Dan Brake does.

What’s more, he’s also working on a system that can soon accurately predict in the future where, how and why contaminants might seep into the environment from industrial projects.

Brake is CEO of EMSAT Corp., a St. John’s startup that has developed software to analyze in real time environmental data picked up by sensors placed near industrial sites, pipelines, and the like. By placing sensors in and around a site just about anywhere, EMSAT can collect data on such environmental factors as levels of carbon dioxide, sulphur oxides, nitrous oxides or particulates, whether in the air, soil or water.

The company can transmit the data by land line, cellular or satellite communication. EMSAT analyzes them and presents charts, graphs or raw numbers, as the customer requires.

 “We’re like an ADT system for the environment,” he said over breakfast at the recent Face2Face conference in Baddeck.

The company, which operates out of the Genesis Centre at Memorial University of Newfoundland, began in 2010 when Brake returned to Newfoundland from stints in California, Australia and the U.K. and teamed up with co-founders Philippe LeBlanc and Ron Thistle. They landed angel funding from environmental entrepreneur Paul Antle, and launched the company.

EMSAT is now conducting a pilot project with Alberta Innovates Technology Futures, a quasi-governmental body that encourages innovation in the resource-rich province. Brake said working with the Alberta agency is great because it could introduce the company to a vast number of clients in the oil patch.

The agency and EMSAT have placed sensors around a test site, which collect information and transmit it so it can be analyzed by the EMSAT software. They have completed the first phase of the project and are discussing plans for Phase 2.

The St. John’s company is now working on predictive analytic solutions that could warn where an incident might occur and why in the future.

It is also working on a scalable solution for various sectors, so it can operate with sensors in water to monitor the conditions around, for example, fish farms. One challenge it faces is determining whether the product needs to be customized for each client.

 “Each industry sector has to be customized,” said Brake. “What we’re trying to figure out now is (what) customization is needed for each client.”

EMSAT, which has received support from the National Research Council, the Research Development Corp., and the Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Innovation, Business and Rural Development, is now looking to hire one or two developers. It is in discussions with a PhD candidate specializing in environment sciences surrounding greenhouse gases.

Brake said the company will likely have to raise more financing at some point, but it is premature to say when.

The loans are part of a total AIF award this year of $39.9 million, which is being channeled into projects that – including funding from other sources – are worth a total of $71.1 million.

“Our Government is committed to helping Atlantic Canada’s businesses to move innovative ideas from the lab to the marketplace,” said Defence Minister Peter MacKay in a statement announcing the funding. “Investments in innovation help build our country’s commercialization capacity and strengthen our economy by creating high quality jobs and generating economic wealth.”

Drug discovery company Chelation Partners Inc. of Halifax, received a loan of $2.8 million to fund the Phase I trials of its additive product that is designed to fight drug-resistant microbial populations, such as superbugs. The product is delivered with existing antibiotics, essentially depriving the micro-organism of iron to weaken it so that the antibiotic is more effective.

Healthcare IT company Medusa Medical Technologies Inc., also of Halifax, will receive $2.6 million to develop a new version of its Siren ePCR Suite, which allows paramedics to report data electronically to hospitals.  The new version, to be developed over the next two years, will offer more features and greater flexibility to paramedics.

Green Power Labs Inc., a Dartmouth cleantech company, received $2.4 million for a project that will use solar radiation monitoring and forecasting to help design more energy-efficient buildings. Specifically, the project will develop advanced control technology for building energy management for heating, ventilation, and cooling.

The AIF also awarded $1.6 million to the Capital District Health Authority to develop diagnostic and monitoring tools that will help to improve orthopaedic patient outcomes, and $2 million to General Dynamics Canada Ltd. to develop an enhanced maritime communications system. AIF awards are handed out annually and companies applying for the 2014 program must submit a letter of intent by August 14, 2013.

Allen is the founder and CEO of Fredericton-based CloudLinx, a profitable start-up that handles the server functions for small businesses with a cloud-based solution. His four employees use cellphones rather than land lines to communicate.

They use an answering service to channel office calls to their cellphones, but Allen realized that the Halifax-based answering-service staff had no way of knowing whether they were available, talking on their phones, or in meetings and couldn’t be disturbed. So he searched for an app that could solve the problem, but none existed.

Now, it’s not hard to tell where this story is going.

Using his love of programming, Allen spent a bit of time creating an app that signalled on a web page when he was on his cellphone. “In about a day, I had a framework up and running that would signal when I was on the phone,” he says.

