17 Year Old Working On Flu Drugs, Wins Google Science Fair

The Google Science Fair is an international contest open to students world wide to show off their scientific research, experiments and projects. At SXSWedu earlier this year, Google’s Cristin Frodella explained how and why the Google Science Fair works.

The contest brings the best and brightest of young scientists and innovators to Google’s Mountain View Campus to learn from top caliber scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. The students selected for the trip to Google, get to see some of the biggest tech firms up close and personal. Last year they took a trip out to the Tesla plant.

The Google Science Fair sees students that are trying to solve worldwide problems with their technology. Everything from finding a better way to filter water in rural countries, to ways to keep vacinnations at the right temperature, to flu drugs are the kinds of things that these young scientists are working on.

Google had it’s closing ceremony in Mountain View on Monday evening. It was there that each age group winner was announced. Those winners get a $25,000 scholarship and of course bragging rights to say they had won that amazing contest.

The winner overall was 17 year old Eric Chen. He’s working on new drugs to fight the deadly Flu infection.

Business Insider reported that other age group winners included: 16 year old Ann Makosinski, who’s developed a flashlight that runs on body heat and 15 year old Vinay Kumar. Kumar has developed an application that makes it easier for ambulances and police to get through traffic.’

While the winners above all received the $25,000 scholarships, the other startups that participated in the “finals” received a Google Chromebook, a tablet, Lego Mindstorm kits and National Geographic and Scientific American subscriptions.

Business Insider has all of the Google Science Fair finalists here.

Techstars & Sprint Announce Sprint Mobile Health Accelerator

Techstars, one of the most recognized accelerators in the world, is expanding its US footprint into the already lively Kansas City startup community. Earlier this year Techstars co-founder and Foundry Group founder Brad Feld bought a house in Kansas City to house a startup to work on their company, utilizing KC’s 1gb ethernet. Kansas City was the second city in the country, behind Chattanooga, to offer 1gb ethernet to residences and businesses.

But it wasn’t Kansas City’s Google Fiber that attracted Techstars to the region. They’ve partnered with Kansas City’s biggest tech company, Sprint, the third largest wireless carrier in the country. Sprint has always been a friend to innovation. They were the first wireless carrier to hold an annual developer summit for developers to collaborate, and learn about developing on Sprint’s wide range of services.

Sprint and Techstars are centering this accelerator around the growing mobile health segment. Monitoring devices, e-prescriptions, mobile EDR’s and other health based mobile technology startups will work in the three month Techstars-modeled accelerator format at the new accelerator.

“We have been watching Kansas City from afar, seeing it come together, and now we’re excited to join the community and help it grow. It’s great to see Sprint giving first through their tremendous network of resources and executive knowledge. It makes all the difference for the companies we fund through the program,” Techstars co-founder David Cohen said on the official Techstars blog.

Kevin McGinnis, Sprint’s Vice President of Development, will help oversee the program which is taking applications now through December 6th. Startups that are selected will be notified in early January 2014 and the first session will kick off in March.

“Kansas City increasingly is gaining recognition on the national level as an emerging entrepreneurial technology center,” McGinnis told Cohen. “Sprint has been expanding its work with startups and other ventures that are developing intriguing innovations. The Sprint Accelerator will act as a catalyst for growth in this market.”

You can apply here.

Bonfyre Is Back As The Official App For Everywhere Else Conference, And We’ve Got Two Tickets To SXSWi To Give Away

Bonfyre, is back as the official app for the Everywhere Else Conference. Everywhere Else Cincinnati kicks off Sunday night with a welcome party open to the public.

St. Louis startup Bonfyre is a social engagement app that allows you to share thoughts, updates, information, and photos across a closed social network and then outward to your normal social channels including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

At Everywhere Else Memphis last February we used Bonfyre, and the attendees of the conference stayed in the Bonfyre and kept interacting well into the summer.

Bonfyre will allow entrepreneurs, startup founders, investors, panelists, and startup support to keep up with all the conference go-ers in the event’s own channel. In addition to Everywhere Else, Bonfyre was also been the official app for last year’s PowderKeg conference, OneSpark in Florida, and even for St. Louis Rams games.

Bonfyre keeps things going in an easy-to-understand and engaging platform. For Everywhere Else Cincinnati we’ll have two different Bonfyre’s. O will be limited to information about the conference, scheduling, maps, and important information from the conference staff. The other will be the Bonfyre the entire group will use. That’s where the fun begins.

