After 25 years in venture capital, I first heard the term “investment ask” five years ago, when working in Nova Scotia.

I didn’t like it at all! And I really don’t like the practice of asking entrepreneurs to pay to pitch.

One important thing I learned during all those years is a good deal requires equal parties. Entrepreneurs and investors are of equal importance to the deal and to each other. If anyone feels treated any other way than equally, it will lead to friction, and the deal will be harmed.

You may think the investor always has the upper hand, but you’re wrong. The investor

The staff of Ooka Island Inc. gathered at their Charlottetown office a few weeks ago to watch the educational software company’s pitch on CBC’s Dragons’ Den.

One staff member’s smartphone was logged on to the company’s e-commerce site, which pings every time Ooka Island gets a new client.

As the pitch was broadcast, the phone began to ping and ping until it sounded like a drum roll. The sound eventually died down, only to happen each hour as the show was broadcast in the next time zone and then the next.

“That started a pretty steady stream (of sales) for about the next two weeks,”

OneLobby on Thursday will launch – or maybe christen is a better verb – the first version of its event management software, which it has adoringly named Alana.

The Fredericton startup, which last year moved its headquarters from Halifax, pivoted, and raised $500,000 in angel funding, said it the launch will take place at the Canadian Society of Professional Event Planners annual meeting, being held at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Fredericton.

The company has decided to name each version of its software after someone who supported its development, and named Version No. 1 after early adopter

Maria French jokingly says she still has the “startup bruises” from the early years of trying to gain traction with her medical transcription business, Terra Nova Transcription of St. John’s.

In 2000, French got the idea of providing a service to transcribe the notes that doctors dictate for each patient who visits a hospital. Most hospitals have in-house transcribers, but these services are expensive and can take weeks to transcribe a report (too long if a patient’s condition is deteriorating rapidly).

“In 2001, our entry point was the U.S. market,” French said in an interview from her

The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation has named the five finalists for its biennial Breakthru competition, in which early stage companies will vie for $406,000 in prizes.

The finalists -- Black Magic, CeteX, Store-it Squirrel, TotalPave and RTV – will now be entered into the Viewer’s Choice award, in which the CBC broadcasts features on each company, and viewers select their favourites.

NBIF and the law firm Cox & Palmer will announce the winner and two runners up of Breakthru as well as the Viewer’s Choice award at the Breakthru Awards Dinner at the Delta Fredericton Hotel on March

Almost two years after landing a seven-figure venture capital funding, Lymbix Inc. of Moncton is gaining revenue with a different product than the one that attracted investors.

Lymbix drew the attention of the regional startup world in April 2011 when it received $1.35 million from GrowthWorks Atlantic Venture Fund. It received the funding largely on the strength of ToneCheck, a product that runs on the company’s innovative social-media sentiment analysis application programming interface, or API, a set of tools used to build software apps.

But two years later, Lymbix’s focus has

The group producing some of the largest tech-venture conferences in Canada is coming to the Atlantic Provinces.

Spurred by the growing national interest in the region’s start-ups, the Critical Path Group announced late last week that it will host the Atlantic Venture Forum in June at the Westin Nova Scotian in Halifax. The idea behind the event is to provide a meeting place for venture capital funds to get together with local companies, dozens of which are searching for follow-on funding.

 “We work closely with the vast majority of active VC firms in Canada, and many in the U.S.,” says

Ed Leach talks about the upcoming Canada’s Business Model Competition by comparing it to the situation that used to exist in Canadian college basketball – the championships were in Halifax every year.

Dalhousie University – at which Leach teaches entrepreneurship – announced Thursday that its Rowe School of Business will hold the competition for student entrepreneurs on March 9. The winner will take home half of $30,000 in prizes, and then attend the International Business Model Competition at Harvard University May 3 and 4.

What’s significant is that it is the only Canadian venue for

As I ended a conversation Tuesday with an entrepreneur who was once funded by the First Angel Network, he said, “The worst thing that could come out of this would be for FAN to shut down.”

This is the controversy that erupted Tuesday when David Crow of StartUp North published a blog criticizing the Halifax angel network for charging entrepreneurs to pitch and taking money from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Network.

Crow believes strongly that entrepreneurs should not pay to pitch investors. His main complaints – highlighted by boldfaced expletives – are that entrepreneurs pay FAN

The fact that RtTech Software CEO Pablo Asiron has travelled this year to Kazakhstan, Australia and the Philippines to meet clients and sales prospects shows how successful the New Brunswick company has been in international markets.

Only 16 months old, RtTech of Riverview has developed software that helps companies become more efficient with energy and their machinery. Last May, it raised $750,000 in equity investment from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and a group of individual investors.

Since then, the company has expanded its sales and now has 40 clients in 11 countries.