[mrbrandonking]

There's a start-up scene starting to grow around Northwest Arkansas somewhat. Innovate Arkansas and the ARK Challenge are a local source of seed funding.

NWA TechFest http://nwatechfest.com and Little Rock TechFest http://lrtechfest.com/ are good events for networking.

There's a good network of local .NET User Groups across the state, too. NWA, Little Rock, Fort Smith, Jonesboro all have one. If that's too Microsofty for you, I'm pretty sure there's a Cocoa group in NWA.