Catch up on regional tech news with these recent top stories from Silicon Prairie News:

The Startup Collaborative launches first-annual Startup Showcase and Expo

The Startup Collaborative invited Omaha’s innovators, entrepreneurs and supporters to their first-annual Startup Showcase and Expo at the Omaha Design Center on Thursday. The event was The Startup Collaborative’s new take on a demo day, adding in a startup bullpen, a pop-up stage featuring investors and startup ecosystem funders, and a speakeasy after-party.

The expo and showcase was a “high-energy celebration of growth for the 60 plus startups we continuously work with, and a dive into some of the emerging technologies driving future businesses,” said expo organizers.
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Nelnet completes acquisition of Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc.

Nelnet announced this week it has completed the acquisition of Madison-based Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, Inc. from Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation.

A press release provided by Nelnet said the company paid $150 million for 100 percent of the stock of Great Lakes, following the satisfaction of all required closing conditions. The acquisition makes Lincoln-based Nelnet the nation’s largest servicer of federal student loans.
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Paul Jarrett: How to Win (Nearly) Every Time

I speak to a lot of student entrepreneurs, and someone always asks some variation of “how did you get/earn/find ________?” No matter what they’re asking about, I usually can distill it down to two main points: 1) Play the Odds. 2) Just Ask.

I know, it sounds super simple. “Duh, Paul. You have to do the work to see the reward.” But I think so many of us forget that it IS simple (I include myself in this pool, 100%.) We want the answer to success to be complicated or plain luck because then we can justify failure upfront and why not “to attempt.” We want the fallback (it’s complicated and expensive), the scapegoat (I just have bad luck) as if there’s some magical recipe for reaching our goals that we don’t know. Maybe that’s a cultural problem or a human brain problem – I’ll leave that part to the experts.
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Big Omaha and Maha Music Festival merge into a three-day cultural event

The return of the tenth annual Big Omaha conference was announced today, but with one major change. This year, the inspirational tech conference will take place in conjunction with the Maha Music Festival.

The Big Omaha conference, now part of the Maha experience, will be held August 16 and 17 with venue details to be announced. Maha will be expanded to two days and will take place on August 17 and 18 in Aksarben Village.
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