lot of fun and we really enjoyed… read more

For the first time since South by Southwest Interactive this past March, Jeff, Dusty and I are all out of town for a few days. And literally, we'll all be on the road again. (Quick story: We flew to Austin for SXSW last year, but due to a missed connection in Dallas, we rented a van and drove the last leg of the trip. In the photo is Silicon Prairie News and…  read more

A huge congratulations to John T. Meyer of 9 Clouds (and a Silicon Prairie News contributor!) and Adam Coomes and Justin Graves of Infegy for making BusinessWeek's… read more