The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency has awarded a total of $11.3 million from the Atlantic Innovation Fund to five companies or organizations in Nova Scotia to finance the development and commercialization of new technology.

The loans are part of a total AIF award this year of $39.9 million, which is being channeled into projects that – including funding from other sources – are worth a total of $71.1 million.

“Our Government is committed to helping Atlantic Canada’s businesses to move innovative ideas from the lab to the marketplace,” said Defence Minister Peter MacKay in a

The first Atlantic Venture Forum takes place Wednesday and Thursday this week at the Westin Nova Scotian in Halifax, offering a rare opportunity for meetings between local founders and come-from-away funders.

Critical Path Group, which organizes other conferences such as the Banff Venture Forum and the Canadian Financing Forum in Vancouver, has selected 22 Atlantic Canadian startups to present at the event. I’ve spoken to a few impressive companies that didn’t make the cut, and several plan to attend the conference regardless.

Launched with the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency as a

I usually cite 10 recommendations to improve the start-up ecosystem in Atlantic Canada, but there are four that I feel passionately about. My comments refer largely to the technology sector, but I think they apply to the entire start-up community.

Mentorship. The key ingredient in developing start-ups is having enough good mentors. Yes, capital is important, but the do-or-die element in the

After three years of work, SimplyCast has launched its 360 Automation Manager, the flagship product of the Dartmouth multi-channel marketing company.

President and CEO Saeed El-Darahali unveiled the product last night at a reception in the company’s new office off Main Street in Dartmouth. In the interests of transparency, I must declare that I have been working with SimplyCast on promoting the launch. But this news is big enough that I want to describe the product and make a few observations.

There’s a lot of buzz about the 360 Automation Manager because it can do what no marketing

People visiting downtown Fredericton and Saint John this summer will be given the opportunity to pay parking meters with their smartphones, thanks to a startup generating a lot of buzz in New Brunswick.

HotSpot Parking is developing cellphone apps that will allow people to pay their parking meter charges electronically. CEO and founder Phillip Curley said the company has been developing relationships with the two New Brunswick cities and is planning a pilot project for its hometown of Fredericton on Aug. 1 and for Saint John later that month. He plans to spend about six weeks monitoring

This is an Atlantic Canadian story of rugged people braving northern oceans and hauling in huge catches of fish.

But unlike so many business stories about the fishery, this one is set in an elegant office with exposed brick and movie posters on Barrington Street in downtown Halifax.

The office is the home of Raised Media, the Halifax digital media company that has masterminded the Deadliest

Heimdall Networks CEO Jim DeLeskie declined to be interviewed about his company until January of 2013, preferring to quietly develop his software for about a year without any publicity. Sydney, N.S.-based Heimdall is developing a product that protects corporations and governments against distributed denial-of-service attacks, the type of stuff that the Anonymous group does to shut down websites. Heimdall’s market is a high-growth, high-interest sector with a lot of players and rapid advances in technology. DeLeskie didn’t want to tip his hand to competitors by going public too soon.

But

Progress Magazine and Entrevestor today are launching our first joint supplement on the Atlantic Canadian ecosystem. We have just posted the first article from the publication on Entrevestor, and a PDF for the full supplement is available by clicking the “Entrevestor Intelligence Reports” tab on our home page. The supplement appeared in Vol. 20 of Progress Magazine.

We will continue to post

If there’s a date on which the Atlantic Canadian start-up community was born, it was June 26, 2012. The location was Dieppe, N.B., and the event was the Demo Day of Propel ICT’s Launch36 accelerator, at which community members from across the region and beyond witnessed 11 companies delivering tremendous pitches.

The really interesting things took place away from the stage that night. At the pub afterward, Propel ICT chair David Baxter and executive director Trevor MacAusland swore that the New Brunswick-based accelerator, which had graduated one Nova Scotia company, would grow by

The appointment of Sally Ng to head the new startup working space in Fredericton means that Atlantic Canada suddenly has a network of startup pods across the region, led by passionate and energetic people.

Fredericton-based Knowledge Park Inc. last week announced that Ng would become Executive Director of the Commercialization Environment for Advanced Learning Technologies, or CEALT, and its ACcelR8 program.

Like Volta in Halifax and Common Ground in St. John’s, CEALT will provide working space for startups and organize events and peer-to-peer support activities to help the young