Cleantech Companies clean-up in New Ventures BC Competition

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the Awards Ceremony for this year's New Ventures BC Competition. As in previous years there was a lot of buzz around the room as the final 10 competitors, their mentors in the competition and all the other mentors and volunteers waited for the announcements.

I was very pleased to see the team I co-mentored this year made the final 10. Singular Software have an excellent product which can significantly reduce the time (and therefore the cost) of putting together multi-camera videos. I've talked about this before here and you can see a finished video using multiple angles here and here. Congratulations Bruce and Michael for a great job in the competition it's been a lot of fun working with you.

The winners this year all came from Cleantech, with Saltworks Technologies taking the lion's share of the prizes, 1st Prize and the BC Hydro Sustainability Prize. The other Prize winners were the Small Energy Group and Echoflex Solutions. Congratulations Ben, Josh, David and Shawn for coming to the top of 170+ entrants this year!

For me the competition was a great experience this year and credit should go to Bob and Angie doing a great job. The videos are the Awards Ceremony worked really well but one suggestion I would have would be to hire a trio of trumpet players to announce the awarding of the actual prizes. Strangely that part of the evening was a little bit muted. All in all though a great night and the end of this year's competition. I'm looking forward to 2009 already.