For me, very little says more about the accelerated evolution of Atlantic Canada’s innovation economy than the maturation of Invest Atlantic.

The only pan-regional conference for investors and entrepreneurs in Atlantic Canada will be held at the World Trade and Convention Centre in Halifax on Sept. 26, the third of four events in Atlantic Innovation Week. For the third year in a row, I’m helping to organize the event, and I can’t help but be struck by how different the conference and the overall ecosystem are compared with when we began.

Consider this statistic: in the first Invest

The 2012 BioInnovation Challenge at BioPort Atlantic will be a larger event than last year, featuring seven participants, of whom at least three, have raised money previously.

The BioInnovation Challenge was launched in 2011 as the competitive event at BioPort, the main conference for biosciences in Nova Scotia. There were five participants last year, and ABK Biomedical, which is developing a product for the treatment of benign tumors in women, emerged with the $30,000 first prize.

The finalists -- a strong field given that almost half are proven to be investment-ready -- are:

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Three years ago, businessman Gregg Curwin asked to meet me to discuss my book on the Nova Scotia economy, in part because he took exception to my statement that food production was too small a part of the province’s economy to have a significant impact on its future.

In fact, he told me, he was working on a system to grow local vegetables indoors under LED lights, using renewable energy and minimal water and fertilizer. That vision is now bearing fruit – well, leafy greens – at a test facility in Truro operated by Curwin’s company, TruLeaf Sustainable Agriculture Ltd.

TruLeaf has been

The value of the McKenzie Accelerator – which is now accepting applications to its second cohort – was driven home to me when I watched Guyverson Vernous present his company iCubemedia at the accelerator’s Demo Day in April.

Vernous is a native of Haiti, and he enrolled in the Moncton accelerator affiliated with McKenzie College earlier this year to help structure iCubemedia into a more dynamic business. The young company’s product, App-Lingua, allows smartphone app developers to translate their apps into foreign languages. He had already booked some sales, and his two hottest markets

Ocean Sonics – the young sister company of Instrument Concepts of Great Village, NS – is planning to launch a new product called icTalk in the autumn to complement its successful icListen smart hydrophone.

Begun by marine engineer Mark Wood in 2000, Instrument Concepts made a name for itself designing products specializing in underwater sound transmission and receiving. In March, it launched icListen as an underwater microphone that is so simple to use that you can hook it up to your iPod.  Its applications range from monitoring underwater drilling equipment from oil rigs to recording the

Now that he’s able to drive past buildings made of his green concrete blocks, Robert Niven is gearing up for CarbonCure Technology’s second round of funding, which he hopes will raise $3 million to $5 million.

Niven, an environmental engineer and chemist and now the company’s CEO, conceived of CarbonCure (and its sister company Carbon Sense Solutions) five years ago as a means of improving the environmental efficiency of making concrete blocks. Rather than cure the blocks through an energy-intensive steam system, CarbonCure hardens the blocks with carbon-dioxide, producing a quality

Greg Phipps, the man who once brought BDC Venture Capital to Radian6, has taken a leave of absence from Innovacorp to join Livelenz Inc. as its president.

Phipps said in an interview Friday he will be away from Innovacorp, where he serves as an investment director, for six to 12 months to help with operations at Livelenz, which develops data-analysis technology for quick service restaurant, or QSR, franchisees. He will retain his duties as a director at Innovacorp portfolio companies AioTV and Equals6.

Phipps joined the board of Livelenz in February, when Innovacorp made a $1 million

The federal government’s announcement Thursday of $1.2 million in loans for four Halifax-area tech companies highlighted the benefits of both debt and equity financing from public and private sectors for the region’s startups.

As other news outlets have reported, Bernard Valcourt, the Minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, was in Dartmouth to announce loans to Ad-Dispatch.com Inc., NovaWise Inc., B4Checkin Limited and 2nd Act Innovations Inc.

What I thought was interesting is that three of the companies had raised equity financing recently and a fourth was

BoomersWork, a Halifax company that matches retired executives with projects for businesses or organizations, is developing a pricing model for startups to allow young companies to benefit from the experience of seasoned corporate vets.

The company launched this spring and now has a client list of 150 executives beyond their fiftieth birthday who want to keep busy by taking on projects for companies, governments, or not-for-profit organizations.

“BoomersWork is an eHarmony for business,” said CEO Rick Emberley yesterday. “It’s not a job site. It matches people, many of them recent

A pair of researchers from Dalhousie University has struck a partnership with a venture capital fund from Toronto to commercialize their pneumatic rotary engine and develop other projects.

Braden Murphy, a Masters student in mechanical engineering, and Assistant Professor Darrel Doman designed the technology at the university, and announced at a reception yesterday that they have partnered with York Bridge Enterprises of Toronto to form Scotia Motor Works, which will bring the product to market. The company has signed a licensing agreement with Dalhousie and the researchers to develop the