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

Scene Sharp Technologies Inc., a Fredericton software company that improves the quality of colour digital photography, has closed a $300,000 round of angel financing, which it hopes will help to commercialize a new product for security cameras.

President Ian Lucas said in an interview yesterday that the company received backing from enough Atlantic Canadian angels to close the seed round last week. However, he will still be canvassing possible investors and hopes to raise an additional $1 million in the next year.

Scene Sharp is the corporate body set up to commercialize the research of

It was appropriate to have breakfast with Gerry Pond on the morning of Invest Atlantic last week, for it was during the same event a year earlier that I first heard him speak about the need for a regional entrepreneurial community.

So, just after sunrise on Wednesday, I met with Pond, the head of East Valley Ventures, and his COO Jeff White, to discuss where we are and where we’re going, with the regional ecosystem for entrepreneurship, innovation or whatever you want to call it.

A year earlier, Pond had been the Chair of Invest Atlantic, having been invited after his portfolio company

Having raised more than $2 million in total financing, Charlottetown-based ViTrak is preparing to beta-test its Stepscan footprint analysis technology, which has applications in healthcare, security and sports.

The pre-commercial company is developing pressure-sensitive tiles that are placed on the floor and can analyse the gait and footprints of anyone who walks on them. The tiles -- on which ViTrak has received two patents -- can be arranged in lines or as squares of up to 400 square feet.

 “These pressure-sensitive floor tiles can track, monitor and analyse footprints for medical

We can’t count the great speakers we heard during Atlantic Innovation Week, but we did jot down a few of their more interesting quotes. Here’s a selection of our favourites:

 

“Traction is the new IP.”

-- Boris Wertz, Angel Tech Investor

 

“Ideas are social things and from what I’ve seen here in Halifax you people get this.”

-- Thor Muller, Best-Selling Author

 

“The international mentors coming in here – [it’s] impactful. I mean I’m a different person today than I was two days ago.”

-- David Baxter, Chairman of PropelICT

 

“The thing I love about recruitment is it’s

Performance Genomics Inc., which uses genomics to identify the most fertile animals in a herd to increase the reproduction of livestock, won a highly competitive BioInnovation Challenge at BioPort Atlantic on Thursday, walking away with $40,000 in in-kind services.

The Truro-based company was spun out of the Nova Scotia Agricultural College and has established a genetic-selection model that allows the identification of mice that have maximum fertility, thereby doubling the fertility of a group of mice overall. Chief Executive Michael Dennis said the genetic makeup of mice is about 80