Bonfyre and Nibletz have teamed up to give away a pair of SXSWi 2014 passes (passes only) for March 2014. The interactive passes will give you access to the entire interactive conference tract at SXSWi and many of the awesome parties. The passes have a value of over $1400! We will be looking for the most engaged and interactive Bonfyre user throughout the course of the conference.

So go download Bonfyre in the iTunes app store or the Google Play Store and then scan the QR Codes below to get into the Bonfyre’s. We’ll see you this weekend.

Use this QR code to get into the Info Bonfyre for Everywhere Else Cincinnati:

Use this QR code to get into the Engage Bonfyre for Everywhere Else Cincinnati:

Indian Startup Price-Hunt Is Helping Indian Consumers Shop The Best Price

A new Indian startup called Price-Hunt is hoping to become the go-to destination for Indian consumers to find the best price on products. Once most consumers have found the product they are looking for, the next thing they do is shop by price. Obviously if you’re comparing apples to apples, like for instance a specific laptop model by a specific manufacturer, the final decision is going to be price.

Price-Hunt offers price based search results on anything from consumer electronics to the latest fashions.

“But search at price-hunt.com is not limited by categories and one can find anything here that is available at online stores. Its main aim is to make Indian consumers aware of price variation for products in India and make it possible for him/her to save money through price comparison,” Anupam Khurana, the startup,s co-founder told us an in interview.

Check out the rest of the interview below.

What is your startup called?

Price-Hunt

What does your company do?

Price-Hunt.com is a real time price search engine which searches and delivers the best prices across various online stores in India. Price-Hunt showcases wide product range from various categories like Consumer Electronic goods, Mobiles, Digital cameras, LCD TVs, home appliances, clothing and apparels, shoes, watches, jewellery and much more. But search at price-hunt.com is not limited by categories and one can find anything here that is available at online stores. Its main aim is to make Indian Consumers aware of price variation for products in India and make it possible for him/her to save money through price comparison.

Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds

Price-Hunt.com is founded by Anupam Khurana and Palka Khurana.

Anupam Khurana is B.E. (Mechanical) from Delhi College of Engineering with 10 years experience in software and business development.

Palka Khurana is B.E.(Instrumentation) from Delhi Institute of technology with 8 years experience in Marketing and sales management.

Where are you based?

We are based in Gurgaon (Haryana), India.

What’s the startup scene like where you are based?

Our target consumer is online shoppers of all age groups. With online shopping gaining popularity day by day, Price-Hunt was launched with a vision to simplify and enhance online shopping. It revolves about the idea of presenting a one stop search for all online shopping. We We hope to meet our goals and targets soon.

What problem do you solve?

Price-Hunt.com is an online price search engine with real time search as a distinguishing feature. Price search is not limited to any product and current coverage is stores in India. Price-Hunt.com also features current deals and offers for a single click experience. It will change the way people buy products online. One will not have to go to and store individually to check prices and buy products. the one point access to all shopping needs online will be price-hunt.com.

Why now?

Online shopping is gaining momentum and has bright future prospects with an increasing number of people opting to do shopping from the convenience of their home or office. Once keen to shop online, the traditional way is to browse each of the various online stores and order the product from the stores offering the best price (of course with a name and reputation for being good). This takes a lot of time defeating the purpose of time saving in online shopping and one still might miss a store offering a better price and end up buying the product at a higher price. Thus we came up with an idea of providing one click search for all stores so that the shopper finds the best price/deal immediately comparing offerings from the different stores for the product searched. This led us to the idea to develop price-hunt.

What are some of the milestones your startup has already reached?

The company uses generic search engine route to get visitors to the site. We also use social media to provide personalized deals to consumers. Price-hunt.com has an average visitor count of about 900 and we are building up on that. We have just started and will go a long way.

What are your next milestones?

Mobile version of the site is under development. It will be an adaptation of the desktop version to the mobile with reduced features. We also plan an andriod application for the mobile users in very near future. We also plan to launch the Android application of the site very soon.

