Employees’ lack of interest in their work is a widespread problem. Only 30 percent of American employees are fully engaged and happy at work, according to Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report. The apathy of the remaining 70 percent (including the 18 percent who are actively disengaged) may be costing the U.S. economy as much as $550 billion a year in lost productivity.

Respected Moncton businesswoman Paula Morand has spent 18 months working on the issue. ConquerPro is her software-as-a-service solution designed to combat the problem by assessing employees’ workplace

A new event will connect IT and food specialists in Wolfville, N.S., in January in the hopes of fostering new ideas and partnerships.  F5/Food will be held at Wolfville’s Acadia University and will take the form of a 48-hour Idea Lab.

“The idea is to set aside two days to design new solutions in the new media space that focuses on one of our greatest assets here in the Annapolis Valley -- food,” said Melissa Quinn, manager of the Acadia Centre for Rural Innovation, which is organizing the event.

“We have created an incubation lab event where people across new media and agricultural

Having launched its first payroll software product in June, Wagepoint is now gearing up to expand into the U.S. market.

It’s also moving to allow some clients to receive a portion of their paycheque in the online currency known as bitcoins.

Wagepoint is based in Halifax and Toronto. It offers an affordable solution to help businesses perform all the tasks associated with payroll through a single solution. That means small- and medium-sized businesses can use Wagepoint to pay employees, deduct taxes, keep records of their payments and similar functions.

One interesting note about the

B4Checkin, the Halifax-based producer of hotel reservation systems, has announced that the Cheeca Lodge & Spa has implemented its booking engine. The luxurious 214-room oceanfront resort in the Florida Keys went live with the new reservations system this summer.

B4Checkin boasts certified two-way interfaces with many of the hospitality industry’s most widely used property management systems. These interfaces mean that crucial information such as room rates, inventory availability and guest profile data are automatically exchanged in real time between the PMS and the B4Checkin online

Affinio, the Halifax-based social media analytics company backed by Build Ventures, captured third place Tuesday at the Startup Showcase of the prestigious O’Reilly Strata Conference in New York.

The announcement, posted on the conference website, capped off a huge day for Affinio. Earlier in the day, it had launched its first product, Tactics Cloud, which lets small businesses mine social media and other data to find potential customers, partners or employees. It also announced it had received a $1.5 million equity investment from Build Ventures, the regional VC fund based in Halifax.

Colibri Software, a Wolfville, N.S.-based rural development technology company, has announced a partnership with the Devour! Food Film Fest.

The company will soon launch the Devour! app powered by Strollopia, a mobile application that allows users to explore the festival through the app's geo-located content messaging.

“The app will enable users to explore not only the festival but also Wolfville and the surrounding communities,” said President John Read in a press release. “The goal is to make learning and exploring the festival fun and seamless.”

The third annual Devour! Food Film

A pair of St. John’s entrepreneurs has developed a new loyalty program app for smartphones that is gaining traction with retailers in their hometown and as far afield as Calgary.

Matthew Stenback and Adam Puddicombe have formed Brownie Points to offer small and mid-sized retailers — who have to compete with multinationals with sophisticated programs — fun digital loyalty programs with some interesting features.

The two former business students at Memorial University began Brownie Points as a tool for coffee shops (as the name suggests) but other retailers can use the product.

In a sign of how active the startup community in Atlantic Canada has become, November will feature not one, not two, but three Startup Weekends. And these are just a few of the events taking place in the coming month.

Jason Janes, a co-founder of Startup St. John’s, and Chris Gardner, the founder of the Common Ground co-working space, are organizing a Startup Weekend Nov. 8-10 at the Genesis Centre at Memorial University in St. John’s. It will allow 60 people to spend a weekend putting together companies, the best of which will hopefully become bona fide enterprises. I’m proud to say I

BIKE Scientific Inc., a Halifax-based medical device company, may be weeks away from the sale of its new ProTrap XG, a disposable cartridge that simplifies the process of isolating proteins in blood samples.

The company aims to solve the problem clinicians have in isolating proteins in blood samples, which is necessary before blood is analyzed in a mass spectrometer. Some 25 million of these procedures are carried out each year in Canada and the U.S., and isolating the proteins is bothersome and time-consuming.

Led by CEO Michael Barr, BIKE has been going for a few years and was a

Every Tuesday, about 10,000 people in Charlottetown eagerly await an email from a company less than a year old that offers them a chance to claim more than 1,000 gifts from local merchants.

The company in question is GetGifted, and its simple idea of helping merchants attract new customers with gifts is creating buzz in Charlottetown and beyond. The company has launched a program in Fredericton, and is already signing up future members in Saint John, Halifax and Moncton. And next month, it will begin a test program in Cambridge, Ma., its first trial in a U.S. city.

The buzz among