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

ChemGreen Innovations Inc. reminds Nauman Farooqi of a line he once heard a comedian deliver: it faces more opportunities than a mosquito in a nudist colony.

In fact, the ChemGreen president and chief executive officer said one of the challenges for the four-year-old Sackville, N.B., maker of cost-effective and environmentally friendly polymers has been to choose which opportunities it wants to pursue.

The company grew out of research by Khashayar Ghandi, a professor of green chemistry at Mount Allison University who discovered a cost-effective means of producing polymers, or

Praxes Medical Group, a Halifax company that provides medical advice to teams in remote locations, is marketing its software to clients across the country as part of its expansion program.

 

Siance 1997, Praxes has provided emergency medical advice to corporate and government clients with remote operations and teams, such as those aboard ships, in the Arctic or in mines.

 

The company uses software called EMwerx, which it developed and is now selling to emergency search teams, fire departments and others across the country.

 

EMwerx helps to manage people and assets in an

The Next 36, an academic/mentoring program for undergraduate entrepreneurs, is planning a conference and introductory event in Moncton in September as part of its effort to lure more Atlantic Canadians.

The Next 36 is an annual, three-month summer program based in Toronto that mentors undergraduate university students who have shown a flair for entrepreneurship. It is highly competitive, drawing applications from students across the country.  It will accept applications for the summer 2014 program until Oct. 7.

In contrast to the dozens of other mentoring and incubating groups, the Next

[Editor’s Note: Allan Gates of Bonfire has kindly offered to cover the East Coast Startup Community’s pilgrimage to the Montreal International Startup Festival for us. Here is his first report.]

As dawn breaks over the University of New Brunswick Fredericton campus tomorrow, 50 bleary-eyed East Coast entrepreneurs representing a number of new and established startups will roll out by bus to the Montreal International Startup Festival. The Festival brings together early-stage founders with successful innovators and investors looking for the next big thing.

The bus trip to the Festival,

Alastair Jarvis proudly says that he was tenant No. 1 at the Hub South Shore, the new co-working space in Mahone Bay.

In fact, he is so enthusiastic about the new facility that he doesn’t like the term “co-working space.” He feels it understates what the Hub South Shore is and does, and what it means to a rural community.

The new facility, which has 13 tenants or members, is part of an international organization that for almost a decade has been establishing casual office space in major centres around the world.

The goal is not just to provide a desk, chair and Wi-Fi but to bring

Last week I wrote a column citing all that had happened in the East Coast Startup Community in first half of the year.  It dealt with a broad range of things that happened on several fronts, from new events, to co-working spaces, to funding, to organizations.

As we go forward, I think the community needs slower work on a narrower front. It simply defies logic that there will continue to be so many initiatives launched at the pace we’ve seen recently. If there are, they’ll likely be less effective than the recent announcements.

In the next six months, the one thing I’d like to see is an

Four years after signing up to help encourage community-based innovation in Fredericton, Kelly O’Brien is now launching his own innovative product that could help community groups everywhere.

O’Brien is chief executive officer of BusinessBoard, a Fredericton startup that has developed a low-cost online bulletin board that allows not-for-profit organizations and their members to post notices and increase the sense of community.

 “We’ve got a business model now that we’re really excited about, and the market is huge with community organizations around the world,” O’Brien said in an

Dalhousie University will soon launch an Institute for Big Data Analytics to nurture research into the burgeoning field that has already produced some of the most exciting startups in Atlantic Canada.

As part of the effort to boost data analytics education in the region, Dalhousie will also initiate a specialization in data science as part of its bachelor of computer science program, starting this autumn.

These developments are important because a broad swath of government and industry has targeted big data as a key economic sector in the region, and universities are a key component in