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

Magnet Forensics is everything a start-up should be.

The company is lean, produce incredibly strong revenue growth and grows by retaining earnings, not seeking investment. But what makes it stand out is that the company’s technology offers a massive benefit to society.

Magnet, based in Waterloo, Ont., recovers deleted information from a computer. It’s used to help police find information that a suspect thought had been deleted. This could be communications between people, financial records, or even contraband photos. It’s particularly effective in the fight against child pornography.

The Progress Magazine "People We Love" issue is now on the news stands, and it is rich in material about the startup community.

We'll be featuring more on the issue later, but several prominent people in the startup community made the People list this year. I wrote up three items, featuring: SimplyCast CEO Saeed El-Darahali; Build Ventures Co-Manager Patrick Keefe; and a joint piece on Dalhousie University's lean entrepreneurship profs Ed Leach and Mary Kilfoil.

When we asked Danielle Fong -- a Dartmouth native who now runs Lightsail Energy in California -- to appear on the list, she

Patrick Hankinson is not a guy who wears his heart on his sleeve, but he does post his business metrics by his door.

Hankinson is a soft-spoken entrepreneurial whiz who runs Compilr, an online development environment that allows users to learn, write and test code in the cloud.

Earlier this month, Compilr moved into Volta, the new co-working space for startups in Halifax. Beside the door of the company’s new office, Hankinson has posted two rows of printouts, one labelled The Good, and the other The Ugly. They show the company’s good and bad news over the past two years.

The prominent

Jonathan Robichaud recently completed a private tutorial on writing computer code with Java-Script, and he can’t wait to move on to Python.

In his Java-Script course, he received a full day of lessons from Connor Bell, a Dalhousie computer science student and co-founder of Execute Technologies Inc. But Java-Script is used mainly for designing websites, and he really wants to sink his teeth into Python because that’s the language used in designing games. Eventually, he and his friends want to move on to larger engineering projects.

 “We’d like to build an airplane,” he said as he enjoyed

A decade after starting as a research project at Holland College in Charlottetown, the Justice Knowledge Network is being spun off into a for-profit eLearning company called JKN Inc.

Executive Director Sandy Sweet said in an interview yesterday that Charlottetown-based JKN incorporated about three months ago and is in the process of becoming a private company designed to harvest profits for its single shareholder, Holland College. The company, which now has about 20 employees, is eagerly developing new markets for its eLearning systems outside of its traditional base of programs for law