University of Iowa

Minimum Viable Podcast—Episode 1

New podcast on the Gravitate Podcast Channel!

Matt Patane, technology and innovation reporter for the Des Moines Register and Geoff Wood, community builder at Gravitate, sit down for an indepth discussion of the companies, events and ideas making news in the Iowa innovation community.

Topics discussed on this episode: Iowa Venture Capital Association, autonomous vehicles in Iowa City, coding curriculum across the state

Feedback, thoughts or suggestions? Hit us up on Twitter or email the show at mvp@gravitatedsm.com

Four sources of idea-stage capital expecting to deploy $1.33MM in Iowa

It’s only mid-April but details around four new programs to help fund very early stage startups in Iowa have emerged. One of the programs, NestMint describes this stage as "idea-level". All combined, the four programs are planning to deploy $1.33MM in capital in this state.

The clusterFlunk story

Midway through my sophomore year at Truman State University I got a call from Joe Dallago, a good friend of mine since high school. Joe was studying at the University of Iowa and he was just pissed; complaining that he had bombed a test because of one question he couldn’t get on his study guide. He emailed his professor, his TA and was sitting in the middle of the library but he couldn’t find the answer. There were 400 students in that class and he had no way to talk to any of them. One of his classmates could have probably answered his question in a couple of minutes and he would have been fine.

A guest post by AJ Nelson

Ten Iowa expats in tech you should know (updated)

Since identifying Iowa expats is one of the primary purposes of this blog, I thought I'd start with a the following list: "Ten Iowa expats in tech you should know".