Castaway Golf Technologies, a company that grew out of a young boy’s love of retrieving lost golf balls, has won the $287,250 first prize in the 2015 Breakthru competition.

The Fredericton company that is developing an automated system for retrieving, sorting and selling balls lost in water hazards received the news at the Breakthru dinner last night, attended by 540 people.

The first runner-up was Simptek, which is working on home automation systems that save energy. Third place was captured by NB Biomatrix of Saint John, founded by Jeff Jennings and Keith Brunt, who have discovered a

With the support of BDO, Entrevestor will once again this year host a series of Entrevestor Luncheons, beginning with an event in Moncton on April 15.

BDO, the accountancy and tax advisory consultancy, has agreed to sponsor four Entrevestor Luncheons this year. The luncheons are an opportunity for members of the startup community can come together to discuss ways to improve the regional ecosystem.

Last year, partnering with Entrepreneurs’ Forum, we held luncheons or dinners in each provincial capital in the region. The topics we discussed ranged from finding early adopters to mentorship

As Executive Director of The Mentra, Atlantic Canada’s new mentoring organization, Janna Hare expected to be matching mentors and mentees like a dating service. But she’s found that people want to choose who they work with.

So now, The Mentra is establishing MentraConnect, a cloud-based platform that suggests mentors based on an entrepreneur’s profile, but also allows mentees to search for

As education departments around Atlantic Canada try to find a solution for the snow day problem, they should consider asking geeks for help.

The pain is obvious. Our students are missing too much time due to the weather, and officials are considering making up the time on Saturdays or holidays.

They might ask tech communities to come up with an online solution that would allow teachers to

Invest Atlantic has announced that Nancy Mathis will chair the conference this autumn, and that it will expand its pitching series to include new classes of entrepreneurs.

Now in its sixth year, Invest Atlantic is a pan-regional conference for entrepreneurs and investors in Atlantic Canada. It will be held this year at the World Trade and Convention Centre in Halifax on Sept. 29 and 30.

And

Three New Brunswick companies tomorrow will receive funding of more than $200,000 each as the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation will announce the winners of the 2015 Breakthru competition.

The Breakthru Awards Dinner will be held Thursday night at the Fredericton Convention Centre, and the highlight of the evening promises to be the announcement of the winner of the biennial competition. That team will go home almost $300,000 richer, but the second- and third-place teams won’t be complaining either.

Breakthru has become part of the landscape in the New Brunswick startup scene, and

When we published our first Entrevestor Intelligence report of 2014, the numbers that leapt from the page were the job creation figures.  But things have changed in the past year.

The Atlantic Canadian startups we surveyed a year ago told us that they increased their staffing by 43 percent in 2013. They intended to increase employment by 50 percent in 2014, and the IT companies planned to double their staff overall.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

Despite the blazing optimism in early 2014, the 139 companies that gave us 2014 data on their staffing overall employ 1,051 full-time

Known for its verve and creativity, LeadSift has set out to find out which celebrity the world wants to see succeed Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show.

Since Stewart announced last month that he is stepping down, there has been plenty of speculation on who the new host can be. Halifax-based LeadSift, which scans social media to help businesses find sales leads, used its technology to sift

Pascal deVillers regards the Free2Charge phone-charging stations as a “modern payphone.”

The payphone should have gone the way of the buggy whip, given that most of us carry cellphones. But the batteries tend to go dead in the middle of the day, and finding a place to charge them can be inconvenient, to say the least.

The Halifax company was created to address that problem. Founded by

Startup Grind, an event series designed to help entrepreneurs, has launched a Halifax chapter and will hold its first gathering tomorrow with a livestream by famed tech evangelist and author Guy Kawasaki.

The Halifax group is being led by Oleg Yefymov, a former Israeli venture capital fund manager who moved to Halifax last year. He is now working on his own startup Yomes, a feedback service for tenants and landlords.

Backed by Google for Entrepreneurs, Startup Grind is a global network active in almost 200 cities that aims to link and educate entrepreneurs. It generally features a