When Celsius Game Studios Inc. releases its space-trading game Drifter later this year, it will feature planets or star systems named after five real-life Earthlings, who have paid handsomely for the naming rights.

Based in St. John’s, N.L., Celsius has already launched three games; the most successful sold 9,000 copies.

Founder Colin Walsh wanted to do something more ambitious with his next game. To finance his plans, he launched a Kickstarter “crowdfunding” campaign last May, aiming to raise $50,000.

 (Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a venture by raising small amounts of

A corporation or a partnership?

That’s a question facing a lot of founding teams early in their startup life, and it keeps coming up until they finally decide to incorporate.

As with so many business decisions, the correct answer depends on your circumstances. So the best advice I can give is to make sure you’ve considered all these factors before you act:

1. Do you need incorporation to receive non-dilutive funds? Some funding organizations will only allot grants, loans or other contributions to corporations and not partnerships. And in the early stages, non-dilutive financing can be

CompCamp, the group dedicated to teaching teens to code, has issued the following press release on its Girls Tech League championship this weekend:

Halifax, NS, April 9, 2013 – The Girls Tech League, a programing competition for junior high school girls, will hold its championship at Mount Saint Vincent University.

The four teams – from Highland Park Junior High School, Fairview Junior High School and two from Bicentennial Junior High School – have been learning computer programming in after-school sessions since early January. During this time, each team has created an app prototype

Pitch Perfect, a spinoff from Halifax consultancy Headspace Design, will make its long-awaited debut in the autumn, after its developers conduct beta tests in the next few months.

The new company allows commercial design consultants and other professionals to improve the look of their proposals to potential clients, and enjoy more flexibility and ease-of-use when collaborating on pitches. The idea is that a professional submitting a visually appealing pitch with lots of design features will have a leg up over competitors who submit bland Word documents.

Headspace design director Kyle

The KIRA Awards' Selection Committee yesterday announced the finalists for the 2013 Knowledge Industry Recognition and Achievement award.

The winners of the New Brunswick award will be named at a dinner May 2 at the Fredericton Convention Centre. Information on the tickets is available here.

The nominees are:

Exporters

•Green Imaging Technologies Inc. •LuminUltra •Vimsoft

Most Promising Start-Up

•IntroHive •Rt Tech Software Inc. •TotalPave

Technological Advancement and/or Innovation - Private

•Inversa Systems •Smart Skin Technologies •SPIELO International

Technological

The Entrepreneurs with Disabilities Network invited me to speak yesterday on a subject I hadn’t thought about much – early adopters. It led me to ask what makes a good early adopter, and who’s the best early adopter in Atlantic Canada.

It was a thoroughly unscientific exercise, but I searched through my lists of companies and old articles. When I spoke at the EDN Entrepreneur of the Year event last night, I gave the top spot to Emera of Halifax.

The first thing I was looking for was number of partnerships with startups, and Emera boasts varying degrees of involvement with at least three

DemoCamp Halifax will hold a mini, mid-season event on the night of Sunday, April 21, at Durty Nelly’s Pub on Argyle Street.

Billed as Mini DemoCamp Halifax, the event will feature a keynote address by David Crow, a co-founder of StartupNorth and the Evangelist in Residence at OMERS Ventures in Toronto. Crow will be in Halifax for a mentoring session with Toon Nagtegaal’s NextPhase, and will finish out the weekend with his speech to a gaggle of local tech enthusiasts.

Founded by TitanFile Co-Founder Milan Vrekic, DemoCamp Halifax has been held in each of the past two years. The startups

Equals6, the Halifax-based professional social network for students, will soon launch a crowdfunding scholarship program in which people or organizations can help students raise funds for tuition over the Internet.

The two-year-old company has been active in raising money for scholarships for deserving students, amassing $40,000 for 140 Top Talent Scholarships in its brief history. What is new is the company is now adding a crowdfunding element to the scholarships, meaning other people can add to a scholarship once it’s posted on the Internet. It also means students can use the Equals6

The good patrons of Picaroons Brewtique may soon be helping to produce medical compounds each time they hoist a pint at the Fredericton microbrewery.

Picaroons is in talks with Fredericton biotech Mycodev Group Inc. on a plan to help the startup produce chitosan, a compound that has a range of industrial uses, including pharmaceutical ingredients, water treatment, fertilizer and cosmetics. Chitosan is usually extracted from the shells of shellfish, but Mycodev founder David Brown has devised a way to produce it from fungus.

“The fungus is a lot better in terms of the constant supply,”

When I asked Ulrike Bahr-Gedalia what her three priorities will be as the new CEO of Digital Nova Scotia, she paused and answered: attracting talent, bringing women into ITC, and technical education.

Then she added advocacy for digital industries.

She looked down the list I’d jotted down, laughed and said, “I guess that’s four, isn’t it?”

That one episode from our interview Thursday gives some idea of the energy and ambition of the first full-time CEO of the association for IT industries in Nova Scotia. It also should shed some light on the magnitude of the task before her.

Digital