It was appropriate to have breakfast with Gerry Pond on the morning of Invest Atlantic last week, for it was during the same event a year earlier that I first heard him speak about the need for a regional entrepreneurial community.

So, just after sunrise on Wednesday, I met with Pond, the head of East Valley Ventures, and his COO Jeff White, to discuss where we are and where we’re going, with the regional ecosystem for entrepreneurship, innovation or whatever you want to call it.

A year earlier, Pond had been the Chair of Invest Atlantic, having been invited after his portfolio company

Having raised more than $2 million in total financing, Charlottetown-based ViTrak is preparing to beta-test its Stepscan footprint analysis technology, which has applications in healthcare, security and sports.

The pre-commercial company is developing pressure-sensitive tiles that are placed on the floor and can analyse the gait and footprints of anyone who walks on them. The tiles -- on which ViTrak has received two patents -- can be arranged in lines or as squares of up to 400 square feet.

 “These pressure-sensitive floor tiles can track, monitor and analyse footprints for medical

We can’t count the great speakers we heard during Atlantic Innovation Week, but we did jot down a few of their more interesting quotes. Here’s a selection of our favourites:

 

“Traction is the new IP.”

-- Boris Wertz, Angel Tech Investor

 

“Ideas are social things and from what I’ve seen here in Halifax you people get this.”

-- Thor Muller, Best-Selling Author

 

“The international mentors coming in here – [it’s] impactful. I mean I’m a different person today than I was two days ago.”

-- David Baxter, Chairman of PropelICT

 

“The thing I love about recruitment is it’s

Performance Genomics Inc., which uses genomics to identify the most fertile animals in a herd to increase the reproduction of livestock, won a highly competitive BioInnovation Challenge at BioPort Atlantic on Thursday, walking away with $40,000 in in-kind services.

The Truro-based company was spun out of the Nova Scotia Agricultural College and has established a genetic-selection model that allows the identification of mice that have maximum fertility, thereby doubling the fertility of a group of mice overall. Chief Executive Michael Dennis said the genetic makeup of mice is about 80

Olympian-turned-tech-executive Julia Rivard will travel to Toronto this weekend to unveil Pursu.it, a new platform to allow Canada’s leading athletes to use crowdfunding to raise the money they need to achieve their dreams.

The Senior Partner at Halifax cloud computing company Norex, Rivard placed in the top 10 in kayaking at the Beijing Olympics and understands the trials athletes face in raising money to train for international competition. She believes crowdfunding – using the internet to raise substantial money in donations of varying size from a vast network of people – can help

East Valley Ventures, the business development group headed by investor Gerry Pond, is in the process of hiring a full-time recruitment executive who will help Atlantic Canadian startups locate key executives, especially among new Canadians.

Speaking at Invest Atlantic yesterday, Pond said there is a need for talented executives to bolster the ranks of the emerging companies in the region, and East Valley Ventures hopes this new executive will help find suitable people to help grow them.

Pond and his COO Jeff White are quick to point out two misconceptions about East Valley Ventures.

For two of the companies pitching at the BioInnovation Challenge today, the $30,000 contest will serve as a precursor to the prestigious AdvaMed conference in Boston next week.

Mindful Scientific and Dartmouth Medical Research Ltd. are among the 10 Canadian companies presenting at the annual get-together of the U.S. medtech industry when it convenes in Boston Oct. 1-3.

The two companies will also pitch at the BioInnovation Challenge, the competitive segment of BioPort Atlantic, which takes place today at the Westin Nova Scotian. BioInnovation Challenge is a pitching contest for biotech

Invest Atlantic, the premier conference for investors and entrepreneurs in the region, takes place today with a keynote speaker from Arkansas and a generous infusion of entrepreneurs.

Jeff Amerine, Technology Licensing Officer of the Adjunct Faculty of Entrepreneurship at the University of Arkansas, will deliver the main speech at the third annual conference, talking about the lessons he has learned in developing an innovation community in his home state. What will be particularly relevant in Amerine’s speech will be his experience in commercializing university research and the role of

Less than a year after it received its first press coverage, medical device company Densitas Inc. is positioning itself to have a market-ready product for testing within a year with a commercial launch planned for the first half of 2014.

Densitas is a seed-level company launched by Dalhousie Associate Professor Mohamed Abdolell to develop the Densitas automated breast density measurement system, which will generate real-time breast density measurements each time a woman receives a screening mammogram.

The system can help to determine the risk of breast cancer. Women with very dense

Having struck a partnership with York Bridge Enterprises of Toronto, Halifax-based Novawise Inc. is mapping a path that it hopes will lead to booking annual revenues of $4million by the end of next year.

Novawise, headed by CEO David MacKinnon and CTO Steve Macdonald, revealed at MentorCamp 2011 that they had developed a Customer Relationship Management solution for the pharmaceutical industry that would collect data from sales reps and then analyse the data in reports for managers. With about $750,000 in angel funding, the team has enhanced the software so it is now applicable to other