I recently witnessed a pitch by the representative of a Central Canadian biotech company that had a product that sounded spiffy, but damned if I could figure out what the guy was saying. The pitch involved a string of medical jargon—and while I did understand that the founder and his team were developing a revolutionary drug, I only gained a vague sense of what the company, for which he as trying to raise $2 million, was doing.

When I was in a group session with the fellow later that morning, I wanted to discuss the wording of his pitch, but someone asked him first about his fundraising.

The Co-Founders of the new Halifax startup Modest Tree Media Inc. want to make printed training manuals — whether for assembling an Ikea bookshelf or operating a state-of-the-art jet engine — a thing of the past.

These entrepreneurs — chief executive officer Saman Sannandeji, chief operating officer Emily Sannandeji and chief technology officer Steven Vermeulen — are designing a software-as-a-service product that will reduce the cost and time involved in making 3-D training programs by as much as 80 per cent.

Modest 3D, as the product is called, lets instruction designers or subject

My latest article for USA Today, which is in today's edition, covers the programs popping up in the U.S. that help Canadian startups – C100, Canadian Entrepreneurs in New England and the Canadian Technology Accelerators.

The story features Joelle MacPhee of Ooka Island, the Charlottetown producer of games to encourage literacy in children. Joelle has attended programs on both coasts in the U.S.

The article also mentions that CENE recently held its launch in in Halifax.

 

Data analytics company Search2Go of Saint John is opening a development office in northern New Brunswick, supported by an investment by former premier Frank McKenna’s Miramichi Technology Fund.

Capitalizing on the boom in big data, Search2Go is a vertical search engine that allows users to conduct deep searches of specific information. Using unique markup language, Search2Go mines data from sources all around the world and provides the customer with a simple, filtered set of data that is easy to comprehend.

Founder and CEO Jason Richard began a company several years ago called Prop2Go,

IPSNP Computing, the Saint John company whose software conducts industrial-strength searches of vast numbers of data banks, is looking for a few end-users to beta test its HYDRA product early next year ahead of the full launch in the late summer or fall of 2014.

The company, whose name is pronounced IP-snip, is on the cutting edge of semantic technology, which means it helps end-users like pharmaceutical companies find specific, often highly complicated, information.

It is now looking for researchers and knowledge workers in about 10 to 15 companies and research organizations that could

Daniel Silver held up a printout of about 15 possible names, bearing varying combinations that featured such words as “Acadia”, “Data”, “Analytics” and “Institute.”

Silver, the Director of the Jodrey School of Computer Science at Acadia University, and several colleagues are at work this summer putting together plans for a data analytics institute. As the list shows, they have yet to agree on such minutiae as the name, but they already know what will separate this from other academic Big Data bodies in the region.

“Our data institute will have a rural and agricultural focus,” said

The reception wasn’t great on Atlee Clark’s call from San Francisco, but what came through loud and clear was that C100 is more than ever a vibrant part of the Canadian start-up ecosystem.

The executive director of C100 had no trouble getting across the message that the organization for Canadian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley is shifting emphasis slightly to represent that it’s no longer a fledgling organization. “In the last three years, the focus has been on taking 100 people in the Valley and figuring out who’s best to help certain entrepreneurs,” said Clark in a

BDC Venture Capital said today it is investing $150,000 each in RUMAnalytics of New Brunswick and Analyze Re of Nova Scotia as part of an agreement with the Launch36 accelerator program.

The venture capital arm of Business Development Bank of Canada said it is extending convertible notes of $150,000 each to 10 recent graduates of Canadian accelerators, including the two from Moncton-based Launch36.

The accelerator, which has prepared 18 companies for investment and the market in 15 months, said that it will work with BDC in the future to assess “venture ready” graduates from the

When about 50 East Coast founders, entrepreneurs and partners rolled en masse into the Montreal International Startup Festival’s opening night barbeque in matching “Startup East” blue t-shirts, it made a statement.

“It shows that we are presenting ourselves as a community,” said Milan Vrekic, Executive Director of Halifax’s Volta Labs. “More importantly, it shows we are maturing as a community compared to where we were five years ago.”

And while today no one is going to confuse the “Silicon Coast” with Silicon Valley, it does show that something real is taking root in Atlantic Canada’s

Dozens of East Coast startup attending the Montreal International Startup Festival are hustling hard to find partners, employees and, of course, investors.

Companies like TitanFile, Modest Tree Media, topLog, Interview Rocket and Wicked Ideas took turns holding court in the Atlantic Canada tent, pitching their ideas to the wandering crowd, alongside startups from Ottawa, New York and Toronto. People from other East Coast startups like RUM Analytics, One Lobby, 26ones, AnalyzeRe and Fund Metric, took in the sessions and roamed the scene.

East Coast entrepreneurs – many arriving on one