Atlantic Innovation Week kicked off last night with a range presentations by entrepreneurs, and continues today with MentorCamp Halifax.

DemoCamp was an open forum for entrepreneurs to demonstrate their products to the community. There were no pitches, no powerpoints. The developers had to stand before their peers and competitors (and potential funders) and demo their product – a nerve-wracking experience because you pray the thing works.

The highlights included Darren Piercey of CyberPsyc Technologies showing to everyone the anxiety his product addresses by drowning the hall with the

The pain that Paul Gratzer’s startup addresses is all too quantifiable and frightening: every 20 seconds, someone in the world loses a limb because of chronic foot ulcers caused by diabetes.

Gratzer is the founder and chief executive of DeCell Technologies Inc., which is commercializing a patented technology that could soon help to cure these ulcers quickly and affordably. The Halifax-based company has developed a natural scaffolding from human skin that can be placed over the ulcer to encourage the regeneration of skin cells and keep the wound clean to avoid infection. On Thursday,

For the second year in a row, a New Brunswick company has won the Deal of the Year Award in venture capital from the CVCA, Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association.

The CVCA announced last week that BDC Venture Capital and New Brunswick Investment Management Corp. won the award for their investment in Q1 Labs Inc. of Fredericton, which sold out to IBM last year for an undisclosed price.  Last year, the award went to Summerhill Venture Partners, Brightspark Ventures and BDC Venture Capital for their funding of another Fredericton company, social media analysis outfit Radian6.

Since winning Innovacorp’s CleanTech Open in April, Mather Carscallen’s SABRTech has landed $250,000 in funding and is working toward opening a pilot scale plant, hopefully in Nova Scotia in 2014.

SABRTech came to public notice in the spring when its revolutionary technology for reducing the cost of producing fuel from algae won first place at the $300,000 CleanTech Open. Innovacorp launched the contest to find a cleantech company anywhere in the world that would set up in Nova Scotia. After scouring the globe, they found the winner at Dalhousie University, where Carscallen was working on

The four co-founders of LaunchPark came together this year to form a company to solve the problem they were facing.

The Halifax-based venture is developing a meeting place for ideas and technical expertise, so that entrepreneurs with great ideas can link up with the talent they need to implement them, and vice-versa. And it was created by people who lacked that sort of solution as they set out to form a company.

“We were a team looking for an idea,” said Shivam Rajdev, one of the co-founders, gesturing to his partners Oliver Baltzer and Adrian Bentley. “And Paul had an idea but was

We’re proud today to publish INNOVATION IN NOVA SCOTIA, the first in our series of PDF-based supplements that we’re producing under the Entrevestor Intelligence brand.  And we’re delighted to publish it on the same day as we launch our new web design, .

Entrevestor Intelligence is a series of supplements on the innovation economy in the Atlantic Provinces. Starting with Nova Scotia, we

On the cusp of rolling out a new Rich Communications Suite product announced earlier this year, NewPace Technology Development Inc. is seeking its first round of equity funding. 

NewPace specializes in software development for mobile telecommunications, and is still owned solely by two co-founders, CEO  Brent Newsome and CTO Gavin Murphy. The company borrowed $850,000 from the Business Development Bank of Canada last November and has re-invested its own profits to finance the development of the rcsConnect product but has never raised money from venture capital funds or angels.

Newsome

Ever wish you had a temporary local phone number - one that you could use on Kijiji or a dating site and then dispose of? Sandy Walsh has the technology to make it happen.

Walsh is the founder of SafeCell.ca, a new startup based in Halifax, N.S. that can issue people temporary local phone numbers for smart phones, older cell phones ... even landlines.

“When you are dealing with the public, voice is still the preferred method of communication, but you have to sacrifice privacy,” said Walsh in an interview. "No one wants to get hounded by an annoying salesperson or receive phone calls

Very quietly in the past year or so, Mindful Scientific has been hitting milestones and moving forward with the aim of having a product on the market next year.

The company’s main technology is the Halifax Consciousness Scanner, or HCS, which has many potential applications, though the company has focused its efforts on development of a device to assess head trauma as its initial product. It has received considerable attention in the past year because of the growing concerns about concussions in sports.

“Any work we do in concussions is of key importance to our corporate development

Ashwin Kutty perceives a missing link in the great web of social networks and business tools available today: no one has a solution to navigate the tendering process.

An international consultant based in Halifax, Kutty is now the president and CEO of weusthem Inc., a startup that will present at DemoCamp Halifax on Sept. 23. Its product RevealFP will launch in Atlantic Canada this year and its singular goal – at least in the early stages – will be to help small and medium-sized businesses compete effectively in the formal and informal procurement process both locally and internationally.