Alex Gillis and the Wisdom of Youth

Young entrepreneur Alex Gillis was keen to share his views on education with the Prime Minister when they met earlier this month.

Gillis was one of eight young Canadians, (Halifax-based Sage Franch was another) to be invited to meet the PM to discuss how education has fueled their success.  

“I told the PM there isn’t enough creativity in our school curricula,” said Gillis, who two years ago

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Nature’s Way Applauded by BioNova

BioNova, the Nova Scotian life sciences industry association, has chosen Nature’s Way’s acquisition of Ascenta Health as its good news story of the past year.

The association last night held its annual Good News and Blues festivity – a chance to celebrate a good news story in the biotech sphere, and listen to blues played by members of the life sciences community. And it announced the best news

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Halifax Startup Group on Facebook

There’s a new social media platform to connect entrepreneurial Haligonians, and it uses that most ubiquitous of all networking sites, Facebook.

St. Mary’s University student Mike Cyr created a group on Facebook called the Halifax Startup Community on Friday and as of Wednesday it already had 160 members. You can find it here. In true Facebook fashion, it is a place where members can post

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Mariner Grows With Shift Energy Buy

Last autumn, Mariner Partners concluded a sizeable transaction the way it does much of its business – quietly.

The Saint John technology conglomerate works with a host of startups, and one that captured a lot of its attention was Shift Energy, an Industrial Internet of Things concern that provides automated energy controls to large facilities. Mariner and several of its principals had great

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1 Week Until Atlantic Venture Forum

The Atlantic Venture Forum, the conference that aims to link Atlantic Canadian startups with investors, has issued a last call to register for the event that starts one week from today in Halifax.

Critical Path Group, which is organizing the event, says people hoping to attend still have time to register here.

The organizers said that at least 39 investment and tech support groups will attend

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Our Report on Scaling Is Out

When the Halifax startup Proposify wanted to tell the world how it had grown in 2015, it put out a press release with some pretty gaudy numbers.

Founded by tech entrepreneurs Kevin Springer and Kyle Racki, Proposify had already been going for half a decade with the goal of producing a Software-as-a-Service product that would help agencies and others produce a better quality of pitches. It

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Kinduct, Affinio Kill It with Pitches

To appreciate how successfully some Atlantic Canadian startups are scaling, check out these two pitches – one by Kinduct and the other by Affinio – that wrapped up recent West Coast accelerator cohorts.

Travis McDonough, CEO of medical-data provider Kinduct, delivered his pitch in November at the Dodgers Accelerator in Los Angeles. And Tim Burke, who heads the data analytics company Affinio,

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Time to Consider B Corp Certification

I often discuss strategy with the companies I meet, and there’s one piece of advice I am giving more and more frequently these days: consider a B Corp certification.

And I’m making this recommendation based economic more than ethical grounds. I say this because B Corp certification can help staffing immediately and – I believe -- will become more and more important in sales and funding as time

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