The following is a look back at the things that really stood out in the Iowa innovation community in 2016. To create it, I combed through the past 51 issues of The Pull and grouped the highlights into three pretty handy categories: Acquisitions, Accelerators and Investment. Of course, there were several other items that I wanted to include that didn't fit as neatly into one of the categories so you'll find them at the end in the "The Year in Other Stuff" section.

Putting together a post like this really makes one appreciate how much ground we cover as a community in the course of a year. You're all pretty great. 

We're now four months into doing the monthly Iowa Startup Power Rankings and I'm tweaking things just a bit. Rather than posting towards the end of the month with a floating time frame for recognition, I've decided to push the publish date until after the first of the month. That means that we'll be able to consistently recognize the efforts of the people and companies in our community from the calendar month prior. Also, it means that this post isn't technically late even though today is August 3rd and the post is about July (when all else fails, change the rules).

In March UpCraft Club was part of the Small Business Administration's InnovateHER competition...and we WON! Since that competition, the SBA has been incredibly helpful in connecting us with opportunities to continue moving UpCraft Club forward and a month ago they asked if I'd like to travel to the APEC 'Women and the Economy' forum in Lima, Peru as part of the US State Department delegation. During the forum, Russia held a pitch competition, co-sponsored by the US and Chinese Taipei and UpCraft Club was asked to represent the United States!

Welcome back to the Iowa Startup Power Rankings! We kicked things off with a bang last month as Tourney Machine was a clear number one after their big news of being acquired by Sports Illustrated Play. They are absent from the list this month (sorry folks—an acquisition or IPO means you're ineligible moving forward) and we welcome three new companies to their first ever power rankings.

Welcome to the first ever Iowa Startup Community Power Rankings! The idea is to highlight the most interesting things being done within our statewide community at any given time. The plan is to publish around mid-month and recognize companies for the things they've accomplished in the 30 (or so) days prior.

It’s on me to have a list of most-interesting startups to share and promote and I realized that I’ve never done that publicly. So, I sat down this week and put together my own current top five “most interesting” list.