The Halifax startup community is staging an event next month that could theoretically lead to improved services and greater efficiency in Halifax Regional Municipality.

Volta, the co-working space for startups in downtown Halifax, is hosting a hackathon Sept. 14 and 15 in which as many as 140 tech enthusiasts will work with municipal data to devise web- or mobile-based applications that the municipality and its citizens could use. Applications are available here.

In a hackathon, tech enthusiasts come together for a weekend and are divided into teams that work together to develop a

After a gas leak was reported in Halfax’s south end in July, Gordon McArthur and Nick Nickerson drove around the area taking readings of natural gas with an ultra-sensitive analyzer to make sure all leaks had been plugged.

Within a few hours, the two execs from Forerunner Research Inc. had crunched the numbers and mapped out all air levels on Google Earth.

 “The results looked fine, with no lingering reason for concern,” McArthur said later, pleased to be able to demonstrate his company’s gas detection capabilities.

Forerunner Research of Dartmouth has developed gas-flux measurement

I was really lucky in March to spend some time with Mark Dobbin, the head of Killick Capital of St. John’s.

The result of that interview – conducted in his open, marble-floored office with a panoramic view of St. John’s Harbour – is an article on the Killick portfolio in this month’s edition of Progress magazine.

What really interested me about Dobbin’s investments was the diversity – both in terms of segments and geography.  There’s a theory in the investment world that you improve your success with a focus on a certain sector, but Dobbin is the exception that proves the rule. Though

The latest edition of Startup Monthly, the video discussion about the Atlantic Canadian startup community, is now available at Startup Kitchen.

This month, Robert Foley, Suhaim Abdussamad and I are joined by Jason Lee, Program Manager at Entrepreneurs Forum in P.E.I.

As usual, we take a look at what’s going on around the region, including a few recent funding announcements.

Ascenta Health Ltd. in Dartmouth has received a $500,000 repayable loan from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency to support the marketing of Ascenta Skin, its first omega-3-based product for the beauty market.

Founded a decade ago by CEO Marc St-Onge, Ascenta Health has developed a dominant position in the Canadian natural health product market with its NutraSea brand of nutritional products made naturally from omega-3 fatty acids.

Four years ago, St-Onge and his team became aware of scientific research showing that omega-3 EPA and DHA (the fatty oils found in such fish as salmon)

BlueLight Analytics, whose technology ensures dentists apply the right amount of energy when curing resin-based fillings, has launched its new checkMARC product, which it hopes will serve as an entry into dental offices around the world.

The Halifax company has also restructured its royalty agreement with Dalhousie University, where its technology was developed, so the university is now a shareholder. And it has expanded its board of scientific advisers.

Though it has clients in 12 countries, BlueLight has so far focused on raising awareness in the dental community of the problems

All you North American sports fans out there: have you ever read a cricket report in a British newspaper?

My bet is any fan of the NFL, NHL, NBA or MLB will be lost in the talk of the wickets, creases, hits for six and the mind-numbing stats. But millions of Englishmen start their day reading these reports and understand every word.

Too many statements from startups – whether they’re pitches, or blogs, or press releases, or demos -- come across like a British cricket report. They target a specific audience and are incomprehensible to most other people. And they often result in the

My old friend Gail Lethbridge highlighted Entrevestor in this superb column on Atlantic Canadian entrepreneurship on Saturday.

Lethbridge, whose column appears weekly in the Chronicle-Herald, makes the case that entrepreneurship is alive and well in the region.

She speaks with some authority on entrepreneurship, given that she is a Co-Founder of the highly successful ocean industry company Welaptega, which assesses the condition of industrial moorings and other underwater equipment.

Lethbridge’s columns are uniformly entertaining and insightful and we’re delighted to be mentioned in

In the next few months, a Halifax startup will launch an online learning network that will deepen the relationship between some of the world’s leading personal improvement authors and their legions of followers.

The company, sageCrowd, was founded on the belief that such writers don’t change their readers’ lives because people fail to engage with a book in a way that changes behaviour. SageCrowd transforms each author’s work into a series of monthly online lessons so followers can develop habits that improve their performance, brings them success and make them happier.

 “What we’ve

Halifax-based LeadSift, whose software finds sales leads for corporate customers, has signed a distribution agreement with HootSuite, the Vancouver startup that allows people to monitor and manage their social media traffic.

The two companies said today that the LeadSift app is now available in the HootSuite App Directory, and it can help HootSuite Clients to quickly find social media posts that can become sales leads. Clients would pay $4.99 a month to subscribe to the app.

“We’re excited to announce that an app integration partnership with HootSuite . . . that was released today is