Omaha (Left, Jimmy Winter at SXSW Music 2010 with celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton. Photo courtesy of Winter.) With South by Southwest Interactive fast approaching, Rockdex co-founder Jimmy Winter gave me insight into what to keep an eye out for when he and his team land in Austin, Texas in the coming week. For RockDex, a web-based application providing the music industry with social… read more

Des Moines The new platform Dwolla CEO Ben Milne hinted as revolutionary last week in our preview post was announced today as "Dwolla Spots" and will be rolled out in the the next version of their iPhone app later this month. As the screenshot shows on the left (courtesy of Dwolla), Spots will implement geolocation services to let users find locations around them accepting Dwolla, and then once the transaction has been made users will be able to share it on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, bringing a more social experience to the way in which consumers spend money. One way to think about it is through a comparison with foursquare – while you check-in to venues after arriving there, you'd now "check-in" to a location after you've… read more

Kansas City (Chris Routh and Ben Tyson of Five and Fifty presenting at LAUNCH Conference on February 23rd. Photo by Ken Yeung via Flickr.) There’s a new deal in town and it’s called Five and Fifty, a Kansas City startup that provides businesses a quick and easy way to create a minimum 50% off deal that last for five hours. People in the local area receive the deal through text message, making it different from Groupon. “Five and Fifty is the first real-time…  read more

Kansas City (Left, Bo Fishback presents Zaarly at Startup Weekend Los Angeles. Photo by Jim Alden via flickr.com/techfrog.) Over the course of three weeks, Zaarly will go from building a prototype and pitching Hollywood celebrity and startup investor Ashton Kutcher to aggresively launching at the tech industry's largest conference, South by Southwest Interactive. If their quick turnaround isn't turning heads by itself, the team is confident it's product will do… read more