Springleap of Capetown, South Africa, and LeadSift of Africa have been named the two top companies appearing at MentorCamp Atlantic Canada 2012, a one-day forum of advice and learning for nine startups and 37 mentors.

Permjot Valia, CEO and founder of the event, tweeted last night that the mentors had chosen Springleap, a design crowdsourcing startup, and LeadSift, which mines social media to find sales leads, as the two top presenters. Each company will be offered a $25,000 seed investment from MentorCamp.

Springleap CEO Eran Eyal told the opening session that his company is gaining

Springleap of Capetown, South Africa, and LeadSift of Africa have been named the two top companies appearing at MentorCamp Atlantic Canada 2012, a one-day forum of advice and learning for nine startups and 37 mentors.

Permjot Valia, CEO and founder of the event, tweeted last night that the mentors had chosen Springleap, a design crowdsourcing startup, and LeadSift, which mines social media to find sales leads, as the two top presenters. Each company will be offered a $25,000 seed investment from MentorCamp.

Springleap CEO Eran Eyal told the opening session that his company is gaining

Springleap of Capetown, South Africa, and LeadSift of Halifax have been named the two top companies appearing at MentorCamp Atlantic Canada 2012, a one-day forum of advice and learning for nine startups and 37 mentors.

Permjot Valia, CEO and founder of the event, tweeted last night that the mentors had chosen Springleap, a design crowdsourcing startup, and LeadSift, which mines social media to find sales leads, as the two top presenters. Each company will be offered a $25,000 seed investment from MentorCamp.

Springleap CEO Eran Eyal told the opening session that his company is gaining

Continuing with its entrepreneurial whirlwind, Fredericton-based conference support company OneLobby has closed its $500,000 seed round and pivoted to become an event management application.

OneLobby began earlier this year with CEO Jordan Smith working on his own out of a coffee shop in Halifax. He gained some traction and was even admitted to SeedCamp New York with his plan to develop a social network for conference attendees. In late June, he teamed up with New Brunswick tech veterans Brian Dunphy and Todd Murphy, and moved the whole show to Fredericton.

In the ensuing months, as

Atlantic Innovation Week kicked off last night with a range presentations by entrepreneurs, and continues today with MentorCamp Halifax.

DemoCamp was an open forum for entrepreneurs to demonstrate their products to the community. There were no pitches, no powerpoints. The developers had to stand before their peers and competitors (and potential funders) and demo their product – a nerve-wracking experience because you pray the thing works.

The highlights included Darren Piercey of CyberPsyc Technologies showing to everyone the anxiety his product addresses by drowning the hall with the

The pain that Paul Gratzer’s startup addresses is all too quantifiable and frightening: every 20 seconds, someone in the world loses a limb because of chronic foot ulcers caused by diabetes.

Gratzer is the founder and chief executive of DeCell Technologies Inc., which is commercializing a patented technology that could soon help to cure these ulcers quickly and affordably. The Halifax-based company has developed a natural scaffolding from human skin that can be placed over the ulcer to encourage the regeneration of skin cells and keep the wound clean to avoid infection. On Thursday,

For the second year in a row, a New Brunswick company has won the Deal of the Year Award in venture capital from the CVCA, Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association.

The CVCA announced last week that BDC Venture Capital and New Brunswick Investment Management Corp. won the award for their investment in Q1 Labs Inc. of Fredericton, which sold out to IBM last year for an undisclosed price.  Last year, the award went to Summerhill Venture Partners, Brightspark Ventures and BDC Venture Capital for their funding of another Fredericton company, social media analysis outfit Radian6.

Since winning Innovacorp’s CleanTech Open in April, Mather Carscallen’s SABRTech has landed $250,000 in funding and is working toward opening a pilot scale plant, hopefully in Nova Scotia in 2014.

SABRTech came to public notice in the spring when its revolutionary technology for reducing the cost of producing fuel from algae won first place at the $300,000 CleanTech Open. Innovacorp launched the contest to find a cleantech company anywhere in the world that would set up in Nova Scotia. After scouring the globe, they found the winner at Dalhousie University, where Carscallen was working on

The four co-founders of LaunchPark came together this year to form a company to solve the problem they were facing.

The Halifax-based venture is developing a meeting place for ideas and technical expertise, so that entrepreneurs with great ideas can link up with the talent they need to implement them, and vice-versa. And it was created by people who lacked that sort of solution as they set out to form a company.

“We were a team looking for an idea,” said Shivam Rajdev, one of the co-founders, gesturing to his partners Oliver Baltzer and Adrian Bentley. “And Paul had an idea but was

We’re proud today to publish INNOVATION IN NOVA SCOTIA, the first in our series of PDF-based supplements that we’re producing under the Entrevestor Intelligence brand.  And we’re delighted to publish it on the same day as we launch our new web design, .

Entrevestor Intelligence is a series of supplements on the innovation economy in the Atlantic Provinces. Starting with Nova Scotia, we