Then he enhanced it to signal that he was in a meeting and shouldn’t be disturbed, and tinkered with it so it could be used on his colleague’s BlackBerry, as well as his own Android device. It worked well for the four CloudLinx employees, and he thought other people could benefit from it. So he put it on LinkedIn for anyone to use free if they had a similar need. Any company that has a central phone system and employees with cellphones could use it, he believed. “We posted it on LinkedIn, and holy jumpin’—I didn’t expect so many people to order it in just a few days,” says Allen.

It turned out that many people had the same problem as CloudLinx. In the first 10 days, 921 people registered to use the app with no publicity at all. Allen has had to manually help each one sign in, so he’s now working on an automated process that will handle the sign-in step.

The big question has been where to go with SmartPhone Switchboard. CloudLinx’s business has been soaring, and Allen is determined to continue focusing on that business. So he’s working out a system that will let people have access to SmartPhone Switchboard and benefit the community.

Allen is partnering with his friend Rob Frenette, who is on the boards of Bullying Canada and AIDS New Brunswick, on a way to roll out the app to benefit charities. The system would allow people to download the app for free but request that they make donations to charities in return for using the service. Frenette’s two charities will be among those highlighted, and Allen would like to name a charity in each province to help encourage the rollout across the country.

Meanwhile, Allen is continuing to ramp up CloudLinx, whose customer base has doubled to 400 users since it was featured on Entrevestor in late January. CloudLinx lets small business staff use any computer anywhere and instantly access all the data and software they have on their home or office computer.

Allen’s sister, Jayne Wilson, had been handling sales and marketing part-time for CloudLinx since late 2011 and will now be joining full-time. With the marketing effort expanded, Allen expects the company will double sales again by the middle of 2014.

The development of CloudLinx and the charitable rollout of SmartPhone Switchboard is a good-news story for a guy who has been through the wars. Allen came up with the idea for CloudLinx while he was recovering from cancer three years ago, and now he’s growing a viable business and giving back to the community.

Critical Path Group, which organizes other conferences such as the Banff Venture Forum and the Canadian Financing Forum in Vancouver, has selected 22 Atlantic Canadian startups to present at the event. I’ve spoken to a few impressive companies that didn’t make the cut, and several plan to attend the conference regardless.

Launched with the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency as a founding sponsor, the conference is designed to bring outside investors to the region to witness what all the buzz is about in the Atlantic Canadian startup world.

In addition to local investors, the funders speaking at the AVF include: Scott MacDonald, McRock Capital; Antoine Michaud, Tandem Expansion Fund; Mark Hatfield, Fairhaven Capital; Gaurav Jain, Founder Collective; Henry Kay, Boston Harbor Angels; Ron Warburton, BDC Venture Capital; Gerard Buckley, Jaguar Capital; Scott Pelton, Round13 Capital; Chris Legg, Progress Ventures; Paul Singh, 500 Startups; Charley Lax, GrandBanks Capital; and Brian Underdown, Lumira Capital.

Ben Yoskovitz, the Co-Author of Lean Analytics and VP of Product at Halifax-based GoInstant, will deliver the final keynote address.

One added feature of the conference is that it will host the official launch of Canadian Entrepreneurs in New England – a mentoring and introduction group that will serve the same function in the Boston region that C100 does in Silicon Valley.

The Atlantic Canadian companies presenting at the AVF are: 

Early Stage -- ABK Biomedical, Halifax; Analyze Re, Halifax; Ara Labs, Fredericton; Densitas, Halifax; Mindful Scientific, Halifax; OneLobby, Fredericton; Performance Genomics, Truro, NS; RUMAnalytics, Quispamsis, NB; Shopulse, Moncton; Spinzo, Saint John; The Rounds, Halifax.

Growth Stage – BlueLight Analytics, Halifax;  CarbonCure Technologies, Halifax; Celtx, St. John’s; Chelation Partners, Halifax;  InNetwork, Halifax; Measurely, Moncton; Novawise, Halifax; Oris4, Halifax; Scene Sharp, Halifax;  UserEvents, Fredericton; and Zaptap, Fredericton.

For details on all these companies -- except Ara Labs, BlueLight and Chelation, which sadly we haven’t reported on yet – please use the search function to the right of this blog.

Mentorship. The key ingredient in developing start-ups is having enough good mentors. Yes, capital is important, but the do-or-die element in the ecosystem is mentorship. And the most important—and hard to find—component is quality mentorship. We just can’t get enough of that, and I believe it’s the hallmark of a start-up community.

We’re finding it tough to get enough quality mentors. It really is no different than any other talent: there are people who are good at it and others who aren’t quite so good. It’s not a simple matter of bringing in someone with business experience, or even entrepreneurial experience, and saying he or she is a mentor. It’s a matter of finding the right people and matching them with the right companies.

