Ryan Keliher walked into Pitch101 in Charlottetown with an idea for a social entrepreneurship venture and walked out with a $500 first prize and an invitation to Invest Atlantic in Halifax in September.

Keliher’s pitch Friday for United World Changewear was a wonder in brevity, focus and passion, and one of the highlights of the first Pitch101 – a new regional initiative organized by Bob Williamson of Invest Atlantic, the region’s premier conference for the startup community.  The second Pitch101 will be held in Halifax on March 1.

Williamson set up the events to give entrepreneurs in the region a chance to get together throughout the year, and to allow entrepreneurs to learn the basics of pitching. Pitch101 will help choose candidates for the Pitching Den, which has become a hallmark of Invest Atlantic, now entering its fourth year.

Keliher demonstrated instantly that he could pitch his company in less time than the 60 seconds allowed for each of the 16 pitchers. United World Changewear is a social enterprise that will partner with philanthropic groups to produce T-shirts bearing the message of the group. The wording, for example, could support women’s education in the third world or oppose bullying. The company proposes changing the message and design each month, selling the T-shirts over the Internet and donating 25 percent of the profits to the charity that initiated the message.

“This is not just a company,” said Keliher. “It’s a team and an attitude and who wouldn’t want to be on the team that the whole world cheers for.”

The $300 second prize went to Alex Rice whose Raw Creative has developed an app that offers subscribers free gifts at local retailers and can be used to attract customers to stores. The third prize, worth $200, went to David Lopes, the CEO of Re-Form Technologies, which has developed cloud-based software to help architects oversee their projects.

The big story from Pitch101 is in the numbers. Williamson said beforehand that he’d be pleased with 60 attendees and six to eight pitchers. But he got twice that number of pitchers and three times as many attendees. And he did it on a chilly Friday in January.

The pitches ranged from experienced entrepreneurs (Mike MacAdam has been working on Extemporal, an online language training program, for several years) to the true novices (One had got his idea from a newspaper article four days earlier).  Yes, some fell short of what you’d hope for, but this event and others like it are focusing the attention of potential entrepreneurs on developing businesses.

Consider Matthew Perry, a computer science undergrad at the University of Prince Edward Island. He’s an avid player of video games, but he’s found that it’s difficult to make video game leagues across different time zones. It’s a problem for many of the 500 million gamers around the world.

So Perry’s been developing Virtual Sports Management, an organizational tool that helps gamers form leagues and agree on times that people can play against one another. He hopes to launch the product soon, and once it is established he wants to build similar products for real sports leagues.

It can’t hurt that he got full marks from all three judges -- Patrick Keefe of the regional venture capital fund, Brian Lowe of the First Angel Network, and Robert Bechard, a biotech consultant and former venture capitalist from Montreal.

The event took place the day after the successful DolphinTank pitching session for women entrepreneurs in Halifax. It came a week after the sold out Big Data Congress in Saint John. The nasty weather isn’t chilling the enthusiasm for entrepreneurship in the region.