With the provincewide I-3 tech startup competition already in full swing, a new competition is being launched solely for startups in Cape Breton and the Mulgrave area.

Enterprise Cape Breton Corp., the Economic and Rural Development and Tourism Department and Innovacorp are jointly organizing the Spark Cape Breton competition. They launched the event Thursday night at TecSocial, the monthly get-together for the tech community on the Island.

The competition will target true early stage startups, meaning those that have yet to book any revenues. With an eight-member judging panel

Phillip Curley walked into a Fredericton Tim Hortons last week bearing a big smile and a handful of blue plastic chips that he had just received in the mail.

The chips, each about the size of a loonie, were Bluetooth low energy devices. Curley says they are key components in his plan to convert his company, HotSpot Parking, into a customer relationship management, or CRM, provider.

As a student at University of New Brunswick, Curley developed HotSpot Parking as the provider of a cellphone app that allows people to pay their parking meter charges electronically. The idea was that

Katelyn Bourgoin had such huge belief in her plans for a bartering website that she bartered with service providers to get it built.

Bourgoin, the head of the Halifax marketing firm RedRiot Communications, had a vision about a year ago for a site that would allow service providers and entrepreneurs to swap their services without exchanging cash.

What she found as she worked on the project is that women were far more enthusiastic about the concept than men. So she will soon launch Swapskis, a site where entrepreneurial and professional women can go to swap services.

 “After

As a tenant of Halifax’s historic Roy Building, which will be replaced by a new building this year, Halifax Makerspace Society is looking for fresh accommodation. The fledgling group of creators needs a space large enough to accommodate a growing membership keen to work on and build their creative design and technological projects.

Halifax Makerspace, whose membership  now stands at 30, has

For about a decade, Siu O’Young has been wrestling with a problem: How can unmanned aircraft — commonly known as drones — fly safely in a sky filled with aircraft?

A native of Hong Kong, O’Young is a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland and is now developing a young company called Seamatica Aerospace Ltd. in the Genesis Centre, the university’s commercialization incubator.

Seamatica is exploring commercial opportunities for unmanned aircraft and tackling the vexing problem of flying them so they are not a danger to other planes.

“The whole thing is collision avoidance,”

When Ian Earle encountered a common problem with his digital camera last year, he had no idea it would lead to a business that helps chip-truck owners and street vendors.

The third-year computer science student at Dalhousie University has teamed up with classmate Colin White to form Pixel, which is developing a small mobile printer that can operate off of a phone, tablet or computer.

The genesis for the project was the fact Earle couldn’t find a cheap, convenient way to print photos from his camera. He is a passionate photographer and wanted prints from his digital camera without the

We want to wish a Happy New Year to all our readers, and close out 2013 by drawing your attention to the Techvibes home page. There you’ll find Entrevestor’s wrapup of the year – the first of what we hope will be frequent Entrevestor posts on Techvibes.

As Atlantic Canadian startups move aggressively outside the region in search of capital and customers, we believe news about these companies should also find a broader audience. So we’ve reached an agreement with Techvibes, Canada’s national online tech publication, to pick up our articles from time to time. This will include material from

We’ve had a great year at Entrevestor, and one of the joys has been meeting and chatting with so many dynamic people in the startup world. So we’d like to take a moment to thank you for your support and friendship, and for educating us in the strange ways of innovators.

This festive photo shows how much our family is embracing innovation. It’s a custom-made Entrevestor ornament, designed by

Like most youngsters, Jonathan Robichaud is excited about putting snacks around the chimney for Santa and his reindeer. In the Robichaud household, Santa is left chocolate chip cookies and a latte, and his reindeer get carrots and celery.

What sets Jonathan apart from most kids is the content of his wish list. The nine-year-old tech lover’s letter to Santa requested robotics equipment and

Robert Niven walked into the CarbonCure Technologies holiday party earlier this month with an expression that was equal parts elation and weariness. Not only had the company’s Founder and CEO spent the week closing a few sales deals, he had also announced a $3.5 million round of financing led by BDC Venture Capital to fund R&D and expand its sales team.

The Halifax cleantech company, which is pioneering a low-carbon process of manufacturing concrete products, was part of a healthy trend that developed in the Atlantic Canada startup community in 2013 – a growing flow of institutional money