Saint John has become the third New Brunswick city to be named to the Smart21, a club of cities and towns from around the world dedicated to the "broadband economy", the New York-based Intelligent Community Forum said Friday.

Fredericton received the honour several times, most recently in 2009, and Moncton made the list in 2009 and 2010.

"What we did is finally throw our hat in the ring," said Jeff Roach, the former executive director of Propel ICT and the brains behind the new thethinkcity.ca website. He said the other New Brunswick cities had applied repeatedly in the past but this

Innovacorp, Nova Scotia’s technology commercialization agency, has received 142 applications for its biennial I-3 competition, up almost 7 percent from two years ago and reflecting particular interest in the Halifax area.

Dawn House, spokeswoman for the agency, said Innovacorp is pleased with the numbers as it had set a target of 100 submissions.  It had received 133 submissions two years ago.

The Halifax region accounted for the lion’s share of the submissions with 69, up from 54 in 2009. Cape Breton was second with 27 submissions, followed by 24 from Digby and the Annapolis Valley, 16

Halifax-based 2nd Act Innovations , which has developed an advanced document-organization system called 4sightECM, landed its first sale in the U.S. by winning a contract yesterday with North Star Solutions of Media, Pennsylvania.

North Star, which provides technology and services to the mortgage industry, announced that it selected 4sight Enterprise Content Management, or  ECM, platform. Corporations face the perennial nightmare of organizing, protecting and accessing their documents, emails, reports and the like and 4sight is a system that allows companies to quickly and easily store

Halifax medical devices company Mindful Scientific has secured the first commitment of funding en route to a seed round it hopes will be worth $400,000 to $600,000.  

Permjot Valia, a London investor who has invested in several Nova Scotia startups and the author of the Angel Business Blog, has made a commitment to invest in the company, which is commercializing technology that can check for brain injury.  The company recently gained media attention because it hopes its technology will help diagnose brain trauma caused by sports injuries – an incredibly controversial subject.

Mindful

There are few angles of the Halifax Shipyard story that have been overlooked, but none is more glaring than how lucky we are that K.C. Irving and his descendants were  born in the Maritimes.

Billionaires are not in vogue this season, but the Irving family has proven this week that they have done all the region – New Brunswick in particular but the region in general – could ask of them.  For almost a century, they’ve channeled and rechanneled their wealth into tremendous enterprises in Atlantic Canada, and that is a big reason that Irving Shipbuilding won the $25 billion contract

Atwood Technology, a Miramichi software company employing artificial intelligence to provide matching services, will launch its first paying site within weeks, CEO Theresa Williams said in an interview.

The early-stage company, which has attracted New Brunswick tech mentor Gerry Pond to its board of advisers, has devised software that uses artificial intelligence to match individuals with people or organizations that suit their personalities.  The software, says Williams, has several applications and the company will begin with a dating service launched on behalf of a corporate client

Two Newfoundland and Labrador companies have been named to the prestigious 2011 Deloitte Tech Fast 50, and a P.E.I. startup has been named a Company to Watch.

Marport Deep Sea Technologies of St. John’s placed 17^th on the list after its revenues increased 1131 percent over five years. And Verafin, which makes anti-fraud and anti-money-laundering software,  took the 27^th position with an 840 percent growth in revenues over a half-decade.

ScreenScape Networks, which customizes video screen displays for clients, was one of ten companies named to Deloitte’s Companies to Watch list, the

Exits, schmexits! The truly compelling news in the New Brunswick startup community late in 2011 involves entrances.

McKenzie College of Moncton will soon open an accelerator for pre-seed companies, and Propel ICT has announced its Launch 36 program, designed to develop 36 seed-level companies through an advanced accelerator in three years. (Accelerators are similar to business incubators in that they help mentor and often capitalize young businesses, preparing them to survive on their own. As the name suggests, they intend to get the new enterprises off the ground quickly.)

And Mariner

The Telegraph-Journal reported this morning that tech entrepreneurs Gururaj Deshpande and Gerry Pond have made a multi-million-dollar donation to finance the Pond-Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UNB.

This is only the latest nugget of good news for the startup ecosystem in New Brunswick and the region.  The recent exits have boosted capital for investment and there are new accelerators being launched. New Brunswick has a competitive tax regime and is developing an admirable swagger.

So what’s needed now to ensure the region spawns a few more Radian6’s?

My

Companies often develop into family trees, with clusters of progeny growing hither and yon, and an interesting group of shoots is sprouting in northern Nova Scotia around an intriguing entrepreneur called Joe Menchefski.

He is the CEO of Billdidit, a design-and-manufacturing concern best known for drumming products, and he has teamed up with chemistry professors from St. F.X. to form GMS Surface Tech, which produces green cleaning products now selling at such chains as Staples, Grand and Toy and Basic.

Born and raised in Whitney Pier, Menchefski received an engineering degree from the