Peter Gifford may have trouble finding a place to launch the working prototype of his new offshore supply vessel, even though it’s only nine metres long.

The problem: it’s 16 metres deep — same height as, for instance, an IMAX screen.

Gifford is founder and CEO of ExtremeOcean Innovation Inc., a St. John’s startup that is developing a radical new vessel to serve the burgeoning market of offshore wind turbines.

The TranSPAR Craft looks like a New York taxi on top of a telephone pole, and the unusual design is one reason it has been lauded internationally and received three rounds of

Iain Klugman bristled when I referred to the Atlantic Canadian start-up community in a recent interview. A start-up community, explained the CEO of Kitchener, Ont.-based accelerator Communitech, is a smaller entity than something spanning four provinces. “Start-up communities define themselves, and they have to be first and foremost a place where people think they belong, where they believe they come from,” he said. “I don’t think people think of themselves as Atlantic Canadians.”

So my in-person interview in Kitchener with one of the most respected technology proponents in the country

[Editor's note: Blair Ryan, CEO of The Rounds of Halifax, contacted Entrevestor to respond to our article on Iain Klugman’s contention – printed previously on the Progress website -- that a startup community can’t span four provinces.We're publishing his remarks in full.]

I must say, I disagree with Iain Klugman (and with full respect; his achievements are undeniable). I lean and rely on the startup community in Atlantic Canada as much as anyone, I'm sure. I looked back quickly at the last seven people I went to for help or advice:

OneLobby CEO Jordan Smith (Fredericton via Halifax)

Moncton-based Picomole Inc., which is developing a breath analysis device that detects cancer, said yesterday its technology has produced preliminary accuracy of 98.5% in independent trials, which it believes makes it a world leader in detecting lung cancer.

The company has a working, portable prototype of its breathalyzer-like device that can detect lung cancer by identifying markers in breath samples and is spending 2013 performing clinical studies on the device and its infrared-based method of detecting cancer.

 In a press release Wednesday, the company said it had conducted a pilot

Smart Skin Technologies of Fredericton has reached an agreement with a major golf club manufacturer to help launch its new Quantifeel product, which tests the pressure points on a golfer’s grip throughout the swing.

Founder and CEO Kumaran Thillainadarajah said the parties have agreed to terms on a deal they hope to sign in the next few days. Together, they hope to finalize Quantifeel so it will be available in golf stores this year to help golfers choose just the right grip when they’re buying golf clubs.

 “We expect we will have a product out in the market later this fall,” said

What a difference a year has made for Celtx, the St. John’s-based maker of pre-production software for the film industry.

By coincidence, I recently interviewed CEO Mark Kennedy, one year to the day after my last report on the company appeared on Entrevestor, and it was astonishing how the company had performed in that time.

In April 2012, the company had almost two million users (those who had logged in five times or more) in 170 countries operating in 34 languages. Today, Celtx has 4.6 million users, and the company has placed special emphasis on revenue growth lately so it is getting

Canadian Entrepreneurs in New England, a Boston-based group dedicated to helping Canadian tech and biotech companies navigate the New England startup community, will be launched at the Atlantic Venture Forum in Halifax in June.

Critical Path, the Vancouver-based organizer of the Venture Forum, issued a brochure this week that shows the group, modelled on C100 of San Francisco, that will be unveiled at the event, June 19 and 20.

Though it shares a name with the Halifax radio station, C100 in the startup world is the name of a group of Canadian tech professionals working in Silicon Valley

When Andrew Cherwenka first showed up in New York to market his Toronto-based startup Authintic, he worked out of coffee shops, always on the lookout for a spot with free wi-fi.

Today, he’s working in shared space in the city’s Flatiron district and enrolled in one of the leading initiatives of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs to develop Canadian startups.

Authintic is one of six Canadian tech companies now enrolled in the Canadian Tech Accelerator at New York City, or CTA@NYC. Though none of the current participants are from Atlantic Canada, the 30 or so companies that have

Media Spot Me, a Kitchener, Ont.-based, startup that helps link journalists and experts, is considering a move to Halifax if it can make the economics of such a move work out.

 

The company was started two years ago by former television journalist Stavros Rougas and his technical co-founder Ebrahim Ashrafizadeh to help solve the problem journalists face in finding experts to comment on topical events. Rougas is a former TV producer, and understands the difficulty in quickly finding experts — usually academics — to speak on any given issue.

 

Having launched the service a month ago,

One of Canada’s leading specialists in innovation on Tuesday urged Atlantic Canada’s entrepreneurs to embrace federal government procurement as a means of driving their products to market.

Tom Jenkins, the Executive Chairman of Waterloo-based OpenText, told a luncheon speech at the Nova Scotia Innovation Summit in Halifax that government procurement is more effective than subsidies as a tool for encouraging innovation. And he added the good news is government procurement, especially in select sectors like defense programs, is destined to be lucrative for several decades.

“Government as