On August 14, Chris Dobbin will wade into the chilly water of the Northumberland Strait for the second time in a year and swim from New Brunswick to P.E.I. to raise money for children with chronic diseases.

The gruelling 14-kilometre swim -- dubbed The Big Swim -- has a special resonance for Dobbin, the president of Precipice Capital in Dartmouth, as it was only 16 months ago that he lost his five-year-old son Jack to a terminal illness.

In the initial swim – shown in this video – Dobbin, Todd McDonald and Peter McCormick raised $50,000, including donations to the Jack in the Clouds

For the second time in 85 days, Jordan Smith and I met Monday at Fred’s Café in Halifax. What a difference. In less than three months, the OneLobby CEO has raised $200,000, hired a `Dream Team’ of executives and attended SeedCamp New York.

When Smith and I first sat down in May, he was a bootstrapper’s bootstrapper. OneLobby was a simple system that offered a social network to conference organizers, so attendees could network online before, during and after a conference. Smith was operating out of Fred’s with a laptop and a cell phone, subsisting on $78,000 in grants.

But he had a

Early in June, Dr. Kirk Hillier of Acadia University stood before the people who’d been backing research into commercial applications of insect pheromones and reported their collective efforts had already resulted in sales.

Hillier, a graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland, has spent several years working on an interesting conjecture. He is leading a group of researchers and companies focussed on extracting and synthesizing the pheromones of specific insects that destroy forest and crops and using these products to lure them into traps or to disrupt their mating cycle. In its

Azorus, a Halifax company that offers customer relationship management software to universities and colleges, has signed a major partnership agreement with Tribal Group of the U.K., with the aim of using the British company’s large client base to support growth.

The two companies offer complementary services to universities, but Tribal has much deeper penetration in the British market, so the alliance between the two should assist Azorus in its aim of gaining critical mass in the U.K.

“They’re going to be able to assist us with growth,” Azorus CEO Stephen MacDonald said in an interview

Mathew Georghiou is so convinced that early adopters will like MediaSpark’s new wellness eBook that he’s offering it at a 93 percent discount for the next 43 days.

The Sydney-based eLearning company has just launched its new gamified eBook, GoVenture Health, to teach wellness to a broad range of people, including students as young as age 10. In an introductory offer, it’s selling the eBook to schools until Aug. 31 for $99, which is a $1400 discount on the regular price of $1499. (After Aug. 31, schools will still be able to purchase it for $399 for one month, then the full price kicks

After gestating for 14 months in SwiftRadius Inc.’s innovation incubator, Adeptio Inc., an achievement planning software company, has been launched in Charlottetown, complete with a round of seed funding from private angels.

The cloud-based software-as-a-service company helps a client’s employees achieve better results in life, in terms of their professional performance, long-term ambitions and personal health.

CEO Chad Griffin told Entrevestor that Adeptio is unique because it offers the user various tools, including a life plan, a planning calendar, advanced program tracking, a habits

Given that they named the company GoInstant, no one should have been surprised when the founders decided to exit quickly.

Still, we were surprised–I sure was–when the news broke last Monday that the Halifax co-browser company was selling to Salesforce.com for just over $70 million.It was only last September we were reporting that the developers led by Jevon MacDonald and Gavin Uhma had raised $1.7 million from a dream team of Silicon Valley investors.

Not to mention, it wasn’t that long ago Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce.com and Q1 Labs was bought by IBM. The GoInstant selling price

Halifax-based 2nd Act Innovations said Wednesday it has opened a sales office in Silicon Valley to be staffed by its new senior vice-president of sales, Chris Strachan.

The company has developed the Ortis4 platform, which helps small and medium-sized businesses to efficiently organize, store and retrieve documents. Earlier this year, 2^nd Act raised $1.1 million in capital, including equity investments worth a total of $500,000 from GrowthWorks Atlantic and Innovacorp.

 “We are ecstatic to add a player of Chris’s calibre to our team,” said CEO Andrew Doyle in a release.

“Chris has

About a year after launching Livelenz Inc., Joel Doherty ran into an extremely grateful early adopter of the company’s data-analysis technology for quick service restaurant, or QSR, franchisees. This client, an Albertan who used Livelenz at his 11 franchises, had just come from meeting with his accountant and was delighted to learn that Livelenz had saved him $144,000 in the first year alone. He now employs Livelenz at 19 franchises.  

It’s this sort of value proposition that has allowed Livelenz to build up 4,500 clients, to develop strong relationships with leading international

Oh, to have Sean Liptay’s problem for a minute.

The co-founder and CEO of Selectbidder expects his vehicle-resale company to be profitable by the end of the year, and must then decide whether to proceed with a seven-figure fundraising, a round he has already discussed with potential investors from the private sector.

“In six months’ time, we’re going to be at a crossroads,” said Liptay in an interview Monday. I’d asked for the interview to follow up on his presentation at the Launch36 Demo Day in Moncton two weeks ago. I wanted to check a few facts, and find out why he was so bullish on