Following a first half of record venture capital financing, this year's Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit has found new ways to showcase the city's high-tech companies.

Rob Woodbridge, manager of OCRI's Ottawa Capital Network, says there have been many changes to this year's event, moving away from a "pitch-style" format to focus more on content.

Twelve Canadian-owned and privately held businesses who have a presence in Ottawa have been invited to pitch directly to a large audience of local and foreign venture capitalists, angels and corporate investors from Sept. 27-29 at the Hotel Lac-Leamy Casino.

"We'll have the exact same number of companies pitching this year and these are earlier stage companies, most looking for series "A" funding," he says. "But we've also complemented it with the strongest content line-up we're ever done, including keynote presentations from, for example, Tony Perkins, the founder of the original Red Herring magazine and Always On Network magazine and Steve Elop, the CEO of Macromedia, which just merged with Adobe."

This new conference-style format will allow other technology companies from Ottawa to showcase their wares and provide more networking opportunities for companies to make pitches through participation in panel discussions, the technology showcase and the golf tournament.

Gord Echlin, CEO of Netistix Technologies, sees great value in participating as both a presenting company and as part of the showcase.

"As a first-year participant, we are interested in making an impact at this event," he says. "It brings together high-quality content, investors and companies all under one roof – we are very pleased to be a part of it."

OVTS describes itself as an integral step in securing venture investment and its statistics show that 60 per cent of all the venture deals done in 2005 have gone to alumni of the event. More than 200 representatives of the Canadian and U.S. investment community are expected to attend this year's summit.

The 12 companies selected to pitch are Ambercore Software, Black Coral, Diablo Technologies, Emerging Memory Technologies, FaSDR Semiconductor, Netistix Technologies, Silect Software, VoIPShield Systems, Newstep Networks, Solana Networks, Symbium and TenXc.