Andrew Button has attended too many meetings about Atlantic Canada’s economic troubles. He has worked in economic development with a specialization in rural communities and found that the region’s economic woes became a hot topic in every discussion.

Yet these constant meetings never found concrete solutions to grow economic development in Atlantic Canada.

“Who was actually going to do this

My column last week suggesting a hackathon to find a home-grown solution to snow days drew a lot of response, which I’d like to share with our readers.

To recap, I suggested that the education departments or school boards hold hackathons to work on a tech solution for the amount of time students miss due to snow storms. Even as I write this, the Halifax Regional School Board, which had a week to sort things out, has canceled classes while it assesses buildings.

I said we need an online platform with which teachers could communicate with students when schools were closed, either

The Genesis Centre, an incubator affiliated with Memorial University of Newfoundland, has issued the following press release:

Ocean Technology Company SubC Imaging Wins International Business Award

Memorial University’s Genesis Centre is congratulating its graduate company SubC Imaging on winning the Outstanding Incubator Graduate Award from the U.S.-based National Business Incubation Association (NBIA).

Out of six possible award categories, SubC Imaging is the only Canadian company to receive an award. The NBIA Incubation Awards honour the top business incubators, client companies

Castaway Golf Technologies, a company that grew out of a young boy’s love of retrieving lost golf balls, has won the $287,250 first prize in the 2015 Breakthru competition.

The Fredericton company that is developing an automated system for retrieving, sorting and selling balls lost in water hazards received the news at the Breakthru dinner last night, attended by 540 people.

The first runner-up was Simptek, which is working on home automation systems that save energy. Third place was captured by NB Biomatrix of Saint John, founded by Jeff Jennings and Keith Brunt, who have discovered a

With the support of BDO, Entrevestor will once again this year host a series of Entrevestor Luncheons, beginning with an event in Moncton on April 15.

BDO, the accountancy and tax advisory consultancy, has agreed to sponsor four Entrevestor Luncheons this year. The luncheons are an opportunity for members of the startup community can come together to discuss ways to improve the regional ecosystem.

Last year, partnering with Entrepreneurs’ Forum, we held luncheons or dinners in each provincial capital in the region. The topics we discussed ranged from finding early adopters to mentorship

As Executive Director of The Mentra, Atlantic Canada’s new mentoring organization, Janna Hare expected to be matching mentors and mentees like a dating service. But she’s found that people want to choose who they work with.

So now, The Mentra is establishing MentraConnect, a cloud-based platform that suggests mentors based on an entrepreneur’s profile, but also allows mentees to search for

As education departments around Atlantic Canada try to find a solution for the snow day problem, they should consider asking geeks for help.

The pain is obvious. Our students are missing too much time due to the weather, and officials are considering making up the time on Saturdays or holidays.

They might ask tech communities to come up with an online solution that would allow teachers to

Invest Atlantic has announced that Nancy Mathis will chair the conference this autumn, and that it will expand its pitching series to include new classes of entrepreneurs.

Now in its sixth year, Invest Atlantic is a pan-regional conference for entrepreneurs and investors in Atlantic Canada. It will be held this year at the World Trade and Convention Centre in Halifax on Sept. 29 and 30.

And

Three New Brunswick companies tomorrow will receive funding of more than $200,000 each as the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation will announce the winners of the 2015 Breakthru competition.

The Breakthru Awards Dinner will be held Thursday night at the Fredericton Convention Centre, and the highlight of the evening promises to be the announcement of the winner of the biennial competition. That team will go home almost $300,000 richer, but the second- and third-place teams won’t be complaining either.

Breakthru has become part of the landscape in the New Brunswick startup scene, and

When we published our first Entrevestor Intelligence report of 2014, the numbers that leapt from the page were the job creation figures.  But things have changed in the past year.

The Atlantic Canadian startups we surveyed a year ago told us that they increased their staffing by 43 percent in 2013. They intended to increase employment by 50 percent in 2014, and the IT companies planned to double their staff overall.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

Despite the blazing optimism in early 2014, the 139 companies that gave us 2014 data on their staffing overall employ 1,051 full-time