[Editor’s Note: Allan Gates of Bonfire has kindly offered to cover the East Coast Startup Community’s pilgrimage to the Montreal International Startup Festival for us. Here is his first report.]

As dawn breaks over the University of New Brunswick Fredericton campus tomorrow, 50 bleary-eyed East Coast entrepreneurs representing a number of new and established startups will roll out by bus to the Montreal International Startup Festival. The Festival brings together early-stage founders with successful innovators and investors looking for the next big thing.

The bus trip to the Festival,

Alastair Jarvis proudly says that he was tenant No. 1 at the Hub South Shore, the new co-working space in Mahone Bay.

In fact, he is so enthusiastic about the new facility that he doesn’t like the term “co-working space.” He feels it understates what the Hub South Shore is and does, and what it means to a rural community.

The new facility, which has 13 tenants or members, is part of an international organization that for almost a decade has been establishing casual office space in major centres around the world.

The goal is not just to provide a desk, chair and Wi-Fi but to bring

Last week I wrote a column citing all that had happened in the East Coast Startup Community in first half of the year.  It dealt with a broad range of things that happened on several fronts, from new events, to co-working spaces, to funding, to organizations.

As we go forward, I think the community needs slower work on a narrower front. It simply defies logic that there will continue to be so many initiatives launched at the pace we’ve seen recently. If there are, they’ll likely be less effective than the recent announcements.

In the next six months, the one thing I’d like to see is an

Four years after signing up to help encourage community-based innovation in Fredericton, Kelly O’Brien is now launching his own innovative product that could help community groups everywhere.

O’Brien is chief executive officer of BusinessBoard, a Fredericton startup that has developed a low-cost online bulletin board that allows not-for-profit organizations and their members to post notices and increase the sense of community.

 “We’ve got a business model now that we’re really excited about, and the market is huge with community organizations around the world,” O’Brien said in an

Dalhousie University will soon launch an Institute for Big Data Analytics to nurture research into the burgeoning field that has already produced some of the most exciting startups in Atlantic Canada.

As part of the effort to boost data analytics education in the region, Dalhousie will also initiate a specialization in data science as part of its bachelor of computer science program, starting this autumn.

These developments are important because a broad swath of government and industry has targeted big data as a key economic sector in the region, and universities are a key component in

Four years of research by a team of computer science academics at University of New Brunswick has produced a revolutionary product for detecting and fighting cyber-fraud.

Ara Labs is a new startup that is now beta-testing its cloud-based Software-as-a-Service product that its creators say provide more unique intelligence on online threats than other products on the market. It’s quite a claim given that cyber-security is now a $68 billion annual industry and that annual data loss due to cyber-crime is now estimated to be worth about $1 trillion.

“We crawl the web looking for hundreds of

There has been considerable buzz in Atlantic Canada each time lean startup guru Ash Maurya, author of the groundbreaking book Running Lean, has visited the region. But there should be even more excitement that the co-author of a worthy companion piece lives in Halifax.

Benjamin Yoskovitz’s official title is vice-president product at GoInstant, the co-browsing startup that was bought by

Happy Canada Day, everyone. We hope all our readers have had a safe and happy weekend celebrating the country’s 146^th birthday.

Of course, July 1 is also the first day of the second half of the corporate calendar, and a good time to look back at what’s happened in the East Coast Startup Community in the first half. What’s been especially impressive is that the community has made so many strides on so many fronts in just six months.

The biggest news is probably that there is now a network of co-working and incubation centres around the region where virtually nothing existed before. Volta

Progress Magazine this month has published my article on the search for and development of talent for Big Data in Atlantic Canada.

This article grew out of discussions at the Big Data Congress in Saint John in January, at which speakers highlighted the many skills needed to develop data analytics solutions. Finding an individual with all these traits can be a challenge.

Later in the week, I will follow this up with a look at one university is doing to improve research and education in the field of Big Data.

Bedford-based NewPace Technology Development Inc. has signed six-figure sales agreements with Nokia Corporation of Finland and an unnamed European company, accelerating the traction of its Rich Communications Service, or RCS, mobile phone products.

NewPace has spent years developing a suite of RCS products, which increase the flexibility that companies can offer in texting services on mobile handsets. It means texts can be used for chat, group chat, file transfer, video and voice calling across networks and using any smartphone. The goal of this initiative is to upgrade the current