Last week I posed the same question to two players in the New Brunswick tech industry, and got identical answers.

What, I asked both Barbara Ells of Tech South East and Larry Sampson of the New Brunswick Information Technology Council, was the biggest issue facing the tech segment in the province? Their answer: talent, or the lack thereof.

“The biggest issue here is talent,” Ells, the Manager of Programs and Member Relations for the tech enabling organisation, said in a meeting at her Moncton office on Thursday. “It’s mainly (an issue) on the IT side, but IT marketing skills, for

St. John’s-based Verafin, which makes anti-fraud and anti-money-laundering software, announced Thursday it has signed a formal partnership with Open Solutions Inc., a Connecticut company that makes systems that process banking transactions.

The Newfoundland company said in a statement the partnership will bring its converged fraud detection and anti-money laundering solution to customers of Open Solutions’ on-demand and on-premise core banking solutions.

“We have always had the pleasure of a great relationship with Open Solutions,” said Verafin CEO and co-founder Jamie King. “We’re very

LED Roadway Lighting is developing the next generation of energy-efficient outdoor lighting, which will feature dimming technology that is triggered during periods of low traffic volume.

Ken Cartmill,  Vice President of Business Development at the Halifax manufacturer, told a business forum the company is in the research stage of developing lighting devices that will dim, and therefore use less electricity, at non-peak periods or when traffic is low.

“We’re working on innovative control systems that would turn lights down whenever there is less activity in an area,” said Cartmill,

The Nova Scotian government is providing $2.63 million in financing to the Nova Scotia Research and Innovation Trust, which hopes to leverage it into $11 million in R&D funding from a range of partners over the next five years.

The Trust issued a statement saying the funding will “finance 17 research projects over the next five years, and that more than 300 people will be involved in them.”

NSRIT matches funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the projects they are involved in attract funding from other institutions as well. The beneficiaries of recent funding include

Jeff Roach likes the fact that he so frequently runs into his lawyer when he leaves his office.

Not to mention his accountant or other advisers and peers in the tech community.

Roach works in Uptown Saint John, and revels in the fact that his office is dead centre of the greatest concentration of information technology companies in the region. Within a few blocks – and blocks adorned with wonderful Victorian architecture – he can find 30 tech companies and a vast array of intermediaries. In fact, he says he can’t leave the office without running into them.

The tech community in Uptown

Cape Breton medical device maker Halifax Biomedical Inc. has secured a $3 million equity investment to help finance the roll-out of its high-resolution imaging system that allows surgeons to monitor changes in artificial joint replacements and detect implant failure.

Nova Scotia Business Inc. said Friday its venture capital arm has invested $2 million in the company, and that Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation is investing $1 million.

Mabou-based Halifax Biomedical's main product is the roentgen stereophotogrammetric analysis or RSA, which is an X-ray device that allows two simultaneous

Just back from a successful trade mission to Boston, Jason Richard, CEO of Saint John-based real estate website Prop2go.com, said his company is preparing to move into new market segments, including cars and jobs.

Prop2go’s technology allows landlords and property managers to find tenants for their apartment buildings. It has more than 100,000 listings from clients in seven countries, though its main focus is on Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. In a recent trade mission, it signed up three new clients in suburban Boston, which were its first clients in New England.

Richard explained in an

File-sharing enterprise TitanFile Inc. of Halifax has been named the joint winner of an award aimed at recognizing young companies contributing to Canada-U.S. collaboration.

The U.S. Embassy in Ottawa is holding a conference Wednesday titled The Canada-U.S. Partnership: Enhancing the Innovation Ecosystem, and in honor of the conference it held a contest for startups whose work contributed to cooperation between the countries. TitanFile and FloorNav3D of Toronto won the competition and are invited to the conference in Ottawa.

Founded by Milan Vrekic and Tony Abou-Assaleh, TitanFile’s

Cape Breton healthcare administration company Health Outcomes Worldwide has secured $840,000 in funding from federal and provincial governments to help with the roll-out of its new how2trak product.

Innovacorp, the Nova Scotia government’s innovation agency, said this morning it has made an equity investment of $250,000 in the New Waterford-based company. And the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency said in a posting on its website that it has extended Health Outcomes a $500,000 provisionally repayable contribution, which means it will have to be wholly or partially repaid under certain

 With a new in-licensing deal signed and sealed, Sackville, N.B.-based biotech Soricimed Biopharma is preparing to begin its Phase I human tests for its own cancer drug and cancer diagnostic product in 2012.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it has in-licensed a proprietary peptide from the University Health Network of Toronto so it can commercialize the drug. A peptide is a small protein, and this particular peptide can stop growth in cervical, bone and lung cancer cells. It has similar properties to the peptide Soricimed has been developing for the past six years.

In an