IT News Atlantic Canada

The Newfoundland government is providing a $125,000 term loan to New Brunswick-based Silk Stevens Ltd. to assist the company in establishing operations in Grand Falls-Windsor. Since its inception in 2006, Silk Stevens has been working within Atlantic Canada’s aquaculture industry. The company will use the loan to acquire equipment such as an underwater camera, laboratory supplies, technology and other investments in design technology and training.

For nine teams in the Chignecto Central area, Lego also means robot engineering, software development and teamwork. These are the teams that are competing in the fifth annual Central Nova First Lego League competition, an international competition created to get children excited about science and technology..

Halifax could be home to another 500 IBM employees in eight years, in a deal Premier Darrell Dexter trumpeted Thursday as an “extraordinary opportunity” for Nova Scotians. The province will be the anchor client of the international information technology giant’s new Halifax global delivery centre, its only one in Canada. IBM Canada will be taking over support of the province’s SAP computer system in an untendered deal. About 120 public-sector employees are now doing that work. IBM wants to hire 75 of them.

Joining the likes of Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, Innovacorp has invested in a California energy storage company that, among other projects, is building a facility near New Glasgow. LightSail Energy of Berkeley, Calif., said in a news release Monday night it had raised $37.3 million in its fourth round of venture capital fundraising. In September, LightSail’s subsidiary, LightSail Canada, said it was planning for a $4.6-million pilot facility to store energy produced at a wind farm near New Glasgow.

Raising capital, recruitment of new talent and keeping up with the ever-changing technology landscape are the things that keep at least three Nova Scotia business leaders up at night. The insight comes from three chief executive officers from three wildly different industries — information technology, health care, and aerospace and defence — and was shared with the more than 200 delegates who attended the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council Outlook 2013 conference in Halifax November 6th.

Nova Scotia's mobile breast screening program will be reduced from three mobile mammography units to one beginning in January. Health Minister Dave Wilson says a technology upgrade to digital mammography in the one mobile unit and at 11 hospital sites across the province makes the change possible.

The Government of Canada is investing in important sonar technology for the Royal Canadian Navy's Maritime Coastal Defence Vessels. MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. is awarded this $13.4 million contract over the next two years for the repair and upgrade of four deployable sensor systems. During that time, they will repair, upgrade or replace the various elements of the Route Survey System that it originally delivered for the Royal Canadian Navy's Kingston-class Maritime Coastal Defence Vessels in 1999.

Rutter Inc. of St. John's NL announced it has acquired OceanWaveS GmbH of Lüneburg, Germany, a recognized industry leader in the development and supply of radar-based wave and surface current measurement technology. Rutter's sigma S6 and OceanWaveS' WaMoS are respected within the industry for discrimination of ice, oil, small targets, waves, currents and bathymetry from conventional navigational X-band radar.

Two additional high-tech innovation centres have joined the cross-Canada digital media network to enable collaboration and advance digital innovation nationally. The Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre in northern Ontario, and Tech SouthEast in Moncton, New Brunswick are the newest nodes on the Canadian Digital Media Network (CDMN), bringing the total number across Canada to 12 with 20 locations.

Sometime in the new year, at a cattle farm in Port Hood, Cape Breton, Chris van den Heuvel will launch a software product that could save thousands of dollars each for hundreds of thousands of North American farmers.

Van den Heuvel is a software developer and the founder and sole proprietor of Fireblade Software, which monitors real-time data on cattle farms. By identifying areas of weak performance, Fireblade can help a farm save an estimated $7,500 per year, which goes directly to the operation’s bottom line.