Where can people find out more? Any social media links you want to share?

https://www.facebook.com/PriceHuntIndia

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/price-hunt

http://www.linkedin.com/company/price-hunt-com

Silicon Prairie Startup Flywheel Launches, Words Press Hosting Re-Designed

Often times when we talk about our friends at Silicon Prairie News we talk about our friend Jeff Slobotski, as the “Chief Community Builder” Slobotski is often times the face of SPN. His co-founder, equally as vested in the Silicon Prairie region, Dusty Davidson, is often times very busy building something. Well after six months in beta his latest “something” is now launching, and it’s a relief to many designers reliant on the WordPress platform.

Davidson along with partners Rick Knudtson and Tony Noecker have launched “FlyWheel”. The team, which Davidson calls a “…dream team of founders” has launched a “premium” WordPress hosting platform built for designers. “We’re re-imagining what it means for designers to host and launch sites on WordPress, and for them to collaborate with customers and other designers and developers. ” Davidson told us an in email.

One of the things that sets FlyWheel apart from other hosting platforms is that they strictly WordPress. “All we do is WordPress, our servers are tunes specifically for WordPress, ultrasecure and have top performance” Davidson said in a statement. That makes “light speed’ normal speed for designers that use FlyWheel for their sites.

FlyWheel allows design firms to launch demo sites for free and then easily transfer files to a client site to “go live”, a feature which Elevate’s Jake Stutzman, finds particularly useful. FlyWheel will allow a webspace for actual collaboration rather than having to send stills back and forth through collaboration platforms like BaseCamp.

To that end, FlyWheel has made it very easy for a designer to grant access to their site without having to send usernames and passwords back and forth through email, which may open up a client to a designers entire portfolio.

FlyWheel also caters to designers by cutting out a lot of the technical jargon found with hosting companies. Even with a technical background Knudston told Silicon Prairie News “I joke … what are acronyms like CGI? Or what version of PHP is it running? Or things like SSH access,” which is one of the reasons he came up with the idea for FlyWheel.

“The problem that we’re trying to solve is specific to web designers and agencies who manage large numbers of sites,” Davidson said. “Somebody like (Omaha design firm) Grain & Mortar will design 30 WordPress sites a year, and they need to manage those … they have to log into 30 different hosting accounts, or they have to remember passwords and user names or they have to do things that make managing that many sites and launching sites in that manner very difficult for them.”

FlyWheel also features an integrated management tool that allows design agencies to quickly get an overview of all of their WordPress projects and quickly login to a clients site, share credentials with a client or even bill a client for their FlyWheel hosting.

You can check out FlyWheel now at getflywheel.com

Cyanogen’s Startup Was Cyanogen, Closes $7 Million Series A Round

Cyanogenmod, Seattle Startup, Series A, Venture Capital, Steve Kondik

(img: Technobuffalo.com)

Back in May we ran a story on Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik, the Android developer behind the Cyanogen Mod operating system that runs, and improves, the Android operating system. The popular “rom” has millions of users who root their Android device to run the open sourced software.

After creating the initial Cyanogenmod, the project became a community effort with several developers working on future releases of the firmware that when installed, allows users to take advantage of many of the benefits Google has in the Android Operating system.

Android’s biggest manufacturer, Samsung, took notice of Kondik and his work with Cyanogenmod. Kondik moved from his Pittsburgh roots to Seattle to work on Samsung’s Android team.

Kondik posted a note on his Facebook page looking for developers in the Seattle area. We reached out to Kondik at the time, and told us he was working on a startup but couldn’t tell us what it was. Knowing that Cyanogen is the most popular “Rom” for Android, we were quite curious as to what could be so interesting that Kondik would quit that job at Samsung and get his feet wet in the startup world.

It was revealed last week that Kondik had teamed up with Kirt McMaster,a cofounder of Boost Mobile, to turn Cyanogenmod from a community based effort, happening in garages and basements across the globe, to an actual company where they could push out the latest features faster.

Kondik wrote on the company blog that McMaster had contacted him by email last year and they were able to secure venture capital meetings in December. Those meetings led to a $7 million dollar series A round led by Benchmark with RedPoint ventures also participating. A confidential source told us by phone that CyanogenMod had turned down other investors including Google Ventures.

Kondik is adamant that the community know that Cyanogenmod won’t fundamentally change, but rather get better. Now they won’t have to worry about raising money from the community for new servers or having to use day jobs to support their development.

With the $7 million dollars, CyanogenMod became CyanogenMod Inc. They also opened up offices in Seattle and Palo Alto. Kondik was also able to bring three long time members of the Cyanogen team to work for the company full time. Kondik first recruited Koushik “Koush” Dutta. They also brought Chris Soyars Head of Infrastructure and designer Dobie Wollert from Google.

