Nova Scotia’s Clever Fruit Products has developed a new berry-based food ingredient that can reduce cholesterol by as much ads 40 percent, and the company hopes to have a product in the market within a year.

Having started as a juice maker three years ago, the company discovered a process that dries blueberries and other fruit into a powder that can be added to foods to enhance health benefits.

With its digital product being beta-tested by two companies, the troika that heads St. John’s-based Creatros Technologies is turning its attention to its first fundraising effort and a full launch in 2021.

The company came together three year ago at Memorial University and set out to solve a problem that plagues many teams of programmers – understanding the skillsets of all the team members.

Toronto-based Wattpad said Monday it will open an office in Halifax, beginning in 2020 with a team based at Volta, the city’s innovation hub.

The press release on the Wattpad website said the East Coast operation would be its “second headquarters” though it gave no information on the number of people to be based in Halifax nor what they will do.

The company – which has developed platforms where

Volta, Canada’s East Coast Innovation Hub, has named four new members to its board of directors.

The board provides direction and leadership in carrying out Volta’s goal of building a community in which entrepreneurs can come together to learn from each other, grow their companies and expand to global markets.

The new board members are:

● Rhiannon Davies, former Chief Operating Officer of

Seventeen Indigenous entrepreneurs will graduate this week from the Joint Economic Development Initiative’s Indigenous Business Incubator and Accelerator programs.

Fredericton-based JEDI, as the organization is known, is an economic development agency for Native communities in New Brunswick. It hosts both incubator and accelerator programs to help Indigenous entrepreneurs launch or expand their

Halifax-based Electric Owl is preparing to launch a digital garden management platform targeted at the 46 million households in North America that grow their own food. 

The social enterprise aims to launch its Garden Manager product in the spring of 2020.  The Garden Manager will advise users on how to grow fresh and nutritious food. The aim is to improve food supply and reduce the environmental

Innovacorp has announced the companies selected to participate in its Blue-Green Challenge and Start-Up Yard at COVE cohort for the 2019-2020 season.

The Nova Scotia government’s early-stage venture capital agency issued a statement Thursday saying Blue-Green Challenge round one winners receive $5,000 as well as guidance from business veterans. Round two winners receive $10,000. The Blue-Green

At Entrevestor, we’re dedicated to the growth of innovation-driven companies as vehicles for economic development in Atlantic Canada. But it would be great if economic policy in the region focused more on entrepreneurs than innovators.

We’re all too anxious to toss around the term “innovation” and its derivatives these days. Same goes for “disruptive”, “smart”, “clean” and so on. I plead guilty.

The Memorial Centre for Entrepreneurship has opened applications for the 2020 Mel Woodward Cup, which will hand out $35,000 in prize money to companies founded by Memorial University students.

MCE Director Florian Villaumé sent out an email Monday to say the organizers are changing the rules of the competition to channel more development capital into the two strongest participants.

The

Halifax in 2018 maintained its position as the cornerstone of the Atlantic Canadian startup community, and in the last two years the city’s ecosystem has deepened.

As we present segments from our 2018 Atlantic Canada Startup Data report, we’re breaking out Halifax as its own jurisdiction because it was home to 199 startups at the end of last year – almost two-fifths of the 550 companies we