About 70 people congregated at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax on Tuesday night to launch an initiative that will help young people to understand that entrepreneurship is a viable career option.

The Yes NS initiative — Yes stands for youth and entrepreneurship skills — has set up several working groups that will take various approaches to raising awareness of entrepreneurship.

“We started with an open-ended conversation on what can we attack to make a difference,” said Daniel Holland, executive vice-chairman and managing director at Beacon Securities and one of the founders of the

Trevor MacAusland, the specialist in accelerator programming at PropelICT, will be at the Volta startup house in Halifax tonight from 6 pm to outline plans for Propel’s next cohort.

Propel, which operates a startup accelerator for entrepreneurs in all four Atlantic Provinces, is now accepting applications for its next cohort. The deadline for applications is May 1, and the program runs over the summer.

MacAusland, the Vice-President of Business Development at Propel, will outline the two tracks of the Propel accelerator – the Launch track for early stage companies and the Build track

Startup Weekend will be held for the first time on Prince Edward Next weekend, one of three of the collaborative weekend events to take place in Atlantic Canada in the next two months.

Startup Weekend events have been held in more than 100 countries and several Atlantic Canadian cities but the one on May 1 to 3 will be the first in Charlottetown. The event at PEI Farm Centre is titled the Food and Farm Edition of Startup Weekend.

Startup Weekend, an international organization based in Seattle, encourages entrepreneurship by staging 54-hour competitions around the world. People turn up

Phased.io, a young company developing at the UIT program at Cape Breton University, is looking for companies and organizations that can help it develop an online product to help with succession or bringing in new employees.

The company was founded by Colin MacInnis and Brian Best, two students at the new CBU program that teaches lean entrepreneurship. They were among the handful of entrepreneurs that presented their projects when Premier Stephen McNeil delivered his State of the Province address in February.

At the time, the duo was working on a product that would help university

RtTech Software of Moncton has received the Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Award for 2015 in recognition of its “unrivaled innovation and leadership”.

RtTech Software, whose state-of-the-art automation helps industrial companies improve manufacturing processes, is the second Atlantic Canadian startup to be recognized by the international market research firm. Last year, Halifax-based Lamda Guard Inc. was awarded the 2014 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Leadership for its solution to the problem of laser attacks on aircraft.

RtTech was spun out of ADM Systems Engineering of

Kula Partners, an inbound marketing agency based in Halifax, has issued the following press release:

Kula Partners Becomes Canada's First HubSpot Platinum Partner

Halifax, NS — Kula Partners, an inbound marketing agency based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has become the first Canadian agency to achieve HubSpot Platinum Partner tier status.

As one of only 35 agencies globally to have achieved the distinction, reaching Platinum Partner tier status places Kula Partners in a select group of the over 2000 HubSpot agency partners worldwide. HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) is the world’s leading provider of

Here’s an angle on the Nova Scotia film industry debate that’s not getting enough attention: Moviemakers are vitally important to several high-growth industries that we need for economic development.

When Finance Minister Diana Whalen brought down her budget, she took several difficult measures to constrain the 2015-16 deficit to $97.6 million. It’s a tremendous achievement, given that a year earlier she had forecast a 2014-15 deficit three times that size, at $279 million.

But the benefits were lost in the tsunami of controversy that arose from the cuts to the Film Investment Tax

There’s going to be an interesting debate at Acadia University tomorrow night on the tension between Big Data and privacy concerns, and the organizers are inviting anyone interested to attend.

“Big Data or Big Problems? The Pros and Cons of Data Analytics Debate” will take place Tuesday from 7 to 8:30 pm at the K.C. Irving Centre Auditorium at Acadia on Tuesday. Anyone interested in attending the event can register for free here.

The topic is an important one for Atlantic Canada given the efforts led by T4G President Geoff Flood to establish a centre of excellence in Big Data in

LifeRaft, a startup whose platform uncovers potential threats through social media posts, expects to soon close a $2.5-million round of venture capital funding that it hopes will accelerate its already-impressive growth.

LifeRaft of Halifax identifies threatening keywords, such as “kill” and “gun,” on social media sources like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. This then allows the user to drill into any post of concern to better understand the context of an individual’s comments.

LifeRaft attempts to be proactive in preventing threats in this new world of social interaction.

“If someone

The 2015 KIRA Award’s Selection Committee on Thursday announced the finalists for New Brunswick’s Knowledge Industry Recognition and Achievement Awards, with Eigen Innovation Inc. of Fredericton capturing two nods.

Eigen, whose industrial Internet algorithms help companies automate a range of actions in their manufacturing processes, is a finalist in the Innovative New Product or Service category and in Most Promising Startup.

KIRA Awards are handed out annually to members of the public and private sectors to recognize the contributions the people, companies and organizations have made