Monetization

We were tremendously excited to hear that a project that started out community based, and built up a huge following, was getting funded. But we were curious about how Cyanogenmod was going to make money. After all they just raised $7 million dollars from some of the biggest VC’s around; surely thode investors would want their money back. Also, Cyanogenmod itself is free and Kondik has already indicated it would stay that way.

We spoke with industry analyst Russell Holly over the weekend who assured us that the “ROM” or “OS” would remain free. Cyanogenmod is looking at hardware partnerships that they couldn’t get before because they weren’t a “real company,” and there should be news on their first hardware partnership in the coming week.

They will also work on other features outside the realm of their operating system that could become premium features. For the immediate future we can expect quicker, more thorough releases.

“Our mass market plan is for the second half of 2014, which will include services and third-party integration,” McMaster explained to Fortune.com. “We’ll begin to make money on services we can build and integrate in ways that Google or Apple (AAPL) don’t necessarily do for their own business reasons. We’re not beholden to any OEM or mobile operator.”

When we originally read that statement, we were curious as to the implications stemming from “Apple” being in McMaster’s statement. Holly told us that while we won’t see a “CyanogenMod” for Apple anytime soon, services that may link the two operating systems could be forthcoming. As a hypothetical example Holly brought up the fact that while great in their own systems, FaceTime and Google Hangout were incapable of talking with each other. A more streamlined messaging service may be something the new CyanogeMod takes on.

While that still paves no direct route to monetization, Cyanogemod seems to be in a much better predicament than several social startups that have ballooned to astronomical valuations and huge funding rounds without a solid plan for growth. Undoubtedly the investors will see their money back, in the meantime though, they have now funded a collective of some of the best mobile OS developers in the world.

Findo out more about Cyanogenmod here.

Nashville Entrepreninjas Take Flight (sort of)

By day Jared Marquette, Ryan Carter, Robbie Goldsmith, Sam Lingo, and John Murdock are Nashville-based entrepreneurs living the good life, making stuff, creating things and innovating. By night, they suit up in the ninja masks that they were reportedly born with, and become entrepreninjas.

Entrepreninjas is the name of the Michael Burcham and Nashville Entrepreneur Center backed team that competed this weekend in Red Bull’s Flugtag competition. Flugtag is a national competition that was held simultaneously across five US cities this past Saturday. The competition calls for teams to create a man powered flying machine. The machine is launched from a runway over water where it’s judged.

The celebrity judges were looking for creativity of craft, distance, and showmanship.

The Entrepreninjas built their craft in Nashville with part of the building taking place at the new Entrepreneur Center where team member Sam Lingo is the operations manager.

Entrepreninjas built most of their flying machine at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (photo: Facebook)

Michael Burcham, along with the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, Polar Technology, Track Ref, and the Thinkery teamed up to back the Entrepreninjas with the expenses of building a flight machine, getting it to Miami and entering the contest. It seems like perfect sense. If these guys can build companies, they can easily build a flying machine, no problem.

The team competed against other teams in Miami as well as the four other locations. The top 3 teams from each location won prizes from Red Bull, including Red Bull sports and music experiences, and of course bragging rights.

The flying machine looked great, judging from the photos on the Entrepreneur Center and Burcham’s personal Facebook page.

The team seemed to do very well in the showmanship category, showing off their ninja moves on the runway before launching the flying machine into the sky (or the water as it was).

As you can see from the video below though, they didn’t get very far in flight. The Entrepreninjas, despite a valiant effort, gave new meaning to the theory “Fail Fast.” But alas they are entrepreninjas and iteration trumps perfection, so I’m sure we will see them back out again next year.

This was an awesome showing for Nashville and a great team building exercise. For your enjoyment their flight video is below.

No Active Shooter At DC Area Mall, It Was Just a 16-Year-Old Viner

Over the past two decades when the words “active shooter” are put together with “teenager,” it usually involves a suspect of some sort. That’s not what happened this weekend at Tyson’s Corner Mall in Northern Virginia.

Vine, the Twitter owned short form video app, has created huge internet sensations in the few short months it’s been on the market. People love Vine; they are addicted to making silly little six second videos th

at loop and watching the creativity of their favorite viners.