A good mentor is difficult to develop. What we’re doing at Propel ICT, the region’s private sector-led accelerator, is working on developing mentors. And the Wallace McCain Institute is building this peer-to-peer support group, which is good for fostering mentorship. We’re getting there, but we’re not there yet.

International sales and marketing. Including product management for technology companies, we have big problems in taking products to international markets. It’s a real skill shortage in the region, and it’s hurting a lot of our innovative companies. They’re all export oriented, and they have to sell overseas or even in the U.S. What we lack is a training ground for these people because we don’t have the big companies like Cisco or Google here to train people in selling software in foreign markets. When we do hire people in these roles, they’re usually expats looking to come back to Atlantic Canada who have worked for some of these companies. We don’t have too many like them here to draw from. 

Most of the people in sales in this region haven’t experienced work in fast-growth economies or haven’t been to Asia. That means that they’re not, for instance, familiar with intellectual property rules in China. They don’t know how to operate and protect themselves in that climate. We need people who can operate in these markets. You can’t just say we’re not going to sell in China; it’s too big a market to pass up.

There’s a shortage of people in the world who have international sales experience in software. We need to get better at developing them. I’ve asked universities when they’re going to make international sales—not just marketing, but sales—a specialization in their curriculum, and I’ve been told they’re considering it. Of course, some private schools teach sales and they’re good, but we need to be more serious about it. Our companies are going to stumble until we get a higher quality of sales talent.

Access to capital. In particular, we need to find funding for companies before they’re cash flow-positive and in what we call “the valley of death.” They aren’t looking for huge amounts of money, but they need enough to finance a lean operation until they build their revenues. The easiest, most cost-effective way to do this would be to liberalize the Equity Tax Credits (ETCs) across the region so they apply to investors who live in different jurisdictions from the companies they’re funding. This is something we’ve been requesting for a long time.

Judging from the responses we get from provincial finance departments, they seem to be of the opinion that they aren’t part of the economic development programs of the governments they serve. It’s as if it’s someone else’s job. One advantage of enhanced ETC programs is they cost the government very little to administer. There’s a simple application process, and we don’t need armies of civil servants to oversee the program. I don’t see why we can’t be the best in Canada in ETCs.

In fairness, the ETCs in the region are as good as most others across the country. But we need to grow businesses at a faster rate than other provinces, so we need some unique programs. I’m saying these ETCs in Atlantic Canada can be better than other provinces. It wouldn’t cost the governments any money if you believe that new-business formation results in government revenue. And I’ve seen that it does.

Less overlap in government. We need more co-operation and less overlap among provincial bodies. Do we really need the cost of four security commissions? Do we really get any benefit from having four separate agencies? In several economic development functions, we have four little departments doing exactly the same thing when we’d all be better served by one large department. What we should do is pick the strongest elements of departments in each province and bring them to one pan-regional department.

I understand this is difficult to achieve on a political level. Provincial governments say they can’t offer services to residents and businesses of other provinces. But I think we have to chip away at such thinking. We’re losing a lot of money because of administrative duplication.

There are other things I could recommend, but I don’t feel as passionate about them as these four. If we could master mentorship, international sales, access to capital, and less governmental overhead, we could go a long way to developing the regional start-up ecosystem.

 [Editor's note: Gerry Pond, a founding member of East Valley Ventures, contributed this column to Progress Media and Entrevestor's supplement on the Atlantic Canadian Ecosystem.]

President and CEO Saeed El-Darahali unveiled the product last night at a reception in the company’s new office off Main Street in Dartmouth. In the interests of transparency, I must declare that I have been working with SimplyCast on promoting the launch. But this news is big enough that I want to describe the product and make a few observations.

There’s a lot of buzz about the 360 Automation Manager because it can do what no marketing tool in the world can do. It’s easy to use, even for people without a technical background, and its analytical tools allow it to decide what messages to send customers based on their individual preferences. It automatically responds to clients’ online actions through any number of communications channels, messaging them in the form they prefer. The platform even sends customers targeted messages at special times, such as their birthdays.

SimplyCast has developed a translation feature, so it can be exported around the world (SimplyCast already has clients in 175 countries) and is effective in bilingual markets, such as the English-Spanish markets in the southern U.S.

Here’s what impresses me most about SimplyCast: its sensational bootstrapping skills and its employee development.

El-Darahali raised $758,000 in angel financing in 2009, and that was it for several years. By focusing on sales and the reinvestment of income, he was able to grow his staff and develop the 360 Automation Manager. He’s now up to 30 employees and is planning to add more.

