The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation yesterday launched its Breakthru startup competition, which will offer the largest prize ever for the biennial contest.

The Fredericton-based innovation agency sent out a press release calling for pre-revenue startups to apply for the contest before Dec. 9.  The contestants will be competing for a total pool of prizes worth more than $500,000 in cash and in-kind services. It’s a significant increase over the total prizes of $406,000 in the 2013 event.

“By getting a bigger prize pool, it gives us the ability to be of more help to the winners,” said

The plain facts about strategic investments bubbled to the surface at Invest Atlantic on Tuesday during a no-sugar-coating discussion on whether strategic or venture capital investments are better.

It’s difficult to write a conclusion on the panel discussion titled Corporate vs. Venture Capital Investment. Its strength was that there were so many views, often opposing views, presented clearly by people with tremendous experience in the field.

The speakers revealed that a good corporate partner/strategic investor can bring a huge wealth of experience and contacts to a startup, not to

Nicole LeBlanc, until recently the CFO of the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, is moving to a new role in Toronto.

Speaking from Montreal, where she is training ahead of beginning her new job with the Strategic Investments & Partnership Group at the Business Development Bank of Canada, LeBlanc said she is excited by the move but will continue to support Atlantic Canadian companies.

“My

In February, Michael Brown and Matt Cooper tried an experiment that would indicate whether their idea for an online cleaning service would work.

They wanted to know whether complete strangers would go online to book cleaners, leave their credit card details and allow cleaners into their house. The key was the customer had to be a stranger, because that would tell them whether their business would work beyond a circle of friends. Within six days, they had their first customer and Clean Simple was born.

The Halifax company is an online booking service for residential and commercial

Vish Solutions, a St. John`s startup that helps to improve the efficiency of hair salons, captured first place at the PitchCamp competition that kicked off Invest Atlantic last night.

Vish addresses an unlikely but potentially lucrative pain point. One of the most expensive costs  of running a hair salon is hair dye, but they waste about one-third of  their pigments by not having the right colour in stock, or by mixing it improperly, or other reasons.

Vish Solutions is a cloud-based software-as-a-service product that helps salons to make sure they have the right pigmentation and can use

We’re starting to see tweets about the coming Breakthru competition in New Brunswick. Dalhousie University just hosted a Startup Weekend. And PtichCamp, the pitching competition affiliated with Invest Atlantic will take place this afternoon.

What all these things have in common is they’re encouraging and highlighting company formation in the region, and more new companies lately have been showing their faces for the first time. It’s looking as if the breakneck pace of new company formation will continue this year.

A bit of background: when we compiled our data on the Atlantic Canadian

Atlantic Canada may seem an unlikely place to establish a marketing and PR agency with a focus on startups, but entrepreneurship is growing fast in this region and Allan Gates, partner at Bonfire Communications, sees an opportunity.

Saint John-based Gates said many entrepreneurs fail to grasp the importance of early-stage marketing.

 “Startups are usually launched by people with a

Bob Williamson, the organizer of Invest Atlantic, has almost finalized the list of 16 contestants to compete in PitchCamp next week.

Invest Atlantic will host PitchCamp the night before the main conference as a showcase for young companies in the area, and a chance for them to get feedback on their business models and pitches. It takes place 4:30 to 6:30 pm on Monday at the World Trade and Convention Centre in Halifax.

Williamson has named 12 contestants to the event, which allows each participant 60 seconds to deliver a pitch, after which they are critiqued by a panel of judges.

The

Highlighting the progress being made by local startups, Halifax e-commerce company Dash Hudson used the Startup Empire conference Tuesday to unveil a new feature that will make it easier for people to buy appealing clothes online.

Founder and CEO Thomas Rankin told the conference that Dash Hudson now allows subscribers to click on an Instagram photo of a model wearing clothes. The subscriber is instantly taken to an online store, where he or she can order the clothes on display.

 “It’s a simple experience that takes you from seeing a product you like to buying it and having it soon,”

Ever since Radian6 and GoInstant were sold to salesforce.com, there has been a lot of talk about the entrepreneurial ecosystem here in Atlantic Canada. How can we keep churning out great, innovative companies that attract world class companies to invest in or buy our companies, creating both wealth for the founders, their employees and investors and adding high paying jobs to our region? Cloning Marcel LeBrun or Jevon MacDonald is likely not an option so we need to figure out how to support our young companies from inception through their growth stages.

There are different types of