Magnet Forensics is everything a start-up should be.

The company is lean, produce incredibly strong revenue growth and grows by retaining earnings, not seeking investment. But what makes it stand out is that the company’s technology offers a massive benefit to society.

Magnet, based in Waterloo, Ont., recovers deleted information from a computer. It’s used to help police find information that a suspect thought had been deleted. This could be communications between people, financial records, or even contraband photos. It’s particularly effective in the fight against child pornography.

The Progress Magazine "People We Love" issue is now on the news stands, and it is rich in material about the startup community.

We'll be featuring more on the issue later, but several prominent people in the startup community made the People list this year. I wrote up three items, featuring: SimplyCast CEO Saeed El-Darahali; Build Ventures Co-Manager Patrick Keefe; and a joint piece on Dalhousie University's lean entrepreneurship profs Ed Leach and Mary Kilfoil.

When we asked Danielle Fong -- a Dartmouth native who now runs Lightsail Energy in California -- to appear on the list, she

Patrick Hankinson is not a guy who wears his heart on his sleeve, but he does post his business metrics by his door.

Hankinson is a soft-spoken entrepreneurial whiz who runs Compilr, an online development environment that allows users to learn, write and test code in the cloud.

Earlier this month, Compilr moved into Volta, the new co-working space for startups in Halifax. Beside the door of the company’s new office, Hankinson has posted two rows of printouts, one labelled The Good, and the other The Ugly. They show the company’s good and bad news over the past two years.

The prominent

Jonathan Robichaud recently completed a private tutorial on writing computer code with Java-Script, and he can’t wait to move on to Python.

In his Java-Script course, he received a full day of lessons from Connor Bell, a Dalhousie computer science student and co-founder of Execute Technologies Inc. But Java-Script is used mainly for designing websites, and he really wants to sink his teeth into Python because that’s the language used in designing games. Eventually, he and his friends want to move on to larger engineering projects.

 “We’d like to build an airplane,” he said as he enjoyed

A decade after starting as a research project at Holland College in Charlottetown, the Justice Knowledge Network is being spun off into a for-profit eLearning company called JKN Inc.

Executive Director Sandy Sweet said in an interview yesterday that Charlottetown-based JKN incorporated about three months ago and is in the process of becoming a private company designed to harvest profits for its single shareholder, Holland College. The company, which now has about 20 employees, is eagerly developing new markets for its eLearning systems outside of its traditional base of programs for law

In the midst of interviewing ABK Biomedical's new CEO Pat O’Connor on the Halifax company’s direction, I realized that the story I should write was about O’Connor himself.

Last October, the company announced it had raised $1.25 million in funding from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Innovacorp and a variety of sources, and co-founder and chief scientific officer Daniel Boyd said,

Charlottetown drug manufacturer BioVectra Inc. said Tuesday it had received a $3 million funding from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency’s Atlantic Innovation Fund, which will help to finance a $5 million expansion project for the company.

The announcement was one of three AIF funding announcements that Prime Minister Stephen Harper made Tuesday during a visit to P.E.I. The others were $2.9 million for Delivra Inc. to support its research on topical creams to relieve pain and $1.9 million for Island Abbey Foods Ltd., the maker of the Honibe line of products, to expand a line of

Build Ventures, the new Atlantic Canadian venture capital fund, launched Tuesday with a new name, new headquarters, new co-manager and $48.5 million in committed capital.

And soon it will have its first investment in its portfolio.

“We’re in the process of closing our first investment,” co-manager Patrick Keefe said in an interview, without naming the company nor its home province or sector.

Build Ventures – which until now has been known simply as the regional fund – is operating out of the new Volta co-working space on Spring Garden Road in Halifax, where it can offer mentorship to

Brad Touesnard exemplifies a segment of the startup world that is too rarely celebrated — the folks who work on their own or in small groups and soldier on from one venture to another until something works out.

Three weeks ago, the Cape Breton native, who now lives in Halifax, launched WP Migrate DB Pro, one of several ventures he has started. And he was pleased to report that the new product is already producing revenue.

 “It took four months to build it, to get it ready for the launch,” said Touesnard, who returned to Nova Scotia after a stint in Melbourne, Australia, three years ago.

There’s been so much going on in East-Coast-Startup-Land recently that it would be difficult to pick out just one good news story of the year. But the folks at BioNova believe they have one. It began with a seeming disaster.

Last week, BioNova, the life sciences organization for Nova Scotia, celebrated its achievements of the past year with a great reception that had the oxymoronic title “Good News & Blues.” The idea: to discuss the wonderful things that have happened in the past year while listening to—and I’m not making this up—blues music played by members of the life sciences