My enduring memory of the two days I spent last week with the Sydney startup community will be the sight of two developers setting up a chat room for the community as one event was breaking up.

On Friday, we held an Entrevestor Luncheon sponsored by BDO Canada at the Verschuren Centre at Cape Breton University. It was followed by brief presentations from seven of the winners of the first two

You’d tend to have low expectations for a group of tech startups that were seeded with no more than $50,000 each, but the Spark Cape Breton Demo Day on Friday surprised on the upside.

The event in Sydney allowed seven startups to showcase what they have done since claiming a prize in the competition in the past two years. Organized by Innovacorp, the Spark competition gives a maximum of $50,000 to Cape Breton and Mulgrave startups with good business ideas.

About half the winners from the past two years presented at Demo Day and they showed they had either launched a product or we close

It’s accepted that there’s a shortage of capital in the Atlantic Canadian startup community. But here’s another problem that’s less well-known but no less relevant – there is also a shortage of people to manage that capital properly.

The Chief Financial Officer, the oft-overlooked counter of beans, is in short supply in Canada’s east coast startup cluster. And the lack of proper, seasoned

Kinduct Technologies, the Halifax medical-technologies company, has issued the following press release:

Kinduct adds fire power to leadership team

Leading sports and health technology firm welcomes elite-level business leaders to their advisory team.

HALIFAX, NS – June 5th, 2015 – Kinduct Technologies announced today the addition of John Risley and Vikram Rao to their leadership team.

Risley, the President and CEO of Clearwater Fine Foods Incorporated (CFFI), a diversified holding company, has been named as Chairman of the Board. While Rao, a former Managing Director at Scotia

Entrepreneurs Charlotte and Isak Rydlund came up with a unique solution when they couldn’t find a skilled computer programmer in Halifax: they taught themselves to write code.

Now, the contract management system they created has been named a tech startup to keep an eye on.

The Halifax couple is thrilled that their PACTA system has been named one of 25 information and communication

Before Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil unveiled his state of the province address in February, the stage was occupied by a few startups, one of which represented the fastest-growing startup hub in the region.

Colin MacInnis and Brian Best, two students at Cape Breton University’s UIT program, took the stage to discuss their company Phased.io, which had been developing a tool for student

Agora Mobile, a New Brunswick software company, is offering all New Brunswick teachers a free premium lifetime membership to its platform Vizwik.

Vizwik is an online platform that allows anyone to create an app and sell it to others on the platform. Simon Gauvin, CEO and founder of Agora Mobile, said that Vizwik makes programming and coding easier because there are visual pointers on the

For some of us, summer music festivals bring to mind relaxation and enjoyment. For Darren Gallop, they mean a heavy workload and more revenue for his company, Marcato Digital Solutions.

Based in Sydney, Marcato provides organizational software to music festival organizers around the world. The Software-as-a-Service platform will be used by 146 events this year, the first year it’s handled more than 100. Some clients run several events and therefore get a discount, so Gallop said that overall the company’s revenues have risen by a respectable 30 to 35 per cent year-on-year.

“It’s a

SageCrowd, the Halifax-based learning science software company, has issued the following two press releases:

SageCrowd Launches Learning sciences white paper

The brain's natural learning cycle

Boston, June 3, 2015 – Learning science software company sageCrowd, announced it has published and made available on its website, The Brain’s Natural Learning Cycle. Based on two years of research, this paper contributes to the learning industry's understanding of the learning implications of the brain’s natural process for creating skill-based memories and behavioral change.

The white paper

Phillip Curley of Fredericton-based HotSpot Parking and Christopher Cowper-Smith of Halifax’s Spring Loaded Technology have made the shortlist for the 2015 BDC Young Entrepreneur Award, joining two other Atlantic Canadians as finalists in the competition.

BDC, the federal government’s business development bank, announced the finalists in a statement this morning for the competition that seeks to find the country’s leading entrepreneur aged between 18 and 35. The other Atlantic Canadian finalists are Martin O'Brien of the Cascumpec Bay Oyster Company in Prince Edward Island, and Melissa