THIS year's Yorkshire Venturefest was the biggest and best yet.

The event attracted more than 2,000 people to York Racecourse yesterday.

Peter Claydon, chairman of Venturefest, said his mission had been achieved for the sixth year of the event - namely to attract a huge variety of sources of advice, fund options and mentoring, through 60 exhibitors and a host of speakers.

These included the likes of Julie Meyer, chief executive of Ariadne Capital, founder of First Tuesday global entrepreneurs network, motivational speaker Ben Kench, seminars on how to be "virtually big" and a debate chaired by Martin Vender Weyer, business editor of The Spectator.

But one of the day's star attractions proved to be Victoria Brown. The Year 12 student from York's The Mount School was the event's pre-dinner speaker.

She was drafted in to deliver the speech after winning the North Yorkshire Business and Education Partnership (NYBEP) Engineering Inspirations Award last summer.

Victoria designed and made an award-winning kayaking jacket which keeps users warm and dry while being used.

An entire floor devoted entirely to children - the tycoons of the future - saw 19 teams competing for a £300 "Griffins' Nest" prize - their version of BBC2's Dragons' Den.

The sense of real competition pervaded as ventures competed for big prizes.

At last night's Venturefest dinner, the climax of the event attended by 250 business people and investors, Alex McWhirter, head of enterprise at Yorkshire Forward, presented the Innovation Showcase prize worth £12,500 to Red Embedded Design Ltd.

The award, supported by Business Link, was for the company with the best future growth potential and the £3 million turnover venture from Bradford was judged worthy.

That was a prelude to the winner of seemingly the biggest prize of the day - an investment competition sponsored by Connect Yorkshire, the fast-track organisation for high-tech newcomers.

A prize worth £30,000, consisting of £5,000 in cash and £25,000 in business support went to Foodspecifications.com, from the Wakefield area.

But even bigger rewards possibly await eight companies which gave 15-minute individual pitches to 25 top investors at a ticket-only get-together in the Ebor Stand, titled Aiming High.

All eight had already reached the point where they had established themselves in the marketplace and were seeking at least £2 million to be injected into their ventures to take them on to the next stage of development.

Their success will only be known in the next few months.