The Regional VC Fund, which launched last week, was created largely to solve the lack of capital in Atlantic Canada.

It was an age-old complaint from entrepreneurs in the region: there simply wasn’t enough capital in these parts to nurture world-class businesses. But now that problem will abate – abate, but not vanish – with the creation of the new fund. And because the problem of scarce capital will linger, the creation of this new fund should be considered just a first step toward a healthier financing regime.

The three Maritime provinces last week announced that the yet-to-be-named

A Prince Edward Island web designer is crowdfunding for a digital project he hopes will benefit research into diseases or other charitable causes.

Brad Pineau of Charlottetown has created Coding for Cures, a not-for-profit startup that will produce products with all the profits going to charities. Pineau’s day job now is owner and CTO of Timeless Medical Systems and Timeless Technologies, which are P.E.I.-based software development companies.

“I’ve always been sort of fascinated by how diseases are cured,” he said in an interview Friday. “It’s not something I could work on because I’m a

TitanFile Inc.’s decision to seek financing from the First Angel Network of Halifax has resulted in an oversubscription of the offering by 86 percent – one of the strongest responses in the history of the angel group.

Dartmouth-based TitanFIle, an award-winning online document transfer company, announced Thursday that it has raised about $1.2 million that it will use to roll out a new product – a secure document-sharing and collaboration software that focuses on ease-of-use and flexibility.

Last year, TitanFile, co-founded by CEO Milan Vrekic and CTO Tony Abou-Assaleh, raised $250,000

The Atlantic regional venture capital fund will be managed by Patrick Keefe, now the Vice-President of Investment at Innovacorp, and include a $5 million contribution from Technology Venture Corp. of Moncton, the three Maritime Provinces announced Wednesday.

The provinces said they will launch the fund with an initial capital of $37.5 million, including investments of $15 million from both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and $2.5 million from Prince Edward Island. Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter initiated the fund last year by announcing his province’s contribution and inviting the other

In launching their new casual gaming analytics tool dystillr, two Karma Gaming execs have used the technology to unveil some troubling trends at the world’s largest social gaming company, Zynga Inc.

Jay Aird and Duncan Gillis have posted a report on the new company’s website titled “Volatility in Zynga’s Core Genre”, which points out the San Francisco-based gaming giant is suffering from its dependence on the declining simulation game market, which has declined 53 percent in just under three years.

Aird got together with Paul LeBlanc in 2011 to form Karma Gaming, a company that

The cover story of this month's Progress is my story on Jevon MacDonald's adventure in Silicon Valley, where he spent months raising his A Round for GoInstant. In the story, MacDonald pooh-poohs the rumours that he hit up existing contacts for money. Virtually everyone who invested was someone he met last year through sheer gumption. His advice is that if you're going to tap California funders

Like so many other people with health issues, singer-songwriter Peggy Gillis found the recovery from illness was an economic struggle as well as a physical toil. That was why she turned to the Entrepreneurs with Disabilities Network, or EDN, for some help.

“I’ve had to start from scratch because when you get sick it robs you of all your finances,” said Gillis in an interview last week.

A few years ago, Gillis made extra money by selling her songs through the pay-per-play website mp3.com, but then she was felled by illness, suffering from chronic fatigue, environmental sensitivities and

The news Thursday that Prince Edward Island will invest $2.5 million in the Regional Venture Capital Fund is just one of many signs that the fund’s organizers are actively courting more sources of capital.

Three sources familiar with the talks say that the government of Newfoundland and Labrador, which was thought during the summer to have declined to participate, is once again in talks about investing. And the organizers, led by Innovacorp, have been lobbying the federal government to contribute some of the $400 million in VC funding announced in the last federal budget.

The P.E.I.

Having bootstrapped for more than a year, Todd Thompson is preparing for a launch late this year of EventLift, an SaaS product that enhances contests by broadcasters or at events.

Based in the Halifax suburb of Hubley, N.S., EventLift simplifies the process of holding contests and allows the hosting organization to enhance its relationship with contestants. Thompson started the company last year as PhoneDJ to target contests on radio and TV, but broadened the scope of the product to include live events like concerts or sports events.

Thompson now works as head of marketing at the Steele

Having raised $700,000 in equity financing, Dartmouth Medical Research is poised to commercialize a “bone glue” apparatus that it hopes to test on cranial procedures in about two years.

The Halifax-based company has licensed two patents from the University of Massachusetts that apply to a sort of glue gun that hot-melts two pieces of bone together, replacing the need for plates and screws. DMR also has three patents on its own.

Interim CEO Steve Arless, a former Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the life sciences segment,  presented the company at the BioInnovation Challegnge at