Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

I am an entrepreneur, technologist, explorer and bon vivant. I came into my own when spurred on by my brother, I decided to start my first business in 1991 and haven’t looked back since. Since then I have founded aTerra Technologies Corp., co-founded of SpaceRef Interactive Inc., co-founded the Mars Institute and most recently Hyperix Search, Inc.

aTerra Technologies focuses on Internet technologies, in particular data mining and aggregation, web development and is best known for developing original content properties and web crawlers. In 1996 the Canadian Internet Awards Committee awarded @Canadas.net web site, “Best Online Site” (Canada) for the year. I created Canada’s first search engine, Maple Square, in 1995. In 1998 I was asked, and had the privilege, to testify before the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) New Media and the Internet hearings by then partner AOL Canada as the lone partner representative.

Marc Boucher in the high arctic on Devon Island at the HMP Research Station. (July 24, 2005)

SpaceRef, an online space news network of 23 sites, grew out of an idea I and co-founder Keith Cowing had at a meeting in Washington, DC, in early June 1999.

On October 1, 1999, SpaceRef launched with little fanfare but soon became a hit. In June of 2000 SpaceRef announced it had licensed SpaceRef content to the Discovery Channel. Today SpaceRef has over 500,000 unique monthly visitors, making it one of the most popular online space sites.

SpaceRef has also begun to modestly sponsor research by first donating the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse to the Haughton-Mars Project (HMP) in 2002.

The Mars Institute is a non-profit research institute co-founded by myself in the fall of 2002 at the World Space Congress in Houston with my colleagues Dr. Pascal Lee, Dr. Stephen Braham, and Dr. Charlie Cockell. The Institute is now an important participant in Mars and moon analog research and manages the Haughton-Mars Project. I have had the pleasure to participate in the HMP since 2000 and have been to the high-Arctic research station three times, once in the summer of 2000, then 2002 and in 2005 and I hope to return this summer.

My latest venture is Hyperix Search, Inc., a search engine technology company developing a vertical search platform used to create specialty, or vertical, search engines.

I live in Abbotsford, just east of Vancouver, in beautiful British Columbia, home of the 2010 Winter Olympics. When not working, rarely it seems these days, I spend time enjoying life with my fiancee Sylvia and relax by reading, hiking, traveling and adding to my modest collection of Japanese woodblock prints.