There was a Nova Scotian angle to the $1.5 billion deal that was the talk of Silicon Valley yesterday.

Professional social media network LinkedIn announced it would pay $1.5 billion in cash and stock for Lynda.com, a Carpinteria, Calif.-based company that offers online training. Part of the technology that LinkedIn is buying was developed by Halifax-based Compilr, founded by serial entrepreneur Patrick Hankinson.

Last year, Lynda bought Compilr for an undisclosed price, and Hankinson and his CTO Tim Speed have continued to work on the product since the deal closed.

Compilr began life

PropelICT, Atlantic Canada’s startup accelerator, announced Wednesday that the best Nova Scotian and New Bruncswick graduates from its accelerator will now be eligible for an additional $100,000 in funding.

The accelerator has struck a partnership with the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and Innovacorp, which will consider investments in the leading graduates from each cohort. This program will begin with the coming cohort, which will run through the summer.

These graduates – those that complete the more advanced “Build” program – are already being considered for $150,000 in funding

I returned recently from a trip to India. We were there to film part of a new documentary called The Millennial Dream. We wanted to see how millennials and an emerging culture of social entrepreneurship in a city of 1.5 million people could inspire us back home. The documentary records New Brunswick’s journey toward becoming Canada’s mecca for millennials or “digital natives” who want to create

GetGifted has sent out its last gift list.

The Charlottetown startup that helped local merchants reward customers by giving them gifts announced on social media Tuesday that it would cease operations.

CEO and co-founder Gillian McCrae said in an interview that merchants were still using the weekly gift lists. However, she and her team came to understand the resources needed to roll out the

The Nova Scotia government announced Tuesday it will contribute $400,000 to Brilliant Labs, an initiative that encourages technical education in schools in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Premier Stephen McNeil said the government will ensure the initiative operates through all eight school boards in the province in the 2015-16 school year.

Under the terms revealed Tuesday, the not-for-profit initiative aims to provide lab space, to teach a range of technical skills and to encourage collaboration with industry.

A statement from the government said it will offer labs where students can

At Volta, Moses is leading his people to the promised land of wellness and productivity.

In this particular case, Moses is Moses Robicheau, CEO of Addo, a startup that helps organizations encourage physical activity and good health among their memberships. It is one of the newest ventures working out of the Halifax startup house, and it’s already creating an impressive list of corporate and not-for-profit clients.

Make no mistake: there are a lot of competitors out there, as there are several websites that help organizations improve the wellness of their employees. But it’s also true

Nathan Armstrong doesn’t mind using the F-word, and believes more Atlantic Canadians should discuss it openly.

The F-word, despite what you may have thought, is “failure”.

Armstrong is rightly proud that he and his brother Greg launched their cleantech startup Hyton Innovations, were shortlisted for an award and took the company through two accelerators. And he’s not ashamed to say that

Ron Keefe is proud that the sale of BioVectra, the Charlottetown drug manufacturer he has led for 11 years, is generating two waves of investment into Atlantic Canada.

Tens of millions of dollars will be invested in capital improvements at BioVectra over the next few years. Plus, the company’s original owners are putting together a fund to invest in Atlantic Canadian businesses.

Keefe and

Origin BioMed has been placed in receivership.

The Chronicle-Herald reported Friday that the Halifax company was placed in receivership on March 16, with Grant Thornton Ltd. being appointed trustee.

Origin Biomed, which had received venture capital funding from Nova Scotia Business Inc., GrowthWorks Atlantic and Avrio Ventures of Calgary, manufactured and marketed Neuragen, a natural pain relief for diabetes sufferers.

At its height, the company sold the sold the product over-the-counter at more than 20,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada. However, in 2011 the company ran into problems

The CS Square pitch competition at the University of New Brunswick took place last week with first place going to No Distrapptions, an app that allows users to eliminate the distraction of message notifications.

By turning on the app, notifications from messages are blocked, and the user has the option to send an automatic response.

“If the user needs to notify someone of their arrival, they can use the app to send an automatic (one time or recurring) message to a specified contact at a specified destination,” Natalia Stakhanova, NB Innovation Research Chair in Cyber Security, said in a