Here’s the state of play in East Coast Tech in the past 24 hours: four established companies in Nova Scotia issued announcements about business growth; and 11 startups are preparing for their groundbreaking Demo Day in New Brunswick next week.
What does it mean?
It means there’s too much news for separate stories and our blog today will be a bit of a smorgasbord.
Tomorrow, I’m going to outline Entrevestor’s coverage plans for the Launch36 Demo Day at Dieppe on Tuesday, which has created a lot of buzz around the region. (Case in point: I met with three people in the startup world in Halifax this morning and two of them will be traveling to Dieppe for Demo Day on Tuesday.)
Today I want to highlight four companies from greater Halifax – SimplyCast, 2nd Act Innovations, Equals6 and NewPace – all of whom have placed press releases in my inbox. If there is a common theme from all these releases it’s that there are now a range of companies throughout the region that are comfortably beyond the startup stage and are exporting, contributing to the community, even becoming early adopters for other local tech companies. These announcements all represent a certain maturity of business that’s impressive given that these firms didn’t exist a few years ago.
Consider this: SimplyCast, the celebrated multi-channel marketing PaaS outfit in Dartmouth, announced Tuesday that it has selected 2nd Act Innovations’ Oris4 as its Enterprise Content Management platform.
Oris4 is software that allows large companies to sort, store and retrieve documents with ease, and will now power SimplyCast's ongoing research and development by providing a secure corporate memory of documents, emails, reports, online news and blogs.
SimplyCast should improve efficiency and 2nd Act Innovation, which raised $1.1 million in April, has booked another customer.
NewPace, a Bedford company that develops software for the telecom industry, said its RCS-as-a-Service product has been proven to be compatible with the equipment of four potential customers -- Jibe Mobile, Neusoft, WIT Software's RCS-e/joyn clients and Solaiemes RCS API product line.
“The completion of this testing demonstrates that the NewPace hosted service is a viable alternative for mobile carriers who want a rapidly deployable, low investment approach to launching RCS-e/joyn,” said CEO Brent Newsome in the statement.
And finally, Equals6 announced the winners of its Tech Idol competition. The social network for students and prospective employers asked industry partners to assess students’ ability to tackle real-world software challenges. Andy Osburn, CEO of Equals6, tells me several employers hired students as a result of the competition.
The sponsoring companies and the students they gave awards to are:
-- J.D. Irving: Mehrdad Pazooki, New Brunswick Community College; Jeremy Miller, Memorial University.
-- CGI: Hari Gudigundla, Dalhousie University.
-- NTT Data: Evan Lowry, Saint Mary’s University.
-- T4G: Kassym Dorsel, University of Waterloo.
-- Equals6: Andrew Redden, Nova Scotia Community College.
-- Lixar IT: Evan Lowry, Saint Mary’s University.
