When the inaugural 48 Hours in the Hub kicked off in Boston last night, the official list of 25 participants included four startups from Atlantic Canada.

Canadian Entrepreneurs in New England, a network of Canuck expats in the Boston area, is holding the event that runs through tomorrow as an east coast counterpart to 48 Hours in the Valley, operated by C100 in Silicon Valley. (Coincidentally, C100 UK held its 48 Hours in London event late last week, though there were no Atlantic Canadian participants.)

The 48 Hours in the Hub event is intended to be an intense two-day session that can expose more than 20 of the hottest startups in Canada to the booming tech and life sciences community in and around Boston. 

The big difference with its West Coast counterpart is CENE is looking for life sciences as well as IT and Cleantech companies, reflecting the massive healthcare complex in the Boston area. More than 15 of the companies attending the Boston event are involved in some way with healthcare or life sciences.

CENE -- pronounced the same as "scene" -- is a non-for-profit group whose members help Canadian startups that need to make connections in the booming Boston market. Formed in conjunction with the Canadian Consulate in Boston, the group aims to mentor young companies and make the introductions that can help entrepreneurs make inroads in the U.S. market. CENE had its official launch at the Atlantic Venture Forum in Halifax in June.

The participants from Atlantic Canada are:

-- Affinio, a new venture co-founded by Tim Burke, the CEO of the Halifax-based startup lab 26Ones Inc. Affinio specializes in customer affinity profiling, which means it trolls through billions of pieces of publicly available information online to identify new prospects for companies and understand how they are connected to current customers.

-- Halifax Biomedical Inc., a Mabou, N.S., medical device company whose technology gives a surgeon an immediate and detailed picture of how an implant is taking hold in an orthopaedic patient. Halifax Biomedical’s main product is the roentgen stereophotogrammetric analysis or RSA, which allows two simultaneous X-rays to be taken from different angles.

-- ViTRAK Systems of Charlottetown, which has developed a pressure-sensitive flooring system for tracking and analyzing human movement. The Stepscan Pad can be connected and arranged in lines or as squares of up to 400 square feet.

-- And Strue, another Charlottetown outfit, which is building a distributed cloud file system that allows companies to encrypt and fragment files so they can be stored across several cloud providers. The idea is to improve security by diversifying the storage sites for cloud-based files.

Thierry Weissenburger, an organizer at CENE, said Jordan MacLeod, the CEO of Strue, had to drop out of the programs for 48 Hours in the Hub because of a knee injury. However, he remains on the official list because he is now going through the Canadian Technology Accelerator in Boston.