SimplyCast, the Halifax-based multi-channel marketing company, is planning to launch its Version 7 product in January, including new features that will make it easier for users to reach their audience.

“It will basically allow us to launch products faster and it will include the most attractive user interface we’ve ever had,” CEO Saeed El-Darahali said in an interview this week.

A former executive at Innovacorp, El-Darahali left the government innovation agency in 2009 to develop his idea of starting an online company that offered a single point of contact for marketing across a range

Halifax’s LED Roadway Lighting Ltd. has bought the intellectual property and other assets of distressed Streetlight Intelligence Inc. of Victoria, B.C., to combine smart wireless technology with its energy-efficient HPS and LED street lighting.

To meet the latent demand for more sophisticated outdoor lighting, the company founded by CEO Chuck Cartmill has been researching new technologies such as dimming features that use less light during low traffic periods. The acquisition will propel the company further in that direction by adding wireless controls to the lighting technology.

“LRL

Halifax-based Sheepdog Inc., an industry leader in the development of Google Apps, began beta-testing its new Milely app for smartphones on Monday, following up on the success of its gTrax time tracking application and the GooGrant application filter.

The company said in a statement that Milely operates on Android and iPhone to track the users’ driving mileage and includes such features as a management approval process, entry auditing and custom reporting.

The company is targeting corporations interested in tracking staff mileage in an efficient and inexpensive manner.

As part of the

 Three months before the year-end figures are in we can all but confirm that Atlantic Canada is enjoying a record-setting year for venture capital investment.

Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA) and Thomson Reuters last week released their VC stats for Canada and the good news is that the country is doing reasonably well this year in VC investment. The better news is that Atlantic Canada is doing brilliantly.

In the first three quarters of this year, venture capital firms have pumped $66.2 million into Atlantic Canadian companies; more than triple the $21.3

My sources say – and I hope they’re correct – that reports of the pending death of the National Research Council’s Institute of Information Technology facility in Fredericton are greatly exaggerated.

Last week, Warren McKenzie, chairman of the advisory board for the IIT, said publicly he expects the institute, which has a facility in Fredericton, will be closed by next spring and its talent will be absorbed into other government programs. The fear is that the R&D component will be transferred out of New Brunswick, meaning the province would lose a crucial segment of research in an

When Chris Zimmer looks at most e-books, he sees something tantamount to an electronic photocopy, but he believes they can be so much more.

Zimmer, a career filmmaker, has teamed up with Kirsten Tomilson, CEO of Lunenburg-based game producer Fourth Monkey  Media, to form Helix Media Publishing, which they hope will soon be producing an e-book a month.

Zimmer and Tomlison believe e-books should be more exciting than black-and-white reproductions of the printed page. They should be interactive, multilingual, with audio and video components, links to games and access to chat rooms. They

When TitanFile organized DemoCamp Halifax in August, it chose an interesting cause to which it donated the proceeds: Dalhousie University’s Women in Technology Society.

I say interesting because the name is a tad deceptive, especially the word “Society”, which connotes companionship and good cheer, possibly a meeting place to discuss shared interests. But the Dalhousie group and comparable organizations in other campuses and workplaces address an acute pain-point in the development of the knowledge economy.

There are too few women choosing technology as a career, and more than half of

 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