Today@Dal

From Tuesday's Chronicle Herald:

For Tyler Zemlak, it all started with an idea.

The 34-year-old was working an overnight shift as a porter pushing hospital beds at Halifax’s Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre emergency room when he noticed a problem: nurses were having trouble reaching support staff using the hospital’s portable phone system.

“When it got really busy, I began to see the breakdown of communication” he recalls. “I immediately realized they were lacking a critical tool.”

That’s when Zemlak, a Dalhousie University PhD graduate in biology and genetics, turned his eye to entrepreneurship.

With the expertise of a business partner trained in information technology, he co-founded Vantij, a company that develops web-to-mobile software to open the lines of communication in emergency rooms.

It’s the passion and determination of entrepreneurs like Zemlak that inspired Ed Leach, director of Dalhousie’s Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship, to pilot Summ’er UP, a new accelerator program that gives first-time entrepreneurs a foothold in business.

“The mission was to get people started,” Leach said. “This isn’t about startups. It’s about talent. It’s about people trying.”

Read the rest of this article online.