One of the greatest recent advances in the startup community in St. John’s is the fact that nine young companies have entered the first PropelICT cohort in the city.

Company formation has been a concern in the country’s most easterly startup community, so it’s encouraging that more than 20 companies in John’s applied for the cohort. Gary Dinn, CEO of the regional accelerator PropelICT, would have liked to see more but he’s heartened by the group he has.

“Mostly it’s gelling well,” said Dinn, sitting in his office Tuesday in the Common Ground co-working space in downtown St. John’s.

When Mark Evans talks about startups telling stories, he doesn’t talk about the founders sitting a client or funder down to tell them the company’s story.

For the Toronto-based communications consultant, the art of storytelling for startups involves a process of investigating and analyzing customers’ needs. Then the startup team has to plot the best way to construct a story that will let key

As it begins to beta-test its app that encourages stricter adherence to drug prescriptions, HealthQR is getting a boost from one of the world’s largest drug companies, Pfizer of New York.

HealthQR, which works out of the Volta startup centre in Halifax, has been in talks with several major drug providers with the hope of helping them ensure their customers take their meds when they’re supposed to.

Those talks continue, but Pfizer recently came on board and is working with the Halifax company in a paid beta test. The reason the startup is gaining attention is it has developed an online

Spring is coming slowly to St. John’s, but that hasn’t stopped new startups from spouting up.

It’s now Startup Week in the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, and there is a strong focus on forming and seeding young companies. Company formation is picking up in the Newfoundland community and Startup Week is shining a spotlight on the growth of seed-stage ventures.

The event, organized by Startup Newfoundland and Labrador, has featured a Startup Weekend, and a Startup Soiree with a range of speakers. Today, Dalhousie University entrepreneurship professors Mary Kilfoil and Ed Leach are

A titanic struggle has been playing out on a federal Crown corporation’s website, and the combatants are a pair of thirtysomething entrepreneurs from Atlantic Canada.

For the past two weeks, the federal development bank BDC has been asking the public to vote on who should win the 2015 BDC Young Entrepreneur competition. There are 10 competitors, one from each province. Until today, the competition website showed the rankings, and the top two were from Atlantic Canada.

Christopher Cowper-Smith of Halifax’s Spring Loaded Technology has been in the lead for most of the two weeks, but

The University of New Brunswick will launch its Masters of Technology Management and Entrepreneurship this autumn, which will feature an immigration component unique in Canada.

Dhirendra Shukla, the chair of the Fredericton university’s Technology Management and Entrepreneurship, or TME, program, said the university is looking for seven to 10 students who already have startups and or have business ideas they want to develop.

Though the Entrepreneurship Program is open to anyone, international students gain an additional benefit. Working with the federal and provincial governments, the

CSIpix is out to solve a problem familiar to all fans of crime fiction: overworked cops waiting days or weeks for fingerprinting results.

The St. John’s startup has developed software that helps forensic investigators quickly find possible matches for fingerprints taken from a crime scene, and then nail down the evidence to help secure a conviction.

“The customer pain we address is finger print examinations being done with a magnifying glass,” John Guzzwell, Vice-President of Business Development, said at the Atlantic Venture Forum last week. “Most police agencies still do it like

BioNova, the association for the Nova Scotia life sciences industry, announced last week that its Good News Story for 2015 has been awarded to DSM Nutritional Products for its decision to invest at least $30 million in new capital to upgrade and expand its facilities in Mulgrave, N.S.

BioNova each spring has a celebration with the oxymoronic title Good News and Blues, which celebrates a good news story and lets members of the biotech community play some classic rock or blues hits. (Some are better musicians than you’d think.)

The DSM story caught the judge’s eyes in part because it

I was interviewed last week by Information Morning Cape Breton host Steve Sutherland on what I witnessed on my recent trip to Sydney. We discussed the impact of programs like the UIT course and the Spark Cape Breton compeition. You can hear the full interview here. 

While presenting his company at the Atlantic Venture Forum on Thursday, Phillip Curley announced that HotSpot Parking Inc. would launch later this month in Columbia, South Carolina, and in a new city once every six weeks after that.

The Fredericton company, which helps local merchants connect with their customers, obviously made an impression with the judges at the two-day conference as it