Ryan Keliher walked into Pitch101 in Charlottetown with an idea for a social entrepreneurship venture and walked out with a $500 first prize and an invitation to Invest Atlantic in Halifax in September.

Keliher’s pitch Friday for United World Changewear was a wonder in brevity, focus and passion, and one of the highlights of the first Pitch101 – a new regional initiative organized by Bob Williamson of Invest Atlantic, the region’s premier conference for the startup community.  The second Pitch101 will be held in Halifax on March 1.

Williamson set up the events to give entrepreneurs in

After a variety of business pursuits, Sarbjyot Bains believes he may have finally found the entrepreneurial venture that can change the world — an educational platform for the world’s most inexpensive tablets.

Born and raised in Gujarat in Western India, Bains is now a 22-year-old chemical engineering student at the University of New Brunswick. Despite his young age, he has initiated several startups, featuring them in various competitions around the Maritimes.

But he believes he has now found the venture he can move forward with.

Bains is the CEO of NovelBoard, a Fredericton-based

Having retired from a career in engineering, Bob Haagensen has devoted the last few years to making GPS surveys more accurate at sea.

Haagensen is the founder of Ocean Wireless Data Systems, or O-Wireless, which has developed technology that extends the range at which the Global Positioning System is accurate at sea. He said the existing system now operates with incredible accuracy up to 20 kilometres from shore, and the O-Wireless technology lengthens that to about 500 kilometres, which could be a valuable resource for the offshore oil industry.

“Offshore surveying is still really

Peter Diamandis has got past linear thinking to grasp the potential of a world in which knowledge is expanding exponentially. And in his brilliant book Abundance he shares his vision of what this brave new world could look like.

The book is powerful enough that I felt compelled to review it, even though it strays a bit from my usual job of covering startups in Atlantic Canada. Its message is key to the people who struggle day after day to develop companies that will change the world.

I first became aware of the book when Dan Martell, the CEO of Clarity in Moncton, tweeted that he loved

Jean-Philippe Olivier is setting out to start a company that will protect the Maritimes’ glorious beaches from harmful jellyfish and make money doing it.

Olivier is a former restaurateur from northern France who came to New Brunswick about eight years ago to work in the hospitality industry. Now living in Grand-Barachois, near Shediac, he is the founder and controlling shareholder of Pilou Products Inc., which is now going through the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition.

The vision is simple. Pilou aims to work with three levels of government in the next five

When T4G and the New Brunswick Information Technology Council staged the Big Data Congress in Saint John on Jan. 24, they wanted to roll out a few of the region’s start-ups dealing in data analytics. They didn’t have to look far. They assembled the bosses of three of the leading regional data-analytics companies who displayed the cutting-edge technology being produced to attack this burgeoning market.

Big Data is in the process of pouring through mountains of data, usually produced by digital actions, and determining how people will act, what they’ll buy, and so on. The three Atlantic

Tim Burke is a pretty amazing entrepreneur. The Co-Founder of Quark Engineering in Halifax calls himself a parallel entrepreneur, a businessman able develop several enterprises simultaneously, and he has other irons in the fire. With his partner Stephen Hankinson, Burke developed Tether, which has been linking laptops and mobile phones for almost four years now. And Burke is active in

Picomole Instruments Inc. of Moncton expects to close $1.2 million in equity funding this quarter with the intent of performing clinical studies on a breath-analysis device it believes will revolutionize diagnostics.

In an interview in his office overlooking downtown Moncton, CEO John Cormier said the company has a working, portable prototype of its breathalyzer-like device that can detect lung cancer by identifying markers in people’s breath.

The company plans to spend 2013 performing clinical studies on the device and examining foreign markets, most likely in Latin America or Asia, to

The success of the Big Data Congress in Saint John on Thursday was driven home to me not just be the crowds but by James Stewart shouldering his way through the packed foyer and saying in passing just three words.

“We got approval,” he said

I wrote earlier this week about Stewart’s startup Repeat Target Vehicles, which analyses data from police departments to pinpoint repeated drunk drivers and warn them not to use their car after drinking.

Stewart yesterday said the Saint John Police Department had just received approval to work with RTV on developing the project. Aside from the

Coady Cameron’s thesis for his master’s of civil engineering degree could end up saving municipalities a lot of money.

Coady and his brother, Drew, are the co-founders of TotalPave, a Fredericton startup that aims to revolutionize the way cities and towns assess which roads need to be paved.

The idea is so impressive that the Cameron brothers won the national Nicol Entrepreneurial Award last year for a new technology coming from a Canadian university.

Both men are still students at the University of New Brunswick, and Coady plans to hone the project as part of his engineering thesis.