Sam Bromley of Whitecap Scientific Corp. and Sarah Murphy of Sentinal Alert captured first place at the Pitch101 St. John’s event at Memorial University on Friday, capping off two weeks of events for and by entrepreneurial students in the region.

I previously reported on the Pitch101 event at Acadia University last month, but have overlooked a few other happenings at universities, such as the presentations by Dalhousie University’s Starting Lean  course two weeks ago and by St. Mary’s University MBA students last week.

Bromley and Murphy are both experienced members of the startup

GetGifted, the Charlottetown-based social media phenomenon, will launch tomorrow in Halifax, the largest city the young company has entered.

Founder and CEO Gillian McCrae said late last week the company has signed up about 40 merchants for the Halifax launch. Anyone in the Halifax area who wants a chance to land free merchandise can sign up on the GetGifted website.

Here’s how it works:  GetGifted asks local retailers to volunteer a selection of their wares as gifts for customers. So a restaurant might offer 30 deserts worth $10 each. Or a clothing store might put forward 50 pairs of

Boston is known as a city that nurtures innovation. Think MIT and Babson College, or Harvard, where Facebook was born, or companies like Genzyme and Boston Scientific. And in this startup mecca, Jordan MacLeod is developing his compan Strue, thanks to the new Canadian Technology Accelerator in Boston.

Charlottetown-based Strue is one of five Canadian companies enrolled at the Canadian

As the startup community strives to become a truly regional presence, one thing becomes increasingly clear and problematic: it’s difficult to follow what’s going on in provinces other than your own.

This is a problem for two reasons. First, startups in the region need to get their message out to international markets, and the factors preventing news from travelling between provinces also prevent it from travelling around the world. And second, there are provincial policy decisions that affect startups around the region, and it’s often difficult to follow the debate on these policies in

During his career as an architect on Prince Edward Island, David Lopes has discovered one part of the job he really doesn’t like: paperwork. And he’s learned that other architects dislike it as passionately as he does.

“Most architects get into architecture to design and build things, but they have to wade through contract administration,” said Lopes. “And most use paper for their contract administration.”

Lopes is out to change that.  

Two years ago, he founded Rform, which is developing a software-as-a-solution product to simplify the administrative burden that comes with

B4Checkin, the Halifax company offering SaaS hotel reservation systems, has received certification from leading hotel booking website TripAdvisor, greatly improving flexibility and efficiency for the startup’s clients.

The company issued a press release Tuesday saying the partnership with TripAdvisor, which has more traffic than any other hotel review site, will let hotels using the B4Checkin system route prospective guests directly to their own websites from listings on TripAdvisor.  These hotels will benefit from an increase in direct bookings without having to pay the additional fees

Eigen Innovations Inc. is a New Brunswick company that ticks a lot of boxes on investors’ checklists.

The Fredericton startup has a strong industrial partner, patented software and an early adopter that will pay for its product. What’s more, it’s working in one of the sexiest segments of the technology sector, the industrial Internet.

The industrial Internet refers to the integration of complex physical machinery with networked sensors and software. It encompasses such fields as machine learning, big data, and machine-to-machine communication to gather data from machines, analyze it

In the latest edition of Progress magazine, I take a look at the challenges facing startups when trying to attract talented people.

One thing that surprised me as I researched the story was that it is easier in some respects to staff a brand new company than one that’s been around for a few years. People like the idea of joining startups, but they prefer to be in on the ground floor and receive a founder’s slice of the pie.

Yet startups continue to attract great people. In the past month, Innovacorp has lost two investment managers to young companies – Thomas Rankin to his own company

Tiffany James broke into a broad grin when her company Halifax Hair Extensions won the Pitch101 event at Acadia University on Friday. But she wasn’t through: an hour or two later, she also won the university’s Wes Nicol competition for business plans.

James’ double-win highlighted an afternoon of entrepreneurship in Acadia’s magnificent K.C. Irving Environmental Science Centre. Acadia is too often overlooked in the startup universe in Atlantic Canada. The university’s Entrepreneurship Centre and its Data Centre for Rural Issues are developing some interesting young businesses.

One thing

I was really lucky recently to interview Ryan Holmes, the CEO of HootSuite, for an article in USA Today. The story ran late last week.

The Vancouver social media management company this summer raised $165 million in VC funding, the largest raise ever in Canada. The article looks at how the four-year-old company now plans to continue its spectacular growth.

What I found interesting about HootSuite is that it is developing the discipline needed to become a publicly traded company. It reports quarterly financial statements. All its statements have the rigors of a public company’s releases.