The Canadian Innovation Exchange on Friday named ClearRisk of St. John’s to the 2011 list of Canada’s 20 most innovative technology companies.

Five-year-old ClearRisk Inc. is an SAAS venture that helps mid-level insurance brokers assess risk. Led by CEO Craig Rowe, it got a major boost this year when GrowthWorks Atlantic and the First Angel Network teamed up to back it with $1.2 million.

The CIX Top 20 divides its winners into two groups: Information and communications technologies and digital media. ClearRisk is in the digital media group and will deliver a presentation on its

Headspace Design, a Halifax graphic arts consultancy, has soft-launched its new Perfect Pitch application as a beta model.

Perfect Pitch is an online instrument that helps graphic artists perfect their pitches to clients. It allows the artist to create a file for the client, collaborate with colleagues to develop attractive proposals and monitor leads as they progress.

The app is designed to solve the pain caused by the unwieldy process of pitching a client and maintaining that client’s file throughout the process. Perfect Pitch keeps case studies in one place and easily allows content

Congratulations to my friend Brent Larsen for prying $50,000 from the taut fist of a dragon on Dragons’ Den last night.

Larsen is the President of Bedford-based Steep Hill Solutions, which makes Omega Crunch Flax Products – essentially healthy flax flakes in a condiment shaker, so you can sprinkle them on your yogurt or whatever.

Having garnered revenues of $190,000 last year, Larsen was asking for $50,000 for a quarter of his business, and he drew immediate interest from the dragons. “You’ve taken something people know is good for them and you’ve made it accessible,” said Arlene

The Moncton Cybersocial today will feature two intriguing new companies -- Picomole Instruments, whose device detects cancer through breath analysis, and The Corporate Trade Network, which offers a bartering service to corporations.

The Corporate Trade Network will actually launch its new trading platform from 2 to 5 pm today at the Moncton Club, 115 Queen St. The event will then morph into the monthly Cybersocial, which will take place from 5 to 7 PM, also at the Moncton Club.

Corporate Trade Network allows businesses to offer services instead of cash to one another to attract and

Innovacorp yesterday released the names of the 25 finalists in its I-3 innovation competition.

I’ve cut-and-pasted below Innovacorp’s list of companies plus a short description of each.

There are a few  – GMS Surface Tech, Mindful Scientific, MediaSpark – that Entrevestor has featured previously, and MediaSpark was profiled in the Chronicle-Herald today.  

I have two thoughts on the long-list: first, there were only six entries from Zone 2 (South Shore and Yarmouth) and five of them are now on the short-list, but I’m familiar with a couple of them and at first glance there doesn’t

Last week I posed the same question to two players in the New Brunswick tech industry, and got identical answers.

What, I asked both Barbara Ells of Tech South East and Larry Sampson of the New Brunswick Information Technology Council, was the biggest issue facing the tech segment in the province? Their answer: talent, or the lack thereof.

“The biggest issue here is talent,” Ells, the Manager of Programs and Member Relations for the tech enabling organisation, said in a meeting at her Moncton office on Thursday. “It’s mainly (an issue) on the IT side, but IT marketing skills, for

St. John’s-based Verafin, which makes anti-fraud and anti-money-laundering software, announced Thursday it has signed a formal partnership with Open Solutions Inc., a Connecticut company that makes systems that process banking transactions.

The Newfoundland company said in a statement the partnership will bring its converged fraud detection and anti-money laundering solution to customers of Open Solutions’ on-demand and on-premise core banking solutions.

“We have always had the pleasure of a great relationship with Open Solutions,” said Verafin CEO and co-founder Jamie King. “We’re very

LED Roadway Lighting is developing the next generation of energy-efficient outdoor lighting, which will feature dimming technology that is triggered during periods of low traffic volume.

Ken Cartmill,  Vice President of Business Development at the Halifax manufacturer, told a business forum the company is in the research stage of developing lighting devices that will dim, and therefore use less electricity, at non-peak periods or when traffic is low.

“We’re working on innovative control systems that would turn lights down whenever there is less activity in an area,” said Cartmill,

The Nova Scotian government is providing $2.63 million in financing to the Nova Scotia Research and Innovation Trust, which hopes to leverage it into $11 million in R&D funding from a range of partners over the next five years.

The Trust issued a statement saying the funding will “finance 17 research projects over the next five years, and that more than 300 people will be involved in them.”

NSRIT matches funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the projects they are involved in attract funding from other institutions as well. The beneficiaries of recent funding include

Jeff Roach likes the fact that he so frequently runs into his lawyer when he leaves his office.

Not to mention his accountant or other advisers and peers in the tech community.

Roach works in Uptown Saint John, and revels in the fact that his office is dead centre of the greatest concentration of information technology companies in the region. Within a few blocks – and blocks adorned with wonderful Victorian architecture – he can find 30 tech companies and a vast array of intermediaries. In fact, he says he can’t leave the office without running into them.

The tech community in Uptown