Laurie Dolhan is fanatical about “buying local”, and she’s gearing up to take that message regional.

Dolhan is the President of ContractMe.ca, a website devoted to linking up local service providers and small businesses with potential clients, whether they’re businesses, non-profits, government or other small businesses.

Operating out of Ketch Harbour, on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore, ContractMe has gained notice for connecting service providers with jobs, and is now garnering about 7,000 page views per month.

The site allows members to post the qualifications and areas of specialty,

Blair Ryan got the idea for Boondoc, a social network for physicians, when he read of a U.S. doctor unable to extract a reciprocating saw blade from a patient’s hand.

The blade was good and stuck, but rather than give up and amputate the hand, the doctor texted six other doctors, one of whom messaged back with a simple solution, and the hand was saved.

Ryan began to think:  what would it mean to healthcare if doctors could canvas thousands of colleagues, not just six?

Thus was born Boondoc, a Sackville, N.S.-based startup that Ryan hopes will soon link many of Canada’s 80,000

Cleantech integration company LightSail Canada will soon apply to the Atlantic Innovation Fund to help with financing for a $4.6 million pilot facility to store energy produced at a wind farm near New Glasgow, N.S. LightSail Canada is a development company for Berkeley, California-based cleantech company LightSail Energy.

Greg Fong, the Director of Business Development for LightSail Canada, said in an interview yesterday the wind developers and LightSail together plan to put about $2 million into the project, which it hopes will be operational in 2014. The company will likely learn

In calling for a new round of startups to enter the Launch36 accelerator program, PropelICT Executive Director Trevor MacAusland released a few interesting statistics .

The 10 startups – nine of them from New Brunswick – that graduated from the first Launch36 cohort in June have already attracted more than $1 million in funding and employ 43 people, he said in a press release yesterday. One-third of them are producing revenue.

The figure on funding sounds low to me, and a few of these companies already have commitments for funding that would push the figure higher.

The employment

Atlantic Innovation Week will be something of an old home week for the companies that went through Propel ICT’s Launch36 accelerator. It will also be a chance for them to learn how they’ve progressed since their term ended in June. In fact we’ll discover that they’ve progressed quite a bit, and the words “early” and “adopter” will feature prominently in their presentations. The term “funding” might creep into the discussion as well.

First, a bit of background: Launch36 is the accelerator operated by Moncton-based Propel ICT; it put 11 companies through its program last winter. Three of

Green with Energy, a company that came together at a Dalhousie University’s Startup Weekend last year, is moving from software into hardware with a new product that can help homeowners find where they’re wasting electricity.

Smartcell is a simple, inexpensive device that can plug into a wall socket and provide a graphic illustration of where and when a homeowner can reduce energy consumption, said CEO Megan McCarthy in an interview. “We think we may have come across a solution for home automation,” she said.

Having begun the project at Dalhousie, McCarthy started Green with Energy to

When Andrew Burke presents Remembary at DemoCamp Halifax on Sept. 23, he’ll be displaying one item in what is becoming a portfolio of apps and, well, an online curiosity.

Burke heads Shindig Digital Constructions Inc. and Remembary, a digital diary for iOS-based products, is the company’s first app, but it won’t be the last. Burke is also working with Toronto-based partner Chung Wong on his second project, Jump2Spot.com. He’s also the brains behind the tongue-in-cheek Starships Start Here campaign.

“The best way to make money in the App Store is to have a portfolio of apps, so people

Some programmers want to come up with products that put the “active’’ into interactive TV. Michael-Andreas Kuttner prefers to let the viewer embrace his inner couch potato.

Having spent 15 years in TV production, Kuttner has now formed Halifax-based Neato Entertainment, a young company whose CommercialBreak product automatically allows a smart TV viewer to see web-based content instead of commercials. Once completed, the software will download to a smartphone, which instantly becomes the remote control for the television. The smartphone can automatically detect when commercials interrupt

When the co-founders of znanja Inc. appear at DemoCamp Halifax on Sept. 23, they’ll have something they didn’t have when they entered Innovacorp’s I-3 Competition last year – a product.

The co-founders of the New Glasgow, N.S., company - Tim Houston, Jim Fitt, Dan Enman and Jimmy Mabey - entered the innovation competition in 2011 with little more than a concept. It was software that converts normal, Word-based training material into an eLearning packaging format called SCORM, saving huge amounts of time and money in a massive industry.

Znanja (pronounced  NAN-ja) makes it easy to

Picomole Instruments, a Moncton company developing a breath analysis device that detects cancer, yesterday announced that it has received approval from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and will patent the device.

Formerly called “LifeSens”, the device is currently unnamed because the company couldn't trademark that name.

Cormier said the patent notice allows the company to protect its proprietary technology as it develops clinical applications. He told Entrevestor that Picomole has completed a small pilot study on lung cancer and, encouraged by the results, is planning a larger