Green with Energy, a company that came together at a Dalhousie University’s Startup Weekend last year, is moving from software into hardware with a new product that can help homeowners find where they’re wasting electricity.

Smartcell is a simple, inexpensive device that can plug into a wall socket and provide a graphic illustration of where and when a homeowner can reduce energy consumption, said CEO Megan McCarthy in an interview. “We think we may have come across a solution for home automation,” she said.

Having begun the project at Dalhousie, McCarthy started Green with Energy to

When Andrew Burke presents Remembary at DemoCamp Halifax on Sept. 23, he’ll be displaying one item in what is becoming a portfolio of apps and, well, an online curiosity.

Burke heads Shindig Digital Constructions Inc. and Remembary, a digital diary for iOS-based products, is the company’s first app, but it won’t be the last. Burke is also working with Toronto-based partner Chung Wong on his second project, Jump2Spot.com. He’s also the brains behind the tongue-in-cheek Starships Start Here campaign.

“The best way to make money in the App Store is to have a portfolio of apps, so people

Some programmers want to come up with products that put the “active’’ into interactive TV. Michael-Andreas Kuttner prefers to let the viewer embrace his inner couch potato.

Having spent 15 years in TV production, Kuttner has now formed Halifax-based Neato Entertainment, a young company whose CommercialBreak product automatically allows a smart TV viewer to see web-based content instead of commercials. Once completed, the software will download to a smartphone, which instantly becomes the remote control for the television. The smartphone can automatically detect when commercials interrupt

When the co-founders of znanja Inc. appear at DemoCamp Halifax on Sept. 23, they’ll have something they didn’t have when they entered Innovacorp’s I-3 Competition last year – a product.

The co-founders of the New Glasgow, N.S., company - Tim Houston, Jim Fitt, Dan Enman and Jimmy Mabey - entered the innovation competition in 2011 with little more than a concept. It was software that converts normal, Word-based training material into an eLearning packaging format called SCORM, saving huge amounts of time and money in a massive industry.

Znanja (pronounced  NAN-ja) makes it easy to

Picomole Instruments, a Moncton company developing a breath analysis device that detects cancer, yesterday announced that it has received approval from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and will patent the device.

Formerly called “LifeSens”, the device is currently unnamed because the company couldn't trademark that name.

Cormier said the patent notice allows the company to protect its proprietary technology as it develops clinical applications. He told Entrevestor that Picomole has completed a small pilot study on lung cancer and, encouraged by the results, is planning a larger

Karma Gaming, the Halifax startup out to marry regulated lotteries with video games, has signed a major contract to provide online games to Jumbo Interactive, a regulated lottery company in Australia.

Brisbane-based Jumbo said yesterday it had signed a deal with Karma Gaming, under which it would launch a Karma-designed interactive game that users could play as a means of picking lottery numbers. Karma CTO Jay Aird said in an interview yesterday that Karma – which is only 15 months old – will launch three products for Jumbo, first in an online format with mobile and tablet projects to

Springleap, a South African design crowdsourcing startup, will attend MentorCamp Halifax on Sept. 24, guaranteeing that at least one international company will attend the one-day event.

Permjot Valia, the CEO of MentorCamp, wants to include overseas startups among the mix of Atlantic Canadian companies to increase the international flavor of the event and enhance the exchange of ideas and experience. MentorCamp assembles 10 startups and exposes them to 30 mentors who have come from around the world. The mentors will select two winners, which will each receive a $25,000 investment from

Today’s post is a link to my most recent column in Progress Magazine, and I’m going to add a word or two about the extraordinary month we have planned for Entrevestor.

The Progress story outlines the increasing investment by funds and individuals based outside the region into Atlantic Canadian startups. This really is a sea change, as just two years ago fund managers west of Gaspe Bay rejected Atlantic Canadian companies just because they were Atlantic Canadian.

I wrote the Progress story in June and I have two additions that I have noticed in the past few months as I delved into the

For me, very little says more about the accelerated evolution of Atlantic Canada’s innovation economy than the maturation of Invest Atlantic.

The only pan-regional conference for investors and entrepreneurs in Atlantic Canada will be held at the World Trade and Convention Centre in Halifax on Sept. 26, the third of four events in Atlantic Innovation Week. For the third year in a row, I’m helping to organize the event, and I can’t help but be struck by how different the conference and the overall ecosystem are compared with when we began.

Consider this statistic: in the first Invest

The 2012 BioInnovation Challenge at BioPort Atlantic will be a larger event than last year, featuring seven participants, of whom at least three, have raised money previously.

The BioInnovation Challenge was launched in 2011 as the competitive event at BioPort, the main conference for biosciences in Nova Scotia. There were five participants last year, and ABK Biomedical, which is developing a product for the treatment of benign tumors in women, emerged with the $30,000 first prize.

The finalists -- a strong field given that almost half are proven to be investment-ready -- are:

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