[Thomas Rankin, Investment Director at Innovacorp, took issue in a recent blog with worries about Series A Crunch. This item previously ran in the Toronto Standard.]

More rare than a humble Kanye? A VC admitting he or she is wrong.

Guess what? I’m wrong every now and then and proud of it. It means I take risks. Believe it or not, failure is also a healthy part of the venture investor’s life.

There is a perceived bubble in seed investing. Industry stats by CB Insights show that the number of seed investments has increased almost six fold since 2009.

Series A (or follow on)

When Calvin Milbury arrived at the Breakthru Bootcamp at 7:30 Saturday morning in Fredericton, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation CEO found virtually all 47 teams at the meeting and waiting to get into the hall.

He was already impressed that the number of teams entering the biennial business plan competition had risen more than 50 percent from the last contest. But the enthusiasm of the young companies had the habitually cheerful chief executive beaming like a kid at Christmas.

“Everyone was really eager to learn, not just from the speakers but also from each other,” said Milbury

 

Start-up investors often say they love the companies in Newfoundland and Labrador because they view the entire world—not just Canada—as their market. Last week we got a reminder that companies in Atlantic Canada are learning a few things from their northeastern neighbours.

There was a flood of news from the start-up community in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, virtually all of which had to do with young companies expanding sales and operations in foreign markets.

Check out what we covered on Entrevestor.com last week:

 •Livelenz, the Bedford, N.S., maker of analytics tools for

Focusing increasingly on the export market, Seaforth Energy Inc., the Dartmouth-based maker of 50-kilowatt wind turbines, has recently completed installations in Scotland and Italy and is ramping up its sales effort in the Caribbean.

The company is in the midst of installing 11 of its AOC 15/50 turbines in Nova Scotia in a five-month period that will end in March, developed under the province’s community feed-in tariff, or Comfit, program. That program encourages communities to finance and develop renewable energy projects and sell the energy to Nova Scotia Power at a fixed rate.

The FounderFuel meeting in Halifax on Tuesday will give Executive Director Ian Jeffrey a chance to explain the program to entrepreneurs and hopefully meet a few of the young businesses that will apply.

Jeffrey said in an interview this week that the agenda for the meeting Jan. 22 at the Karma Gaming headquarters will be very simple: He will take a few minutes to tell the attendees about the Montreal-based accelerator program, and then take time to meet one-on-one with entrepreneurs who are serious about applying. There will not be a formal pitching session.

“We require people to apply

About 90 novice entrepreneurs will gather in Fredericton tomorrow to go through the Bootcamp of the 2013 Breakthru competition, the biennial contest for New Brunswick entrepreneurs organized by The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and the law firm Cox & Palmer.

NBIF Chief Executive Calvin Milbury said his agency this year received 47 applications to participate in Breakthru – a rise of more than 50 percent from the 31 entries for the 2011 competition. They feature a range of startup segments, including ITC, biotech and cleantech, and they come from all parts of the province.

“We’re

Neato Entertainment is looking for about 25 Maritime television aficionados willing to test its new technology, which allows you to enhance your TV time with a simple application on your smartphone.

The company, formed last year by TV production veteran Michael-Andreas Kuttner, is founded on the premise that smart TVs (which converge television and the Internet on a single monitor) should offer people a more relaxing and enjoyable viewing experience rather than using it for more games, video downloads and the like.

 “The television-watching experience is pretty well perfected,” Kuttner

Having recently pivoted to expand its scope, 2nd Act Innovations of Halifax has hired two C-level executives in Silicon Valley to lead its sales and engineering efforts and help to raise a $5 million round of venture capital financing.

Reza Kazemipour has joined as Chief Executive Officer and Guillaume Oget as Chief Technology Officer, and together they will join a four-member executive team with Co-Founders Andrew Doyle and Peter Hickey. Kazemipour and Oget will both be based in the San Francisco area, while Doyle and Hickey back home in Halifax will continue as board members and retain

VidCruiter, a Moncton-based video recruitment company, has been accepted into the Canadian Technology Accelerator, or CTA, in Silicon Valley.

CEO Sean Fahey said Tuesday he will spend the next three months traveling between New Brunswick and San Francisco so he can attend the prestigious accelerator. It’s the third accelerator program he has entered in the past year – last year he attended both PropelICT’s Launch36 program and the McKenzie Accelerator at McKenzie College in Moncton.

VidCruiter offers clients a customized video format that allows job applicants to video-record their

CarbonCure, the Halifax cleantech company dedicated to low-carbon concrete products, has signed a licensing agreement with Ontario concrete manufacturer Atlas Block to make its products available in Ontario.

The deal is an important one for CarbonCure because it should establish a recurring revenue stream in a large market, building on the traction it gained with individual projects in such markets as Toronto and Halifax.

Midland, Ont.-based Atlas has been testing the technology for several months and will now permanently install CarbonCure’s technology and apply it across its broad