Following up on my previous post about the Breakthru competition. I had heard through the twitter vine that the pitches were interesting, so I was looking forward to hearing who the winners were today. 

Brad Pierce and his partners in Greenlight Geomatics were the winners of Breakthru (Telegraph Journal news article), New Brunswick’s Business Plan Competition. 

Miramichi-based Greenlight’s is developing a GPS-based, automated technology for railway companies that meticulously map and controls herbicide spray without affecting environmentally sensitive areas.

The New Brunswick Innovation fund held the gala dinner last night and the platinum, gold and silver winners were announced. A quick summary:

Platinum -Greenlight Geomatics - $100,000 equity investment, $39,500 in-kind legal, marketing, accounting and IT servies.

Gold - Trivnet Media Systems - $50.000 equity investment, $16,500 in-kind services.

Silver - MassRule - $25,000 equity investment, $9,000 in-kind services.

Best Business Plan - Greenlight Geomatics - $2,000

Best Presentation - Trivnet - $1000

Most Innovative Idea - PlayDartsNow - $1000

Most Charismatic Entrepreneur - Justin Kennedy of PlayDartsNow - $1000 

Just a quick post to let everyone know that The Power Within  is coming to Halifax Feb. 26, 2008. Mitch Joel digital marketing expert (and recently award winning) and podcaster extraodinaire is extending a special rate of $129.00 for the first 200 who sign up.

The line up looks great led by Athony Robbins, and Mike Lipkin - The Power to Persuade, Loretta LaRoche on stress management (I could use some of that) and more.

I’m on board and looking forward to the event.

p.s. Day 2 of thinkNB is coming this evening.

thinkNB launched tonight for a mix and mingle with exhibitors and guests at the Aitken Center in Fredericton. Tomorrow is a full day event open to the public. I had the opportunity tonight to meet with a few of the exhibitors and talk to them about their businesses. It was all rather loose this evening and tomorrow I’ll dive more into specific questions when I talk to various technology industry demographics. I used this event as my first time trying out utterz.

I met Dan Martell from Spheric last year at a Wizard Academy workshop put on by the Fundy Group. We have always had lots to discuss about web 2.0, online marketing and social networking. Tomorrow I’ll be talking to Dan and the others at Spheric tomorrow to find out exactly how they’re lazy but for now here’s an utterz from Dan.

I was curious to see what there was for squidoo pages in this neck of Canada. For those of you unfamiliar with Squidoo, it’s  a brainchild of marketing guru, Seth Godin.

From wikipedia;

Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses –single pages that highlights one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren’t primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.

Squidoo has often been used by niche marketers and some have been very sucessful with earning revenue. However with Squidoo on the end of a google slap, it’s been much harder for sites to move up in google rankings.  

What I like about Squidoo is that it is a hub of resources. And for a tourism venue site like some of the ones below, it is a very fast way to have a good looking site with multiple media resources.

I’m VERY surprised that I didn’t find a lense on unusual Newfoundland place names. With names like Dildo, Come-by-Chance, Blow-me-down and more you would think that would make for an interesting lense.

A few lenses from ’round here.

NF

http://www.squidoo.com/newfie/

http://www.squidoo.com/rick-mercer/

http://www.squidoo.com/laurieleehane/

PEI

http://www.squidoo.com/DiscGolfing/

http://www.squidoo.com/fan-of-anne-of-green-gables-and-avonlea/

NB

http://www.squidoo.com/fredericton/

http://www.squidoo.com/chrisnadeau/

http://www.squidoo.com/fly-fishing-new-brunswick/

http://www.squidoo.com/sackville/

 NS

http://www.squidoo.com/novascotiafirstnation/

http://smartest.dentist.ever.com/  - this is the new evolution from Squidoo, the Ever Project with the best/smartest, etc.  .ever.com

http://www.squidoo.com/halifaxnovascotia/

http://www.squidoo.com/luckynovascotia/

Online Revealed Canada is holding a Revealed Educational Exchange conference Jan 24, 2008 in Halifax. This one day event is geared towards those in the tourism, travel and hospitality industry. Topics covered will be search engine optimization, PPC (pay per click), organic search, social media and revenue & distribution management.

I would think that even someone outside of the above industries may still find it useful if they want to learn about those topics. There are so few events held in Atlantic Canada, you almost need to grab related ones that come out when you can.

On another e-tourism note. Atlantic Canada recently took home a few Canadian e-tourism Awards.
Nova Scotia awards are already listed at Tourism Research, E-Marketing & New Media Blog from NS.
Newfoundland - The Government of NF won an award for the best website in the public sector.
Tourism PEI was a finalist in the best website public sector.