When Trevor Hickey began his startup in his home town of St. John’s last year, he often wished he had remained in Vancouver, or another city where there was a structured startup community and shared office facilities.

But now he’s found that such a Newfoundland-based community does exist, if only in its infancy, and there will soon be a shared office facility called Common Ground, where which startups can work in the downtown core.

“I came home and found that there wasn’t that infrastructure,” said Hickey, whose company FundUni is developing a crowdfunding site for university tuitions.

Hot Spot Parking, an app to help cure the pain of downtown parking, won Startup Weekend New Brunswick in Fredericton yesterday, but I’m not sure that was the biggest news from the event.

The big story really took place Friday evening, when about 70 people entered the event, cramming into a room at the Pond Deshpande Centre at the University of New Brunswick. It wasn’t just students but people from every strata of the New Brunswick startup universe who showed up.

“The event was filled with an amazing energy with numerous people from the community coming in to help,” said Suhaim

MyFarmers’Market, a website and app that allow online purchases of organic food, on Thursday night won the Halifax Entrepreneurship Expo’s Startup Sunday, a $10,000 pitch competition for teams of Saint Mary’s University students and entrepreneurs.

The teams, each consisting of two business students and one entrepreneur, were given a market segment for their venture on March 10, and had only one day to create a business idea and plan.

MyFarmers’Market proposed a website and phone app service that would allow people to buy and sell organic food online. Farmers would still sell directly to

Canadian triathlete Simon Whitfield tried a new piece of technology as he prepared for the 2012 Olympics in London — a video app from a Halifax startup called UpMyGame.

Training at his home in Victoria, B.C., Whitfield used UpMyGame to videotape his training and send it to his coach, Jonty Skinner, who works out of Colorado Springs. Skinner was able to review the video, make notes and diagrams on it, and discuss it with Whitfield, even though they were thousands of kilometres apart.

Skinner’s Wikipedia entry now describes him as an UpMyGame coach, meaning that he is now a

Trevor MacAusland is about half-way to his goal.

In the autumn of 2011, the Executive Director of PropelICT announced the tech advocacy group in New Brunswick would start an accelerator called Launch36 with the goal of nurturing 36 companies over three years. Last night in Fredericton, seven teams pitched to a packed auditorium and successfully completed the program. Added to the 10 teams that completed the program in June last year, Launch36 has now debuted 17 companies, meaning MacAusland is just about half way to his goal.

Of course he’s way ahead of schedule, as he’s at the half way

TotalPave, a Fredericton startup founded by brothers Drew and Coady Cameron, has won the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s 2013 Breakthru business plan competition for its system to help cities and towns assess road conditions.

The company, whose smartphone app and analytics system help municipalities determine which roads need repairs, walked away with the top prize of $192,000, consisting of $160,000 in cash and $32,000 in professional services.

The Breakthru contest is held every second year to find the best business plan in New Brunswick. The foundation’s chief executive, Calvin

Trevor Hickey believes crowdfunding can solve what is becoming a huge problem for young adults -- student debt.

Hickey is on the verge of launching FundUni, a St. John's -based startup that aims to help students raise money online for their tuition, and let people with money feel they contributed to the future of a young person.

"We want to tackle student debt and we want to do it in a unique way, by connecting students with their communities," said Hickey sitting in a coffee house in St. John's on Wednesday.

Hickey is a graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland, and his own

RTV Group, the Saint John startup producing predictive analytics software to help fight drunk driving, is looking for about a half-million dollars in financing to get its initial product out the door.

It could take a big step in that direction tonight if it wins the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition, which boasts a first prize of $192,000. If not, it hopes to raise the money by other means.

“Our target between now and the end of the year is to do about $500,000, which would get us to about four paid customers and one or two trials,” said Stephen Goddard, a

As they head toward the Breakthru finals on Wednesday, brothers Drew and Coady Cameron are working on the branding and algorithms for their nascent product, TotalPave.

TotalPave is a Fredericton startup that aims to revolutionize the way cities and towns assess which roads need to be paved. The idea is so impressive that the Cameron brothers won the national Nicol Entrepreneurial Award for a new technology coming from a Canadian university last year.

Now they are one of five finalists in the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition, and will find out Wednesday night

Mikeal Abramoff believes he’s on the cutting edge of a big Internet story — community marketplaces for short-term accommodation.

Abramoff is the founder of Saint John-based Store It Squirrel, which links people needing storage with those who have space to rent.

The company’s site is live with what he calls “a great beta version” with about 80 listings in New Brunswick and Toronto.

It’s doing well enough that Store It Squirrel is one of five finalists for the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthu Competition. The winner will be announced Wednesday.

Store It Squirrel allows