Vine has catapulted several teenagers into stardom, some of whom have hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers on the service. These teenage “Viners” like LohAnthony, Kayden Stephenson and Mathew Espinosa do little more than smile at the camera, sing a little song or just talk about what they had for dinner. There’s not much you can do in six seconds, but it’s that short time frame which makes vine so addictive.

Some may remember Kayden Stephenson from American Idol last year. The 16-year-old Oklahoma City teenager has cystic fibrosis. His disease affects his breathing and also makes the 16 year old look a lot younger. He has a decent voice, but it was his story that won over the hearts of American Idol judges last year. Unfortunately he

didn’t last long on the show, but as soon as Vine was released he bulked up on followers. As for the other two, they are just normal teenagers with a sense of humor and a way with their peers.

Fast forward now to this past Saturday. Espinosa, who lives in Woodbridge Virginia, decided he was going to meetup with some of his Vine followers/fans at Tyson’s Corner mall, one of the largest shopping malls in the Metro DC area.

Although it was never revealed how many people Espinosa thought would attend his little meetup, over 10,000 screaming girls came to see the blonde teenager who bares a slight resemblance to Justin Bieber. Fox 5 reports that some of the girls came from over 5 hours away.

Espinosa arrived at the mall and shook a few hands and gave a few autographs. At one point mall security and police had to escort him out of the mall.

That wasn’t before curious mall goers were trying to find out what was going on, why all these teenager girls were at the mall. At one point someone got confused and said that they were shooting a video where all the fans had congregated. Well as you can see from the Fox 5 video below, shooting a video quickly became “shooting” and all hell broke loose.

People started screaming and running from the mall. Others started calling the police and the local news stations. The Washington DC suburbs have been on high alert since a gunman killed 12 and injured even more at the DC Navy Yard last week.

This is obviously the power of Vine that Gary Vee is banking on.

Cracked Already: Chaos Computer Club Crack’s Apple’s New TouchID

Germany’s Chaos Computer Club has reportedly cracked Apple’s newest feature, TouchID. As you probably know, people lucky enough to pick up an iPhone 5S this weekend are able to open their iPhone and charge their iTunes account with a simple thumb print.

Using some pretty comprehensive technology, the fingerprint scanner, built into the iPhone 5s’ home button, scans the users fingerprint. Rather than comparing it to a stored fingerprint locally or on a server,the technology compares the data in the fingerprint to verify the identity of the user. It also requires that the user be alive, breathing and attached to the person it belongs to.

For their customer’s protection, Apple has blocked the TouchID feature from developers. Apple insists that no one actually has a saved version of the fingerprint, but for now the technology is protected from anyone not working at One Infinite Loop.

Well despite being protected from developers, hackers have been able to crack the TouchID feature.

The biometrics team at Germany’s Chaos Computer Club were able to use a hacking technique that dates back to 1994 in order to breach the TouchID security.

The blog nakedsecurity has simplified the procedure for cloning fingerprints and then unlocking an iPhone 5s to these 7 steps:

Take a hi-res (2400dpi) photograph of the fingerprint.
Digitally invert the image so that the valleys of the print are black.
Laser print (1200dpi) the image with a very thick toner setting.
Smear white woodglue (or latex) over the printout and allow to set.
Carefully peel off the glue or latex sheet.
Breathe on the surface so it’s slightly moist and conductive.
Unlock phone.

What’s more in this story is that the hackers at Chaos Computer Club didn’t use a picture of the iPhone owners fingerprint to clone, rather they lifted the print off of a glass surface and were able to make a working duplicate.

Now obviously this is a lot of steps to take to just get access into someone else’s iPhone, but it sure beats cutting a finger off (which won’t work anyway).

2 Weeks And 2 Startup Avenue Booths Left For Everywhere Else Cincinnati

The feedback for Everywhere Else Cincinnati has been overwhelming. Many startups in the flyover states, middle America, and abroad can’t believe there is a startup conference, with a speaker lineup of this caliber, specifically geared towards them.

At Everywhere Else Cincinnati you’ll mingle, rub elbows, network, talk and hopefully garner the interest of investors who like you, work and want to continue building startup ecosystems everywhere else. We’ll hear from people like Jeff Hoffman who built up Priceline, uBid and other companies. Hoffman has decided that he’s done creating business plans and he’s turned to creating entrepreneurs and he’s going to share that with all of us.

