Lungpacer Medical picked up the New Ventures BC 3rd Place prize last year and founder Dr. Andy Hoffer was honoured with the Innovation & Achievement Award by LifeSciences BC earlier today.

These awards are presented annually by LifeSciences British Columbia to recognize individuals and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to the development of British Columbia’s life sciences industry across all sub-sectors, from biopharmaceuticals and medical devices to bioproducts and bioenergy – sectors which are critical to the economic future of the province and country.

Congrats to Dr. Hoffer who will receive his award at a gala ceremony on Wednesday, April 14th in front of an audience of approximately 600 biopharmaceutical, medical device, bioproducts, bioenergy and greater life sciences community and public policy leaders at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

Lungpacer Medical Inc. was founded in May 2009 and is Hoffer’s third SFU spin-off company.

You will learn how to take advantage of cloud computing to do things you could not do before, to save money, to be more flexible and agile. You can get your questions answered about security, privacy, and compliance. You can learn about and understand the differences between public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid clouds. Hear from your peers who are building and developing on the cloud about how they have stopped buying and installing and maintaining physical servers.

If you’re interested in attending, be sure to register online. Coffee and lunch are provided and the full-day event gets underway at 9:00am.

Remember that NVBC’s business-education seminars are available to anyone. Seminars are $20 each or $100 for all nine seminars plus a networking event. and the fee may also be applied toward your $200 NVBC competition entry fee.

April 6 – Seminar 1: Assessing the Opportunity

• Speaker: Bob de Wit, New Ventures BC & Elisabeth Maurer, LightIntegra Technology
• Networking & Registration: 6:30pm, Seminar: 7:00pm
• Location: SFU Segal School of Business

April 13 – Seminar 2: Managing your Intellectual Property

• Speakers: Roger Kuypers and Doran Ingalls, Fasken Martineau
• Networking & Registration: 6:30pm, Seminar: 7:00pm
• Location: SFU Segal School of Business

April 20 – NVBC Networking Event

• Location TBA, 5:30pm
• Registration to open shortly.

April 27 – Seminar 3: Market Research and Product Marketing

• Speaker: Dave Thomas, Rocket Builders
• Networking & Registration: 6:30pm, Seminar: 7:00pm
• Location: SFU Segal School of Business

May 4 – Seminar 4: The Business Plan

• Speaker: Mike Volker, SFU UILO & WUTIF
• Networking & Registration: 6:30pm, Seminar: 7:00pm
• Location: SFU Segal School of Business

May 11 – Seminar 5: Corporate Structure

• Speakers: Steven Lukas, Fasken Martineau & Sean Hodgins, QC Docs
• Networking & Registration: 6:30pm, Seminar: 7:00pm
• Location: SFU Segal School of Business

May 18 – Seminar 6: Social Networking for Start-ups

• Speaker: Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, Capulet Communications
• Networking & Registration: 6:30pm, Seminar: 7:00pm
• Location: SFU Segal School of Business

May 25 – Seminar 7 – All about Funding: Friends & Family, Angels, VCs

• Speakers: Roger Killen and Tanner Philp, Lions Capital
• Networking & Registration: 5:30pm, Seminar: 6:00pm
• Location: SFU Segal School of Business

June 1 – Seminar 8: Perfecting your Pitch

• Speakers: David Shore, Stirling Mercantile & Jonathan Bixby, Strangeloop Networks
• Networking & Registration: 6:30pm, Seminar: 7:00pm
• Location: SFU Segal School of Business

June 8 – Seminar 9: Start at the end: exit strategy

• Speaker: Basil Peters, Fundamental Technologies II
• Networking & Registration: 6:30pm, Seminar: 7:00pm
• Location: SFU Segal School of Business

Speakers, locations and dates may change on short notice. Please check the NVBC site for updates before each event.

If you’re outside of Vancouver, please check the Regional Seminar Schedule here.

The economy grew by 5% last quarter, the largest single growth number since 2000, surpassing all expectations. Is your technology company prepared to take advantage of the tremendous growth opportunities that are currently in the marketplace. The Discovery Parks Foundation is pleased to have BCIT’s Peter Thomson Centre for Venture Development offer a one time limited seating opportunity for technology companies to participate in a part time growth strategies boot camp. There is no cost to your company and you will be accessing experts in technology and business to create a plan to see your company leveraging current market opportunities.

During this 6 week boot camp you will learn more about:

• Marketization of Product
• Venture Capital Acquisition
• Property Protection
• Growth Strategies
• Cash Flow
• Marketing
• B2B Presentations
• Partner Negotiations
• Operations and more

The six-week part-time program runs from March 30th to May 8th, on Tuesdays from 5:30pm-8:30pm, Saturdays from 9:00am-4:00pm, and by webinar on Thursdays from 5:00pm- 6:00pm. In-person class time is at the BCIT downtown campus at 555 Seymour Street.

