3 questions with Sarah Binder, Community Engagement Manager at We Create Here.

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.

Bunchball, like many companies large and small, believes that talented people and rockstar workers are not geographically exclusive. The entire company supports this idea and knows that to find the best talent possible, we had to focus on areas outside of the Valley.

A guest post by Kasey McCurdy, Director of Engineering at Bunchball

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

I typically put together the Welch Avenue Weekly on Monday nights after I comb through content from throughout the last week. Once or twice a story will break on Tuesday morning that needs to be in that week's newsletter forcing me to cut a story that was in the night before. This was one of those weeks with the Banno acquisition announced yesterday. The story that I pushed was a profile of Pear Deck (Iowa City) on SPN and now I'm publishing it here.