Dice.com (Urbandale), the nearly 25 year old tech job board powerhouse, held it’s first ever hackathon last weekend at the DMACC/FFA Enrichment Center in Ankeny. #DiceMobileHackathon was aimed at getting applications built that test their new API but that was only a factor in one of the five prize categories. Overall they gave out $10,000 in cash on Sunday afternoon.

This week I was quoted in a national Bloomberg story about the health insurance co-ops created by the Affordable Care Act. Regardless of your thoughts (or my thoughts) on healthcare reform, I think you can appreciate the reasoning for my family deciding to give business to CoOportunity Health.

Last night I had the fun opportunity to help judge the Iowa State Innovation Pitch Competition for the third time. The contest is put on ISU Pappajohn Center and their Entrepreneurship and Learning Community program which is housed at the Delta Upsilon Fraternity house. The students with winning pitches are awarded cash prizes for their efforts courtesy of local sponsors.

Last night was the #iowahour, the unofficial, official gathering of Iowans, former Iowans and those who are Iowa-curious atSXSW. And, it was awesome.

This is my fourth trip to the annual interactive festival that literally takes over all of downtown Austin and I think events like the #iowahour are a great way maintain connections with our extended Iowa tech community.

By my rough count, we've had 40 of these meetups in Des Moines since. We changed venues a few times, attendance dipped and spiked and the other two initial organizers stepped away for various reasons. At the end of last year, I'd run out of energy for the event. It had become a recurring task rather than something that I was looking forward to each month. It wasn't growing and I wasn't interested in figuring out how to change that. I realized that I needed to hand over the reins.

Iowa State University alumnus raises $1.5M for Javelin, Inc.