This Bootcamp is fully funded with NO COST to participating companies. In order to qualify, you must operate or plan to operate a technology company within the lower mainland area and have a focus on growth.

To take advantage of this one time opportunity during such aggressive market growth please contact Simonetta at 604‐412‐7651 for further information and to arrange for an interview.

NVBC is one of North America’s largest technology business-idea competitions -  essentially a boot camp for business start-ups.

• Learn from some of B.C’s best business experts at our business-education seminars
• Network with top professionals in business, law, finance, government and academia
• Improve your business and strategies during each round of competition
• Receive advice and insight from mentors In Round 3
• Present your condensed business plan to a panel of ‘angel’ investors, venture capitalists and industry experts in Round 4

But don’t forget that competition winners share $300,000 in prize packages.

NVBC is open to any B.C. resident, team or business with an innovative technology product or service that has not yet secured significant financing from external investors.  The $200 entry fee covers all of the NVBC business-education seminars and networking events – plus entry in the competition.

The Vancouver-based business-education seminars start on April 6th, the round 1 registration deadline is April 19th and the 2010 NVBC Competition Awards Ceremony is on September 23rd.

Those of you that have been part of the NVBC community in the past will notice that we have made some improvements to our site including streamlining content with a new navigation and layout, adding subscribe links for Twitter and RSS, and redesigning the registration form to make it easier to follow. Let us know what you think.

The Mentor-In-Residence Program pairs SFU students with seasoned entrepreneurs or business leaders who can help you achieve your business goals. This new new Mentor-in-Residence position will engage more specifically undergraduate students.

If you’re interested, be sure to check out the job description and scope of work. The anticipated time commitment is 6-9 days per month and the initial contract will run a minimum of six months.

Applicants should have a minimum 10 years business experience, entrepreneurial experience as founder or co-founder of a company, and specific area expertise in one or more of the following:

• sales/sales management
• product development
• business development/contracts
• production/operations management
• finance/investment

The application deadline is Thursday, March 18th and the anticipated start date is April 5th.

As you probably know, the show gives aspiring entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a panel of wealthy Canadian moguls who are entrepreneurs themselves. With the  prize sometimes being real cash and real investment  from the Dragons’ own pockets.

This is a fantastic opportunity for entrepreneurs and small business owners to come down and pitch their business concept for the chance to appear on national television. The producers are coming to us and hosting  initial auditions in BC.

• March 8th – Victoria – 11am – 7pm
• March 10th – Campbell River  – noon – 7pm
• March 11th – Nanaimo – noon – 7 pm
• March 11th – Prince George – 11am – 7pm
• March 13th – Vancouver – 11am – 7pm
• March 15th – Kelowna – 10 am – 6 pm
• March 17th – Nelson – noon – 7pm
• March 27th – Vancouver – 11am – 7pm
• March 29th – Abbotsford – TBD
• March 31st – Prince Rupert – noon – 7pm

As extra incentive this year – entrepreneurs with an eco-friendly business, invention or idea could qualify for a $100,000 Greenvention prize from Sun Chips.

Thanks to the Olympics, this year’s event – the 6th Annual – has been delayed and will take place on May 7th and 8th at UBC. Tickets went on sale for the 2010 edition of Northern Voice last week and should sell-out quickly.

Early-bird tickets are available until March 31st and the registration fee includes lunch, coffee, and tea.

DemoCamp Vancouver 10 is this coming week and picks up where Edition #9 left off with a duplicate format that includes longer featured presentations, 6 minute company/code/demo presentations, and lightning pitches in between to keep things moving.

This time around the theme is Geo and the two featured presentations will be:

• Matt Galligan (@mg), cofounder of Boulder, CO-based SimpleGeo, will be talking about the SimpleGeo platform. In the process of writing a location based app, Matt and his cofounder found that they were figuring out everything from scratch. It was hard and painful coming up with a storage engine for millions of geo points, and it was slow and difficult to run giant database queries against those points. And thus, SimpleGeo was born – infrastructure to power the geo layer of your app so you don’t have to build it all from scratch.
• Parveen Kaler (@kaler), founder of Smartful Studios, will be speaking about the business of Geo Location and Location Based Services. Currently, the Geo technology stack is fractured into disparate slices of functionality. We will look at who owns the data and what functionality currently exists. We will look at where data and functionality gaps exist within the stack. This will motivate the types of applications and services that can be built today. It doesn’t make sense for a viable business to build a product without a revenue model. We will enumerate different methods to monetize Geo Location services and how to build a revenue strategy.

DemoCamp Vancouver 10 is on Thursday, March 4th at Ceili’s Pub and starts at 6:30pm. The event is free but be sure to register online.