We’ll hear form people like Andrew Warner who’s mixergy website has become a bible of sorts for entrepreneurs across the country. We’ll hear from several startup founders who’ve collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars from anywhere USA.

Scott Gerber, the founder of YEC and distinguished startup author will talk about startups everywhere and the YEC’s new Startup Insurance.

And there are 22 more speakers with similar experience taking the stage September 29th-October 1st in downtown Cincinnati at the Duke Energy Convention Center.

The attendee ticket is $99 through this weekend and the remaining two Startup Avenue booths are just $495 through this weekend.

The Startup Avenue booth comes with three attendee tickets for the founder and the your startup team. You’ll exhibit in front of hundreds of investors, founders, entrepreneurs and resources. There will be pitch contests and two exclusive events for startups, investors and our media partners.

Tickets are available below. We’ll see you in Cincinnati.

Online Ticketing for Everywhere Else Cincinnati – “Start Where U Are” powered by Eventbrite

Maryland Startups Square Off With Texas Governor Rick Perry

While he hasn’t declared his candidacy for President of the United States in 2016, we can just about count on the fact that Texas Governor Rick Perry will run for the Republican nomination. It’s just about as sure a thing as Hillary running for the Democratic nomination.

Even though he isn’t officially a candidate Perry has been making the rounds both internationally and nationally, soft campaigning and warming people up to his way of thinking.

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Governor Perry was in Bethesda Maryland for meetings with local political and business officials. The Governor’s meetings were taking place at Morton’s steak house a popular restaurant in the Maryland suburb of Washington DC.

It was there that the Startup Maryland bus, loaded with entrepreneurs and startup founders pitching their companies across the state, came face to face with the Republican Governor.

“If you want to live in a state where you have high taxes and a relatively burdensome regulatory climate, if you want to live in a state where the litigation is relatively easy to get into, then go live in those states,” Perry had told local website BethesdaNow earlier in the day.

“The messaging from Governor Perry is laser focused on the tax environment,” said Startup Maryland co-chair Michael Binko told the Washington Post. “If businesses are only looking at the tax environment for where they should go to succeed, we think that’s shortsighted as entrepreneurs and probably a recipe for disaster.”

Binko is not alone. The issues of lower tax rates and lower cost of living are always popping up in the Silicon Valley vs “everywhere else” startup debate, with PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy saying “But there’s a reason I never talk up taxes or cost of living as reasons other startup ecosystems will take off: Because none of the people who really matter give a shit about these things.” in this article addressing tax breaks, rates and cost of living for startups outside the valley.

While we’re not going to debate politics on the pages of nibletz.com, the current administration has overseen the passing and rolling out of the JOBS ACT, they’re looking at immigration reform that will make it easier for foreign founders to grow their startups here, and they’ve hosted a slew of startup focused events in conjunction with Startup America.

With the weight of turning the economy around falling on developing new businesses startups will be a hot issue in the 2016 campaign.

As for Maryland’s startup bus, this is the second year for the Startup Maryland bus which stops at various cities across the state and invites entrepreneurs and startup founders onto the bus to record video pitches. The pitches are voted on at the end of the bus tour. The bus tour started in Ocean City Maryland on September 9th and runs through September 27th.

Omaha’s Straight Shot Accelerator & First National Bank Of Omaha Holding Code One Hackathon

Omaha’s new accelerator, backed by Dundee Venture Capital, Straight Shot, is making waves in Silicon Prairie. The cohort based accelerator, led by Faith Larson, is taking a big city approach to their accelerator class. Larson and her team have provided an intense amount of mentoring activities, speakers and networking events to make sure their teams are more than ready come demo day.

They’ve also taken a firm position in Omaha’s rapidly growing tech community. Their latest effort is a hackathon happening next weekend called CodeOne.

When Straight Shot partner First National Bank of Omaha decided that they wanted to see some new ideas and technology for their online web platform they turned to the team at Straight Shot. Together they decided to host a hackathon and engage the tech community to help with the banks platform.

The hackathon starts next Friday afternoon and runs through Sunday. Food, drinks, and plenty of caffeine will be supplied to the registrants. The bank is transforming their WinterGarden employee cafe space into a collaborative workspace for all of the hackers

Hackathons like this have created a stir in startup communities in the past. Perhaps most notably was Nashville’s “Code Crush” event. Some hackers are leery of corporations backing a hackathon for the sole purpose of developing their companies technology.

