Three months before the year-end figures are in we can all but confirm that Atlantic Canada is enjoying a record-setting year for venture capital investment.

Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA) and Thomson Reuters last week released their VC stats for Canada and the good news is that the country is doing reasonably well this year in VC investment. The better news is that Atlantic Canada is doing brilliantly.

In the first three quarters of this year, venture capital firms have pumped $66.2 million into Atlantic Canadian companies; more than triple the $21.3

My sources say – and I hope they’re correct – that reports of the pending death of the National Research Council’s Institute of Information Technology facility in Fredericton are greatly exaggerated.

Last week, Warren McKenzie, chairman of the advisory board for the IIT, said publicly he expects the institute, which has a facility in Fredericton, will be closed by next spring and its talent will be absorbed into other government programs. The fear is that the R&D component will be transferred out of New Brunswick, meaning the province would lose a crucial segment of research in an

When Chris Zimmer looks at most e-books, he sees something tantamount to an electronic photocopy, but he believes they can be so much more.

Zimmer, a career filmmaker, has teamed up with Kirsten Tomilson, CEO of Lunenburg-based game producer Fourth Monkey  Media, to form Helix Media Publishing, which they hope will soon be producing an e-book a month.

Zimmer and Tomlison believe e-books should be more exciting than black-and-white reproductions of the printed page. They should be interactive, multilingual, with audio and video components, links to games and access to chat rooms. They

When TitanFile organized DemoCamp Halifax in August, it chose an interesting cause to which it donated the proceeds: Dalhousie University’s Women in Technology Society.

I say interesting because the name is a tad deceptive, especially the word “Society”, which connotes companionship and good cheer, possibly a meeting place to discuss shared interests. But the Dalhousie group and comparable organizations in other campuses and workplaces address an acute pain-point in the development of the knowledge economy.

There are too few women choosing technology as a career, and more than half of

 The Canadian Innovation Exchange on Friday named ClearRisk of St. John’s to the 2011 list of Canada’s 20 most innovative technology companies.

Five-year-old ClearRisk Inc. is an SAAS venture that helps mid-level insurance brokers assess risk. Led by CEO Craig Rowe, it got a major boost this year when GrowthWorks Atlantic and the First Angel Network teamed up to back it with $1.2 million.

The CIX Top 20 divides its winners into two groups: Information and communications technologies and digital media. ClearRisk is in the digital media group and will deliver a presentation on its

Headspace Design, a Halifax graphic arts consultancy, has soft-launched its new Perfect Pitch application as a beta model.

Perfect Pitch is an online instrument that helps graphic artists perfect their pitches to clients. It allows the artist to create a file for the client, collaborate with colleagues to develop attractive proposals and monitor leads as they progress.

The app is designed to solve the pain caused by the unwieldy process of pitching a client and maintaining that client’s file throughout the process. Perfect Pitch keeps case studies in one place and easily allows content

Congratulations to my friend Brent Larsen for prying $50,000 from the taut fist of a dragon on Dragons’ Den last night.

Larsen is the President of Bedford-based Steep Hill Solutions, which makes Omega Crunch Flax Products – essentially healthy flax flakes in a condiment shaker, so you can sprinkle them on your yogurt or whatever.

Having garnered revenues of $190,000 last year, Larsen was asking for $50,000 for a quarter of his business, and he drew immediate interest from the dragons. “You’ve taken something people know is good for them and you’ve made it accessible,” said Arlene

The Moncton Cybersocial today will feature two intriguing new companies -- Picomole Instruments, whose device detects cancer through breath analysis, and The Corporate Trade Network, which offers a bartering service to corporations.

The Corporate Trade Network will actually launch its new trading platform from 2 to 5 pm today at the Moncton Club, 115 Queen St. The event will then morph into the monthly Cybersocial, which will take place from 5 to 7 PM, also at the Moncton Club.

Corporate Trade Network allows businesses to offer services instead of cash to one another to attract and

Innovacorp yesterday released the names of the 25 finalists in its I-3 innovation competition.

I’ve cut-and-pasted below Innovacorp’s list of companies plus a short description of each.

There are a few  – GMS Surface Tech, Mindful Scientific, MediaSpark – that Entrevestor has featured previously, and MediaSpark was profiled in the Chronicle-Herald today.  

I have two thoughts on the long-list: first, there were only six entries from Zone 2 (South Shore and Yarmouth) and five of them are now on the short-list, but I’m familiar with a couple of them and at first glance there doesn’t

Last week I posed the same question to two players in the New Brunswick tech industry, and got identical answers.

What, I asked both Barbara Ells of Tech South East and Larry Sampson of the New Brunswick Information Technology Council, was the biggest issue facing the tech segment in the province? Their answer: talent, or the lack thereof.

“The biggest issue here is talent,” Ells, the Manager of Programs and Member Relations for the tech enabling organisation, said in a meeting at her Moncton office on Thursday. “It’s mainly (an issue) on the IT side, but IT marketing skills, for