Silicon Prairie News Awards 3 KC Startups with Golden Analog

Throw together 400+ entrepreneurial enthusiasts, 48 incredible startup nominees and one giant golden prairie dog and what do you get?  The Silicon Prairie Awards.

Last night, the first annual Silicon Prairie Awards honored those startups and Silicon Prairie members who have greatly impacted our Midwest community in a positive way.  With awards ranging from Mobile App of the Year, Startup Service Provider of the Year and the greatly-anticipated Startup of the Year, 12 lucky and talented nominees from Omaha, Kansas City and Des Moines walked away with a golden analog, appropriately shaped as SPN's mascot, a prairie dog.

I was lucky enough to trek across the heartland with two partners from Think Big to partake in the Silicon Prairie Awards.  And after we climbed the stairs of the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, glided across the orange carpet, got "paparazzied" by a SPN photographer and interviewed with the "Joan Rivers" of the event (Michael Stacy), we finally arrived at the Silicon Prairie Awards.

One thing is for sure--there was a lot of entrepreneurial energy in the room.  Lawyers were chatting with startups, sponsors were clinking glasses with executives and even David Cohen, CEO of TechStars, was making his way through the crowd.  It took everything in SPN's power to actually stop people from networking to sit down for the awards ceremony--obviously, we have a lot to talk about!

The awards ceremony was equally as impressive.  It was all smooth sailing for the SPN team as awards were given to startups, entrepreneurs and service providers from across the Silicon Prairie (namely Kansas City, Omaha and Des Moines).  Kansas City alone had 17 nominees, three of which went home with a golden analog.  Those teams and individuals awarded were Front Flip (Mobile App of the Year), Jake Johnson of Divshot (Startup Designer of the Year) and Greg Kratofil (Startup Service Provider of the Year).  The cities of Omaha and Lincoln seemed to walk away with the most analogs, five in total, and Des Moines claimed four (three of which were awarded to Dwolla!).  Don't worry Silicon Prairie, we love a little healthy competition!

After the awards ceremony, guests were invited to an after party in the Joslyn lobby which was sponsored by Lincoln startup Hudl.  Guests had the chance to walk down Startup Alley, a showcase of nine Silicon Prairie startups including eCreamery, MindMixer, Goodsmiths, Vestn, RAZ Mobile, Stackify, RareWire, Obsessive Software and Bulu Box.

Think Big would like to congratulate all winners and nominees at the 2012 Silicon Prairie Awards.  And another big congratulations to Silicon Prairie News for pulling off an event for anyone passionate about startups in the Midwest area!

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Kansas City Big Thinker Profile: Michael Bleigh

 Netflix lovers rejoice, there is now an easier way to soak up the freshest content and you have Michael Bleigh to thank. Created by the Olathe, KS native, Hack the Midwest winner Qup (pronounced queue-up), allows Netflix addicts to receive email notifications when new titles are added. Like all great things, Qup was born out of necessity. An admitted Netflix addict and overall movie fanatic, Michael created Qup because he got tired of the old way he was doing things. What was he doing you ask? The old way was to use Google reader to receive Netflix’s RSS feed via mobile device. Then from those, if he’d like to add something to his queue he’d have to login to Netflix’s non-mobile friendly U/I. He wanted to create a way to be able add something to his queue with one click. Once Qup is paired with a Netflix account, this becomes a reality.

However Qup isn’t the only project in Michael's queue. As a Partner at Intridea, Michael is also an avid competitor in hackathons. He competes because he has a lot of ideas and feels that the time crunch based format gives him a chance to really try something out and see if it has legs. One of the ideas that grew legs is Divshot, created at Startup Weekend along with his brother Nathan Bleigh and designer Jake Johnson, whom they met at the competition. Though they did not win Startup weekend, they did build a great foundation for Divshot, and were recently selected as a finalist for the upcoming Crowdstart LA Competition.

*Editors Update: Divshot was just announced as the first place winner of Crowdstart LA taking home $25k. We here at Think Big would Like to congratulate Michael and the rest of the Divshot team. More info available here via Silicon Prairie News."

Divshot is a rapid prototyping tool for web apps, a drag and drop editor similar to a balsamic or mock up tool, but different in that it exports valid semantic html & CSS which can then be taken and used a basis for web apps. It leverages Twitter Bootstrap to provide a pallet of tools to build an interface. Its ultimate goal is to become the interface builder for the web. It is designed with a vision to be a tool that developers wouldn’t turn their nose up at. As a developer he feels there has never been a tool that truly outputs data in this way. As he simple puts it “(he) wanted to see if it were possible to create something that would export the same kind of markup if he were to code it by hand”.

How he Thinks Big:  by taking something that is a little bit annoying to a lot of people and making it easy. For example it may take 30sec to a minute to do all the click throughs from an RSS feed to add something in Netflix. Which probably takes 5-6 minutes a week, but that’s 5-6 minutes a week of wasting time on something that is annoying. If it is possible to spend a day creating something that solves that. Then he views that a win.