To that end First National Bank of Omaha has been a great partner to the Omaha tech and entrepreneurial community. Not only that but they are giving away $13,000 in cash for the top three teams. First prize is $10,000 cash. Second prize is $2,000 cash and third prize is $1,000 cash.

Throughout the weekend event First National Bank of Omaha will also be looking for potential candidates for their internship program which could lead to employment with the bank down the road. They’ve also made it quite clear developers will be developing for the First National Bank platform. I also hear that the food will be great, we’re not talking just chips,soda and pizza.

It’s looking like CodeOne will be an amazing event for developers, designers, coders and hackers. You still have a few days left to register and if you’re confident your three person team can knock it out of the ball park there could be some money in it for you as well.

Here’s a link to registration.

While you’re at it don’t forget to register for Everywhere Else Cincinnati, the huge national startup conference is just two weeks away. Dundee Capital’s Mark Hasebroock is one of our 30 top notch startup speakers.

No Worries, You Can’t Open The New iPhone 5S With A Severed Finger

By now we’ve all heard that the brand new iPhone 5s, that hits stores this Friday, will come with a new locking feature called TouchID. Apple’s first soiree into biometrics is designed to protect your phone from anyone but yourself. At first glance it’s a great feature. Some even took to social media to call it a “relationship saver.”

Now perhaps I’ve watched too much Scandal or Burn Notice, but once this feature was announced I started having these strange thoughts. What if you had really sensitive information on your iPhone, you know like top secret spy stuff. Now we all know the NSA can probably look at it anyway, but what if spies came and wanted to get in your iPhone 5. What if the only way to do it was to chop off your finger?

What if your significant other decided to pull a Lorena Bobbit with your thumb. Maybe they think you were cheating, so they cut your finger off to get into your phone and see all of your text messages.

Well rest assured. I wasn’t the only one with these crazy thoughts. In fact there were so many people thinking about these particular scenarios that Sebastien Taveau, Chief Technology Officer at Validity Sensors and an expert on biometric technology like Apple’s issued a statement:

“The [RF capacitive sensor] technology is built in a way that the [fingerprint] image has to be taken from a live finger. No one in biometrics wants to talk about cut fingers and dead bodies, but at the end of the day we are still asked to remove the fears of consumers and make sure that they understand that [a severed finger] will not work.”

Aren’t you relieved now?

Of course as SourceFed suggests, nothing can prevent someone from making you unlock your iPhone 5s at gunpoint. I see the plot of a new action film brewing.

Boulder Tech Is OK! Mobilizing To Help Those In The Canyon

Boulder startups, Brad Feld, David Cohen, Techstars, Boulder Floods

Techstars David Cohen took to Twitter to report everyone was ok and helped mobilize cleanup efforts

Brad Feld, the author of Startup Communities and the founder and managing director of Foundry Group, is one of the Boulder tech community’s most notable figures and a champion for startups and Colorado. When news broke out about the intense downpours and rain that hammered Boulder over this past weekend Feld was vacationing at Vail and watching the coverage on TV, reports USA Today.

Feld keeps a condominium in downtown Boulder, but his primary home is in the nearby mountains. By most accounts the town of Boulder weathered the storm quite well. It was those in the canyon and in the mountains that were hit hardest. Feld took to his popular blog, Feld Thoughts, to let people know that he was a-ok but he wasn’t able to get to his home in the mountains.

One of the biggest themes when Feld and others talk about Boulder is the tight knit community that’s formed around entrepreneurs, technology, and startups. Last July when wild fires ravaged parts of Colorado, Boulder’s tech community banded together to raise money through fundraising drives, t-shirt sales, and other impromptu crowdfunding efforts to help others.

The same holds true today after the floods and rain.

Techstars co-founder David Cohen echoed Feld’s initial sentiment reporting on Twitter that the town of Boulder was ok, but the canyon roads were washed out. Feld also took to Twitter to organize people to help others who had flooded basements. 15 people quickly mobilized just off Cohen’s tweets.

Techstars alum Benny Joseph, whose startup GoodApril was acquired by Intuit before demo day this year, wanted to give back as well. USA Today reports that although GoodApril has moved to the California offices of Intuit, Boulder had a special place in their hearts,and they donated $20,000 to clean up efforts.

Boulder again has shown the community in “Startup Community”