With a $1.9-million loan from the Atlantic Innovation Fund, Island Abbey Foods of Charlottetown is tripling its research staff and pioneering the delivery of health supplements and pharmaceuticals through its honey-based products.

The company is famous for its honey-based candies and lozenges, and for walking away from a $600,000 funding agreement with four dragons from CBC’s Dragons’ Den. The collapse of that deal was the dragons’ loss because Island Abbey now appears to be in the midst of its second straight year of 100 per cent revenue growth, and is not only cash-flow positive but

Answer this quickly: What’s the one thing that private enterprise in Atlantic Canada wants governments to do to improve our competitiveness?

Did you answer, “Lower taxes”? It would have been my guess.

But we’d both be wrong.

The top business leaders in Atlantic Canada have spent more than two years studying the weak economic performance on Canada’s East Coast as part of the 4Front Atlantic series of conferences. Ahead of the third and final 4Front gathering on Thursday, the heads of the five working groups that wrote the 4Front report assembled Friday to brief the media on their

Halifax Pop Explosion, the autumn event that started 21 years ago as a forum for local music, plans to expand its digital component this year so it will become a marketplace and mentorship lab for East Coast technology.

HPX last year added HPX Digital to highlight the technology that goes hand in hand with the pop phenomenon, focusing mainly on such segments as the Internet, gaming, mobile and startups.

The reaction has been positive, and the organizers have decided to expand the tech side of the festival, said executive director Jonny Stevens in an interview.

The festival this year

The Wallace McCain Institute at the University of New Brunswick has named the 16 participants in the sixth cohort of its Entrepreneurial Leaders Program.

After an intense two-day process it calls "The Choosing", the institute selected a range of entrepreneurs from the three Maritime Provinces who Executive Director Nancy Mathis described as representing “the regions highest growth potential entrepreneurs.”

The 16 people who will participate in the program over the next year are:  

 

1. Monica Adair, ACRE Architects Inc., Saint John;

2. Sarah Albert, PGYIN Holding Inc., Moncton ;

At least nine startups or organizations working in the area of animal health will attend a MentorCamp affiliated with the VetHealth Global conference in Charlottetown on June 10.

The participants in the one-day mentoring session include two groups operating in Atlantic Canada — the Moncton-based Atlantic Cancer Research Institute and Delivra Inc., a Burlington, Ont., biotech that has a research and development facility in Charlottetown.

This is the first year of collaboration between VetHealth Global, one of the leading conferences in North America for animal medicine, and MentorCamp, a

Volta, the co-working space for startups in downtown Halifax, has yet to complete its first month of operation, but it is already fleshing out its programs and partnerships, which will benefit young companies in the region.

The “startup house”, as its founders have dubbed it, has struck partnerships with MentorCamp and with St. Mary’s University’s new Masters of Technology, Entrepreneurship and Innovation program. Executive Director Milan Vrekic has also unveiled the list of programs for the startup community.

About 13 tech startups now occupy the shared office space on Spring Garden

Sackville, N.B.-based biotech Soricimed Biopharma Inc. has signed a contract to conduct Phase I clinical trials at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, meaning its drug candidate SOR-C13 will be tested at three North American facilities.

The drug has been in trials since last autumn at two Canadian facilities – the Juravinski Cancer Centre in Hamilton, Ont., and the nearby London Health Science Centre. In an interview yesterday, Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer Jack Stewart said the Phase I trials should take about a year.

SOR-C13 is a targeted

ClearRisk Inc., the St. John’s SAAS venture that helps mid-level insurance brokers assess risk, has closed a follow-on round of funding from GrowthWorks Atlantic and an arm of the Business Development Bank of Canada to help it continue its rapid growth.

CEO Craig Rowe said in an interview last night the company has raised $500,000 in venture capital funding from existing investor GrowthWorks Atlantic, and has raised additional financing from BDC Capital.

The company previously raised $1.2 million from GrowthWorks Atlantic and the First Angel Network in 2011.

Rowe, who said that

Oris4, the Halifax software company that has developed a cloud-based document organization system, has hired Salesforce.com veteran Wade McCallum to lead the company’s sales team.

McCallum had been Salesforce’s vice-president of enterprise sales, having held a senior sales position with Fredericton-based Radian6, which San Francisco-based Salesforce bought for $326 million in 2011.

His title at Oris4 will be vice-president of sales.

 “It’s a big move for us,” said co-founder Andrew Doyle in an interview. He said he and partner Peter Hickey “can’t focus on everything 100 per cent of

In the last 24 hours, the largest-circulation newspapers in both Canada and the U.S. have run articles on Canadian tech hubs. 

USA Today has printed my story on the tech community in Kitchener-Waterloo. I've already posted a few articles from that trip, such as the report Magnet Forensics and Iain Klugman's comments on whether we should aim for a regional or local startup community. The USA Today piece features Tony Abou-Assaleh from TitanFile, which is based in Halifax and Kitchener.

Meanwhile, the Toronto Star has published a story by Max Mertons on New Brunswick becoming Canada's