Xocean Ponders Base in Halifax

Since touching down in Halifax earlier in the autumn, James Ives has been wondering if the East Coast city could make a suitable North American base for his company, which uses unmanned boats to gather ocean data.

Ives is the co-founder and CEO of Xocean, an Irish company that is developing a fleet of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) to gather data from the murky depths. It’s built on the premise

Continue Reading

MicroWise Taps Halifax Expertise

The fact that Pia Haecky and Jone Jacobsen were sitting in a coffee shop in Halifax demonstrated the international appeal of their company, and how the oceantech cluster is progressing in Atlantic Canada.

Haeky and Jacobsen are senior partners in MicroWise, an ocean startup whose technology assesses the quality of water that ships hold in their bilges as ballast. It tests water quality onsite in

Continue Reading

Milk Moovement Eyes Expansion

Robert Forsythe hopes his company Milk Moovement will have 10 clients within two years, which would mean having coverage right across Canada.

The St. John’s-based company has developed a cloud-based reporting system that helps dairy boards give real-time reports to farmers about the quality and volume of their milk production.  

Milk Moovement now has one customer, the Dairy Farmers of

Continue Reading

ILokol Lands 1500 Clients in 6 Months

There’s often a moment of stunned silence after the founders of iLokol pitch, as if judges and audience members are wondering if they understood the pitchers properly. No one is used to seeing the numbers that Halifax-based iLokol presents from a company in its first year.

Founded by students from China, iLokol is a website that lets international students shop online in their own language from

Continue Reading

Venture Grade Invests in Cribcut

Saint Mary’s University’s Venture Grade Fund – a VC fund managed by students – is investing $15,000 in Cribcut, an online marketplace for hair stylists willing to make house calls.

“Cribcut has a novel business model that we are proud to support,” said Saint Mary’s student and Venture Grade associate Emma Scott in a statement.

Halifax-based Cribcut was co-founded by serial entrepreneur David

Continue Reading

Innovacorp Seeks Sprint Entries

Innovacorp is looking for early-stage IT companies to enter its Sprint competition, which will award a total of $100,000 in grants to at least four winners.

Sprint will give as much as $25,000 each to winning companies and will announce the winners next month.

Innovacorp is the Nova Scotia government’s early-stage venture capital agency, and it also holds a series of competitions in specific

Continue Reading

IT Leader John Swan Passes Away

Our community lost one of its true leaders last week when John Swan of Saint John passed away.

Swan was a tremendous proponent of the tech industries, especially in New Brunswick. As well as overseeing several companies in the field, he was a key figure in the development of the community and ecosystem in the region.

He worked with development agencies to grow the tech sector, and was a key

Continue Reading