Ready for the busiest eight days on the Halifax startup calendar?

You better be because five events that speak to the entire community will take place in the Nova Scotia capital between Sept. 22 and 30. It begins with MentorCamp on Monday, followed by the new Startup Empire conference, the Entrevestor-Entrepreneurs’ Forum dinner, Startup Weekend and Invest Atlantic. DemoCamp had been scheduled for Sept. 24, but a notice on the Volta website says it has been delayed until November.

MentorCamp is a session that exposes a handful of promising startups to mentors from around the region and

Next Thursday, members of the startup community will have an opportunity to discuss a matter that has been on their minds for years – how to liberalize the patchwork of angel tax credits in the region.

Rob Barbara, Partner at Build Ventures, will lead a discussion on this subject at the Entrevestor-Entrepreneurs’ Forum dinner in Halifax. The goal is to come up with new ideas, maybe even a consensus, on how to improve the system for incentivizing angels to invest in startups.

(After this discussion, Innovacorp CEO Stephen Duff will chair a talk on mentorship, which is a follow-on

Island Abbey Foods Launches Two New Honibe – Honey Lozenges Across Canada

Honey Lozenges with Cherry and Honey Lozenges with Immune Boost Now Available at Select Pharmacies and Online at http://www.Honibe.com

Charlottetown, PE, Canada – September 17th, 2014 – Island Abbey Foods, a PEI, Canada based natural health product producer, has announced today the launch of their newest innovations: Honibe Honey Lozenges™ - Cherry and Honibe Honey Lozenges™ - Immune Boost with Echinacea, Vitamin C, Zinc and a hint of Citrus.

“We are very excited to announce, based on the feedback from our loyal

Matt Stewart and Rob Myers should be poster boys for holding down business development costs.

Last year, the two residents of Sydney won $10,000 from the initial Spark Cape Breton competition, which Innovacorp held to encourage startups on the island. The pair won for a company called InstantDiner, which they hoped would become an online ordering and reservation system for independent restaurants.

After a pivot earlier this year, they are beta-testing a new business called PizzaGO, an online site that lets local pizzerias take orders quickly and easily. They have one paying client in

As the Oceans ’14 conference gets under way in St. John’s today, a local startup will debut the 3D underwater visualization system it has been working on for several years.

Whitecap Scientific has developed a product called ROV3D, which creates interactive three-dimensional diagrams of underwater structures and objects using information collected by cameras on un-manned rovers. The company has been working for three years at the Genesis Centre – the Memorial University commercialization centre – with the goal of improving companies’ ability to view underwater topography and structures

The problem of attracting early adopters once again showed itself at the Entrevestor-Entrepreneurs’ Forum luncheon in St. John’s on Thursday, even though it hadn’t been invited.

We had a great turnout and a truly superb meal at the Junior Common Room at Gushue Hall, Memorial University of Newfoundland. About 45 people turned out to join in two discussions – one about the coming Venture Newfoundland and Labrador Fund, and another on encouraging corporations to invest in startups.

Rather than feature keynote speakers, the Entrevestor-EF events are an opportunity for the startup community

Norex, the Halifax web development company, has issued the following press release:

Halifax based innovation and web firm Norex presenting at the world’s largest AdTech conference in Tokyo

Halifax, NS -- September 9, 2014 – It is not every day that one of our Halifax based technology companies is featured at the largest AdTech conference on the other side of the world but on September 18, Partner Leah Skerry of Norex.ca will be on stage presenting to a crowd of over 14,000 delegates about Norex’s products and innovation.

Hosting marketing and advertising delegates from over 40

Failure isn’t something most of us celebrate, but Kathleen Rayworth said her failures help her to be an effective executive director of the Entrepreneurs’ Forum, a regional organization that links entrepreneurs with seasoned advisers from the business world.

Rayworth has been working at the forum since 2007, becoming executive director in 2010. Despite her characteristic modesty, she is

The fifth annual Invest Atlantic conference will shine a spotlight on a problem that hounds every startup community — how to encourage more wealthy individuals to invest in local young companies?

Since it began in 2010, Invest Atlantic has chosen a theme each year, such as partnering with corporations or global investing, and in 2014 is focusing on angel investment. That’s investment in startups by individuals, either on their own or through organized networks.

The growth of angel investment makes sense because there are individuals in the region who have money to invest, and angel

When Claire Ciel Zimmerman entered the Summ’er Up entrepreneurship program at Dalhousie University this summer, she hadn’t even heard of a lean canvas.

The co-founder of the magazine publishing startup Bootstrap had to learn how to use the nine panels of the canvas to test theories on developing a business.

“As my colleagues and I moved through the program we began to see the value of the lean canvas as a set of guiding principles, which became very useful in considering how to establish a viable business with a sustainable revenue model,” said Zimmerman.

She has now joined the