Every Tuesday, about 10,000 people in Charlottetown eagerly await an email from a company less than a year old that offers them a chance to claim more than 1,000 gifts from local merchants.

The company in question is GetGifted, and its simple idea of helping merchants attract new customers with gifts is creating buzz in Charlottetown and beyond. The company has launched a program in Fredericton, and is already signing up future members in Saint John, Halifax and Moncton. And next month, it will begin a test program in Cambridge, Ma., its first trial in a U.S. city.

The buzz among

The surge in submissions to Innovacorp’s I-3 competition has been quite remarkable, especially in rural areas.

The innovation agency announced this week that it received 228 submissions for the 2013-2014 startup contest – an increase of more than 60 percent for the last time the biennial competition was held. Sixty percent is astonishing. The number of entries rose 9 percent four years ago, and 7 percent two years ago. Now there is a sudden surge in nascent companies.

Like the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition, the aim is to thrash the bushes across the

Atlantic Angels held their first meeting yesterday, featuring pitches from four companies and a request for feedback in shaping the young group.

Permjot Valia, an investor and the Founder of MentorCamp, hosted the meeting at the Volta startup house, which was attended by about 30 people, including seasoned angel investors and the presenting companies.

“This is an experiment,” Valia told the group. “The success of this meeting will be judged by the feedback we get.”

A group surrounding Valia and Milan Vrekic, the Executive Director of Volta, have formed Atlantic Angels as a group of

In an effort to reduce the stigma attached to failure, the Pond-Deshpande Centre at the University of New Brunswick has launched the region’s first Failure Fund.

The idea is that entrepreneurs who give an idea their best shot and come up short (read: most entrepreneurs) should be encouraged to give it another try. In fact, the thinking is that entrepreneurs gain so much valuable experience in managing an unsuccessful business that the region gains by having these people running businesses again.

So the Pond-Deshpande Centre, which encourages social entrepreneurship as well as

My favourite sports writer, Don Banks of Sports Illustrated, likes to open his columns with the words: “Musings, observations and the occasional insight from” such and such. Well, here are my musings, observations and occasional insights from the third annual MentorCamp yesterday in Halifax.

1. The quality of the teams was exceptional, showing the depth of great startups in the region. Founder and CEO Permjot Valia had a great lineup of companies at MentorCamp 2012. He had been worried about whether the pool of tech companies in Atlantic Canada was deep enough to bring in six to eight

Having previously proposed developing pneumatic motors for lawn mowers, Braden Murphy is applying this technology to a range of products for the oil and gas industry.

Last year, Murphy was taking his Masters in Engineering at Dalhousie University when he was working on a company tentatively called Scotia Motors, which aimed to commercialize technology he had developed at the university. The plan was to use pneumatic motors in lawnmowers to reduce noise pollution, but Murphy and his supervisor, Assistant Professor Darrel Doman, found that the costs of attacking consumer markets were

A new association has formed in Nova Scotia to advance the interests of the burgeoning video game industry.

The Nova Scotia Game Developers Association formally announced its launch earlier this month, promising to promote and advance the growing industry within the province.

“We were all working on various initiatives and coming together makes us stronger players within the industry,” said President Kirsten Tomilson in an interview last week. “Our aim is to promote and advocate digital game developers, and I think it’s important that we value inclusion.”

According to the

When Greg Phipps, an investment manager with Innovacorp, walked into the offices of the Beijing Development Authority last month, he was struck by the scale model of the Chinese Capital’s industrial park for tech companies, E-town.

The park is bigger than Halifax. The model itself was 30 feet by 15 feet. Phipps took a picture of it with his phone, but it was too large to capture the whole

The third annual MentorCamp Atlantic will take place at the Delta Halifax next week, linking up eight leading startups with a host of mentors from Atlantic Canada and around the world.

The event is the brainchild of British investor Permjot Valia, who has backed several Atlantic Canadian companies. In 2011, he conceived of a program that would gather eight to 10 startups together with about 30 mentors so the companies’ founders would receive sound advice in a closed setting from a range of experts.

Since the first event in September 2011, MentorCamp has incorporated in Nova Scotia and

When the Atlantic Angels hold their first meeting on Oct. 22, it will represent a huge opportunity to usher new blood into the investment community.

That much we know.

But as I spoke to a few entrepreneurs last week, it became apparent that there are still lots of questions about what the creation of a new investment body will mean for Atlantic Canada’s burgeoning start-up community.

A group comprising investors such as Permjot Valia and Milan Vrekic, the executive director of the Volta start-up house in Halifax, said last week they are setting up the Atlantic Angels, which would herd