Three New Brunswick companies tomorrow will receive funding of more than $200,000 each as the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation will announce the winners of the 2015 Breakthru competition.

The Breakthru Awards Dinner will be held Thursday night at the Fredericton Convention Centre, and the highlight of the evening promises to be the announcement of the winner of the biennial competition. That team will go home almost $300,000 richer, but the second- and third-place teams won’t be complaining either.

Breakthru has become part of the landscape in the New Brunswick startup scene, and

When we published our first Entrevestor Intelligence report of 2014, the numbers that leapt from the page were the job creation figures.  But things have changed in the past year.

The Atlantic Canadian startups we surveyed a year ago told us that they increased their staffing by 43 percent in 2013. They intended to increase employment by 50 percent in 2014, and the IT companies planned to double their staff overall.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

Despite the blazing optimism in early 2014, the 139 companies that gave us 2014 data on their staffing overall employ 1,051 full-time

Known for its verve and creativity, LeadSift has set out to find out which celebrity the world wants to see succeed Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show.

Since Stewart announced last month that he is stepping down, there has been plenty of speculation on who the new host can be. Halifax-based LeadSift, which scans social media to help businesses find sales leads, used its technology to sift

Pascal deVillers regards the Free2Charge phone-charging stations as a “modern payphone.”

The payphone should have gone the way of the buggy whip, given that most of us carry cellphones. But the batteries tend to go dead in the middle of the day, and finding a place to charge them can be inconvenient, to say the least.

The Halifax company was created to address that problem. Founded by

Startup Grind, an event series designed to help entrepreneurs, has launched a Halifax chapter and will hold its first gathering tomorrow with a livestream by famed tech evangelist and author Guy Kawasaki.

The Halifax group is being led by Oleg Yefymov, a former Israeli venture capital fund manager who moved to Halifax last year. He is now working on his own startup Yomes, a feedback service for tenants and landlords.

Backed by Google for Entrepreneurs, Startup Grind is a global network active in almost 200 cities that aims to link and educate entrepreneurs. It generally features a

The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and the University of New Brunswick have issued the following press release:

Government of Canada Supports Dr. J. Herbert Smith Centre for Technology Management and Entrepreneurship at UNB

March 16, 2015 - Fredericton, NB – Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA)

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The University of New Brunswick’s Dr. J. Herbert Smith Centre will take on two new projects at its Technology Management and Entrepreneurship Centre (TME), thanks to investments by the Government of Canada.

Mike Allen, Member of Parliament for Tobique-Mactaquac, on

HeadsUp, a startup dedicated to improving tradespeople’s communications with customers, captured the $25,000 first prize at Canada’s Business Model Competition on Saturday, edging out a strong field of finalists.

The university entrepreneurship competition’s winning team, comprising Mike Reid, Jeremy Tupper, and Dimitry Galamiyev, was a bit of a hybrid as its members came from three schools -- University of Waterloo, Dalhousie University, and Ontario College of Art and Design University respectively.

The two other winners were: Ourotech, made up of Duleek Ranatunga and Zain Roohi of the

Atlantic Venture Forum, an investor conference that showcases regional startups, is looking for founders to present at this year’s event June 10 and 11 at the Westin Nova Scotian in Halifax.

Critical Path Group, the company that organizes AVF, has released a call for presenting companies and is accepting applications until March 31.

The company said the two-day event will “bring together

When Dan Palotta speaks in Fredericton next week, he will make a passionate plea for more liberal operating rules for non-profits, arguing they can do more good with greater flexibility.

Palotta is one of the keynote speakers at the Social Impact Dialogue that will take place Monday and Tuesday to kick off the East Coast Startup Week – the winter entrepreneurship festival in the New Brunswick capital.

The influence of the Pond-Deshpande Centre – whose dual mission is for traditional and social entrepreneurship – is strong in the Startup Week, so there is a heavy emphasis on impact

There’s nothing predictable about inspiration. Frances Leary’s journey toward becoming a socially responsible entrepreneur began with a study of Bigfoot in the swamps of Louisiana.

Halifax-based Leary established Wired Flare, her online communications company, in 2011.

It has become the 13th company in the Maritimes to gain the status of Benefit Corporation, a designation that communicates