In 2006, Bob Pelley developed and piloted Innovacorp’s I-3 Technology Start-Up Competition, which began in Cape Breton and spread provincewide, fostering some of Nova Scotia’s most promising startups. Now, Pelley has got behind Spark Cape Breton with the aim of energizing Cape Breton’s burgeoning tech scene.

The inaugural Spark Cape Breton has just concluded, with six very early-stage tech

Haligonians are invited to view a free documentary called Not Business As Usual that stresses the need for entrepreneurs to be agents for social good and redefine business. Organizers of the screening say the documentary recently played to a sold-out crowd at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The movie will play at the city’s Company House on Monday, April 28th and will be followed by a conversation about the future of entrepreneurship in Canada.

Made by InsitituteB.com, a Vancouver-based company that helps develop profitable, socially-purposed businesses, the movie focuses on

The prospects are excellent that equity-based crowdfunding will soon be allowed in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but first securities regulators are looking for feedback on new rules for the online fundraising.

The Nova Scotia Securities Commission and New Brunswick’s Financial and Consumer Services Commission have joined with their counterparts in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec to produce a set of proposals that would let companies raise money through crowdfunding. The Ontario Securities Commission is working on a similar paper.

Crowdfunding, or raising money by seeking small

As the entries are coming in for the Atlantic Canada Startup Directory, it’s becoming clear we at Entrevestor have to differentiate between this directory as opposed to the databank we assembled earlier in the year.

What we are now seeking is the name, address, phone number etc. from all the members of the Atlantic Canada startup community. We’re going to publish this in a directory, a printed booklet, and have it permanently on our website. We’ll distribute the printed version at gatherings like the Atlantic Venture Forum. The details will be public.

Earlier this year, we were looking

The Rounds, a social network for medical professionals, has raised a $1 million seed round, including a $250,000 investment from the Nova Scotia investment agency, Innvoacorp.

The Halifax-based company, which works out of the Volta startup incubator, said in a press release it closed the funding round on Tuesday, and that the money would likely last it for a year. Other than the Innovacorp investment, the rest of the money came from angels from the region, across Canada and in San Francisco. Five of the angels are doctors.

In February, The Rounds -- formerly known as Boondoc -- launched

Almost everything we experience in life has some kind of design. Determining if it is good or not is complicated. Where one object or process may function well under one set of conditions, it may fail under another. From a business standpoint, three factors separate the winners from the losers: the design’s utility, its appeal to a particular demographic, and its staying power.

When developing or improving a product, service or technology, the most successful companies employ professional designers from the very start. Most do it too late, and some not at all. Instead they apply outmoded

A student recruitment survey from Equals6 has revealed interesting views from the Millennial Generation, including that 91 per cent of respondents would relocate for a new job, that 42 per cent seek professional mentorship and that just 13 per cent wish to run their own business. 

Halifax-based Equals6 is an online community of 75,000 students who use the site to make connections with each other and employers. The company surveyed nearly 6,000 high school, college and university students across the country and across a variety of disciplines about their career choices. The report focuses

SwiftRadius, the Fredericton-based IT consulting firm, is launching a new initiative to help large North American companies develop innovation.

The company has struck a partnership with Forth Innovation, a Dutch business consultancy, to roll out the European firm’s innovation program in the North American market. They will launch the initiative in late May when Forth Innovation founder Gijs van Wulfen, one of linkedIn’s top 100 influencers, comes to the region to host a series of workshops in Fredericton, and possibly in Moncton and Halifax.

This initiative addresses a common problem at

Cloud-A, a Halifax provider of cloud delivery solutions, released the following press release:

Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada – April 16th, 2014, Cloud-A, a Canadian leader in cloud delivery solutions for high performance software applications, announced today that it has developed a new automation technology for cloud providers called “Bricks”.    

This advancement solves the problem that developers and system administrators have where they are spending far too much time setting up, patching and updating server side services that add little value to their end customer. The new service

The first Entrevestor Dinner will be held in the Fredericton area May 12, and we hope it will offer members of the startup community a chance to plan lasting improvements to the regional startup ecosystem.

Held with the assistance of the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, the discussion-and-dinner event will feature working sessions in which participants will discuss ways to enhance the startup ecosystem. We didn’t think the community needed another dinner with a speaker, but there are serious issues facing the startup industry in the region. The Entrevestor Dinners seek to identify and