Kansas City As the momentum of Kansas City's entrepreneurial ecosystem continues to grow and success stories are built, the sustainability of a thriving Silicon Prairie will depend on the quantity and quality of the talent pipeline feeding startups. Developing relationships between the local startup scene and the next generation of talent is a critical piece to our future. A student group tour of Kansas City Startup Village last week opened the door to a new awareness. … read more

With more than 1,300 posts published in 2012, it wasn't easy to choose just 10 stories for our annual look at the past year's biggest stories in the Silicon Prairie. When doing so, I kept coming across stories that even though they didn't belong on the list, they deserved to be shared. From a Microsoft acquisition to a "Silicon Prairie" mention on "The Office," here are 12 stories from 2012 that are worth reading again. … read more

Eyes were on the Silicon Prairie in 2012 as the startup community in and around Kansas City, Omaha and Des Moines earned attention from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and other outlets. Startups like Dwolla, MindMixer and Hudl were mentioned in many of those stories, as their milestones have earned them a place in the public eye. But who will be the Silicon Prairie startups in those same stories in 2013? For the second year …  read more

Des Moines The Dec. 20 issue of The New Republic magazine includes an article — published online as "Silicon Valley’s Profit-Killing Provincialism" and in print as "No Angels" — by Lydia DePillis on the trials of raising capital outside Silicon Valley. The story includes insights from John Schnipkoweit, founder of Cedar Rapids-based RecBob, and John Jackovin, founder of Des Moines-based Bawte … read more

An Omaha startup signed a TV deal, a Columbia, Mo. startup went from Startup Weekend to Y Combinator in eight months and a Kansas City entrepreneur who sold his company for more than $125 million last year returned to found another startup and fund others. These are three of my picks for the year's 10 biggest stories, which are stories that received our … read more

Kansas City Over the four years that I've written for Silicon Prairie News, I haven't seen an article on Omaha, Des Moines and Kansas City's startup scene receive as much buzz and attention as the recent New York Times story, "Tech Start-Ups Find a Home on the Prairie." Tweet after tweet, Facebook like after Facebook like and email after email, readers shared the story far and wide. On Nov. 21, the day The Times published the piece online, it made … read more