Last week, members of the Pittsburgh startup community gathered at AlphaLab to participate in This Week in Startup’s second international pitch contest. Several pitches were presented before the actual show’s start at 2:00 PM Eastern, and Shoefitr was selected as the Pittsburgh representative.

At the end of the show Jason and Lon selected Shoefitr as the winner of the pitch contest! Here’s their pitch:

Also part 2 where they make the decision:

Congratulations Shoefitr on a great pitch and special thanks to John Ganotis from Deviceknit for organizing the event!

This week we welcome the next class of passionate entrepreneurs to AlphaLab for the start of the next session of our program. With that in mind, we take a look back at the most recent Demo Day with a few pictures of the event.

AlphaLab’s Demo Day is the opportunity for our “graduating” AlphaLab companies to present to an audience of investors, potential partners, and other key individuals from across the country. Attendance was standing-room only and the companies all did a great job with their presentations, continuing to raise the bar for the next AlphaLab class.

Innovation Works President and CEO Rich Lunak welcomes the audience with some opening remarks.

John Ganotis of DeviceKnit

Rodrigo Carvalho from Black Locus

Karen Anderson of 80 Degrees West Interior Design

Don Charlton, founder of The Resumator (far right)

The Shoefitr team (who also was featured on CNET.com’s Web Crawler Blog)

Derek Wahila, along with Regina Parundik and David Wells, from Photo Synesi

Startup Pittsburgh provides a round-up of the event on their blog as well.

(photo by Matt Bulvony / Pittsburgh Business Times)

iTwixie was recently profiled in an article that appeared on Portfolio.com, where founder Rebecca Gaynier tells the story of why she wanted to start iTwixie as well as the exciting things that are currently going on with the company.

Read more about this Winter/Spring 2009 AlphaLab alumnus over at portfolio.com!

Felix Brandon Lloyd, President and CEO of Skill-Life, was invited by the White House to be present for remarks by President Barack Obama highlighting innovative social entrepreneurs around the country.  Felix remarked that “to be included in a group of social entrepreneurs that the President says are creating the most innovative solutions to our communities most challenging problems, is humbling and inspiring.”

The remarks were made by the President to call upon organizations to work together as well as to call attention to the $50 million innovation fund that is part of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act.  The President thanked the attending organizations, saying “… today, I want to recognize that pioneering spirit and thank you all for the contributions that you’re making to our communities.”

Felix believes that the $50 million fund will “help take social enterprises like Skill-Life, Inc. to higher levels as will the fact that the President has established an Office of Social Innovation.”

Skill-Life, an alum of the Summer/Fall 2008 cycle of AlphaLab and 2007 Echoing Green Fellow, is developing a game-based platform through which tweens earn real-life rewards as they play games to teach life skills such as financial literacy, nutrition, and citizenship.  Skill-Life plans to release a beta version of their CentsCity product later this month.

For more information check out the Official White House Blog as well as the President’s complete remarks.