LeadSift, the Halifax company that mines social media for business leads, has announced the launch of its platform to allow small and medium-sized businesses to use its product. The following is the press release the company issued this week:

LeadSift Announces its Self Serve Platform to Provide Quality Social Media Leads for Small and Medium Sized Businesses

Platform Analyzes Millions of Twitter Conversations in Real-Time to Provide Only the Best Most Relevant Opportunities to Grow Businesses

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA – LeadSift <http://leadsift.com>, known for its ability to sift

CarbonCure Technologies, the Halifax cleantech company dedicated to low-carbon concrete products, has closed a $3.5 million Series B financing led by BDC Venture Capital.

The company has been accelerating the sales of its eco-friendly concrete solution in the past year, and Founder and CEO Robert Niven now wants to use the additional funds for the research and development of precast and ready mix products.

Concrete, the world’s most common construction material, is responsible for 5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions because traditional processes cure concrete blocks by heating

GrowthWorks Atlantic, the labour-sponsored fund based in Halifax, has made follow-on investments in several of its portfolio companies amounting to more than $2.5 million in recent months.

The fund has benefited from exiting two successful investments in the past year: its sale of stock in publicly traded film company DHX Media, and the sale of its holdings in Halifax pharmaceutical services company STI Technologies Ltd. to Toronto-based private equity firm Imperial Capital.

CEO Tom Hayes said in an interview Monday that GrowthWorks has rechanneled some of the proceeds from these exits

Sam Bromley of Whitecap Scientific Corp. and Sarah Murphy of Sentinal Alert captured first place at the Pitch101 St. John’s event at Memorial University on Friday, capping off two weeks of events for and by entrepreneurial students in the region.

I previously reported on the Pitch101 event at Acadia University last month, but have overlooked a few other happenings at universities, such as the presentations by Dalhousie University’s Starting Lean  course two weeks ago and by St. Mary’s University MBA students last week.

Bromley and Murphy are both experienced members of the startup

GetGifted, the Charlottetown-based social media phenomenon, will launch tomorrow in Halifax, the largest city the young company has entered.

Founder and CEO Gillian McCrae said late last week the company has signed up about 40 merchants for the Halifax launch. Anyone in the Halifax area who wants a chance to land free merchandise can sign up on the GetGifted website.

Here’s how it works:  GetGifted asks local retailers to volunteer a selection of their wares as gifts for customers. So a restaurant might offer 30 deserts worth $10 each. Or a clothing store might put forward 50 pairs of

Boston is known as a city that nurtures innovation. Think MIT and Babson College, or Harvard, where Facebook was born, or companies like Genzyme and Boston Scientific. And in this startup mecca, Jordan MacLeod is developing his compan Strue, thanks to the new Canadian Technology Accelerator in Boston.

Charlottetown-based Strue is one of five Canadian companies enrolled at the Canadian

As the startup community strives to become a truly regional presence, one thing becomes increasingly clear and problematic: it’s difficult to follow what’s going on in provinces other than your own.

This is a problem for two reasons. First, startups in the region need to get their message out to international markets, and the factors preventing news from travelling between provinces also prevent it from travelling around the world. And second, there are provincial policy decisions that affect startups around the region, and it’s often difficult to follow the debate on these policies in

During his career as an architect on Prince Edward Island, David Lopes has discovered one part of the job he really doesn’t like: paperwork. And he’s learned that other architects dislike it as passionately as he does.

“Most architects get into architecture to design and build things, but they have to wade through contract administration,” said Lopes. “And most use paper for their contract administration.”

Lopes is out to change that.  

Two years ago, he founded Rform, which is developing a software-as-a-solution product to simplify the administrative burden that comes with

B4Checkin, the Halifax company offering SaaS hotel reservation systems, has received certification from leading hotel booking website TripAdvisor, greatly improving flexibility and efficiency for the startup’s clients.

The company issued a press release Tuesday saying the partnership with TripAdvisor, which has more traffic than any other hotel review site, will let hotels using the B4Checkin system route prospective guests directly to their own websites from listings on TripAdvisor.  These hotels will benefit from an increase in direct bookings without having to pay the additional fees

Eigen Innovations Inc. is a New Brunswick company that ticks a lot of boxes on investors’ checklists.

The Fredericton startup has a strong industrial partner, patented software and an early adopter that will pay for its product. What’s more, it’s working in one of the sexiest segments of the technology sector, the industrial Internet.

The industrial Internet refers to the integration of complex physical machinery with networked sensors and software. It encompasses such fields as machine learning, big data, and machine-to-machine communication to gather data from machines, analyze it