FounderFuel, VC to Host Pitch It Event

Two leading Canadian authorities on startups and seed funding will hold an educational session on pitching in Halifax next month as part of a nationwide campaign to improve startups’ presentations.

Ian Jeffrey from FounderFuel and John Stokes from Real Ventures, both of Montreal, will host Pitch It at the Volta startup house on Spring Garden Road on September 26 at 2 pm. The Halifax date is part of a seven-city Pitch It tour.

Tickets cost $15, and could go quickly. The Montreal event is already sold out.

Pitch It consists of two lectures, and then an opportunity for the startups in

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SMU’s Farrell Seeks Help with Survey

The Sobey School of Business at St. Mary’s University wants to measure and assess all the components of the Atlantic Canadian startup ecosystem, and is looking for a range of people to help out.

Professor Ellen Farrell, well known for her work in entrepreneurship, is conducting a survey of the members of the startup community and is asking that a range of people involved with startups take 15 to 25 minutes to fill out the team’s survey .

Yes, her team at Halifax-based St. Mary’s is hoping that founders of startups and young high-growth companies will fill out the survey, but she is also

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CENE Launches 48 Hours in the Hub

Canadian Entrepreneurs in New England, a network of Canuck expats in the Boston area, announced Tuesday it is accepting applications of its inaugural 48 Hours in the Hub event, to be held Sept. 29-Oct. 1.

Modeled on 48 Hours in the Valley hosted by the C100 group in Silicon Valley, the event is intended to be an intense two-day session that can expose 20 of the hottest startups in Canada to the booming tech and life sciences community in and around Boston.  The big difference with its West Coast counterpart is CENE is looking for life sciences as well as IT and Cleantech companies,

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Purchext Unveils Parental Finance App

After a long and hectic summer, a group of entrepreneurs from Dalhousie University will unveil their financial app Purchext to angel investors in Toronto today as the final segment of the grueling Next 36 course.

Purchext is a company formed at Dalhousie last spring and its founders — Cam McDonald, Zachary Levy, and Daniel Bartek — took the project to the Next 36 program, a three-month academic/mentoring program for undergraduate entrepreneurs. The graduation from the program includes pitches to angel investors.

Having worked and reworked their proposal and technology over the summer,

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Fredericton Cuts Business Internet Fees

Fredericton-based businesses – including the startups in the two incubators that will open this autumn -- will soon be offered a massive saving on their internet fees, which the city hopes will further develop its burgeoning startup community.

E-Novations, the not-for-profit internet provider owned by the City of Fredericton, announced last week it would offer a commercial internet service to local businesses at a discount, which is about 75 percent less than rates available in the rest of Atlantic Canada.

More than a decade ago, Fredericton set up e-Novations as a vehicle for providing

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After Cuts, Sheepdog Focuses on Labs

Sheepdog Inc., the Halifax company specializing in cloud-based software development, will focus on organic growth in its Sheepdog Labs division now that it has laid off most of its 13-member sales and marketing division, CEO Brandon Kolybaba said in an interview Wednesday.

Sheepdog is structured into two main divisions — the first is a venerable reseller of Google Apps, and the second, Sheepdog Labs, is a development business that builds cloud-based software for clients, ranging from small business to some of the world’s biggest companies.

Kolybaba said the company last year hired a

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Vitrak Gaining Traction with Stepscan

A day after its Atlantic Innovation Fund financing officially expired, Vitrak Systems Inc. of Charlottetown closed its first sale.

The company in 2011 won a two-year, $1.4-million loan from the Atlantic Canada Opportunity Agency’s innovation fund, which it used to commercialize its Stepscan footprint analysis technology. The company has now produced a commercial product and sold one to the University of Prince Edward Island for its new Concussion Screening and Return to Play Evaluation Program. And Vitrak has about 10 potential customers that have asked for quotes.

 “People are

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Support Groups Plan Busy Autumn

In the midst of those hazy, lazy days of summer, startup incubators and accelerators around Atlantic Canada are hard at work preparing for a bevy of activity in the autumn.

These “startup organizers”, if you will, all like to be called something different – like incubator, accelerator, co-working space, or startup house. But they all provide places for startups to work and/or provide instruction in how to develop your company.

Several of them have let Entrevestor know about their plans for the autumn, so we’re letting fly with our first Startup House/Incubator/Accelerator/Co-Working

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Volta Hackathon Targets HRM Data

The Halifax startup community is staging an event next month that could theoretically lead to improved services and greater efficiency in Halifax Regional Municipality.

Volta, the co-working space for startups in downtown Halifax, is hosting a hackathon Sept. 14 and 15 in which as many as 140 tech enthusiasts will work with municipal data to devise web- or mobile-based applications that the municipality and its citizens could use. Applications are available here.

In a hackathon, tech enthusiasts come together for a weekend and are divided into teams that work together to develop a

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