One of the unappreciated features of the East Coast startup community is how much mileage its entrepreneurs get out of a few drops of equity financing. It’s a good thing because capital is scarce here. Few exemplify that trait better than El-Darahali.

The second facet is the way El-Darahali develops the competency of his staff. When he introduces a staff member, he usually stresses how lucky the company is to have this particular individual. He’s a great believer in co-op programs, and ensures all co-op students are challenged by the tasks they must perform. The company this year even launched a co-op program for high school students.

Several startups in the region are transitioning into bona fide corporations, and SimplyCast has achieved that step largely because it has paid so much attention to human resources.

HotSpot Parking is developing cellphone apps that will allow people to pay their parking meter charges electronically. CEO and founder Phillip Curley said the company has been developing relationships with the two New Brunswick cities and is planning a pilot project for its hometown of Fredericton on Aug. 1 and for Saint John later that month. He plans to spend about six weeks monitoring the project, upgrading the technology and preparing for a rollout across Canada later this year.

 “Hot Spot Parking is basically a parking service that allows retailers to connect with people who are parking,” Curley said in a phone interview from Fredericton. “We want to create a pay-by-phone service for small municipalities.”

Pay-by-phone parking is already a reality in larger cities such as Vancouver, and has been proven to actually increase parking meter revenue because people can pay without standing next to their car. It’s also great for retailers, who lose sales when customers have to dash out of a store to feed the parking meter. The idea is that if sales staff are working with client on a sale, the salespeople can pay the parking with their phones and retain the client. The goal is to help the municipality and local businesses.

Curley, an engineering student at  University of New Brunswick, began to work on the project last December. He made contact with parking officials in Fredericton and Saint John, which he described as very progressive cities, and began to sit in on conferences to learn about their processes and issues.

Hotspot Parking then drew notice in March when it was the darling of the Startup Weekend event in Fredericton, drawing plaudits on Twitter from New Brunswick Innovation Foundation CFO Nicole LeBlanc.

By the end of the weekend, Curley had attracted a team of partners and $15,000 in angel funding that have helped him develop the project. He also won the Startup Weekend event, in which entrepreneurs have 54 hours to launch a business.

He has since broadened his relationships with the innovation foundation, which has invited him to several events, and the Pond-Deshpande Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UNB.

Curley said the company will have to raise more money once it finishes the pilot projects and completes its parking meter product.

 “At that point, we’ll be looking to get it into things other than parking meters, like parking garages, parking lots,” said Curley. “We’ll be able to do things like tell them how much space there is left, all on their phone.”

He added there are about 160 cities in Canada alone that could use pay-by-phone parking services, and only 12 now do so. The product will be free to consumers during the trial phase and will charge a 20 per cent premium once it is rolled out to other cities. It is free to the municipality.

But unlike so many business stories about the fishery, this one is set in an elegant office with exposed brick and movie posters on Barrington Street in downtown Halifax.

The office is the home of Raised Media, the Halifax digital media company that has masterminded the Deadliest Catch game on Discovery Channel’s website. (Check out the trailer.)

Raised Media has quietly been winning contracts for major clients (like Pearson plc, Discovery, HarperCollins, and BlackBerry) for eight years with the goal of using absolutely cutting-edge technology to develop games or activities that speak to people as humans.

 “One aspect of what we do is we believe that if you’re part of an audience, you’re still a human being,” said president and co-founder Mike Rizkalla in an interview in the company’s boardroom. “We talk to human beings through technology.”

An interview with Rizkalla is an entertaining and edifying experience, as he regales the listener with tales about his experience as the creative director of Collideascope Digital Productions Inc., his music career in the band Bucket Truck, and the time he met the director William Friedkin. But above all, he chronicles a great success story by telling how his 12-person company from Halifax won the Deadliest Catch game contract against huge competition and delivered an almost flawless product.

Earlier this year, Rizkalla and his co-founder Andrew Wilson learned that Discovery wanted an online game to go along with its hit reality TV series Deadliest Catch, the story of valiant fishermen battling the elements to catch fish. The good news was Raised Media had worked with Discovery Channel before, so they were invited to showcase a proposal before Discovery at the South by Southwest Conference in March. The bad news was they had only two weeks to prepare the pitch.

Rizkalla and Wilson knew they would be up against huge multi-media agencies, so they went in with a “non-pitch,” stressing the human element, the interactivity, integrity and social networking involved in their work.

The good news: they won. The bad news: they had two months to deliver the game.

Discovery wanted to launch the game when the ninth season of Deadliest Catch began in late April, so Rizkalla made sure all parties agreed on all the details in the initial stages. “We define the project and get down to what’s important to the client,” he said. “It’s not a matter of throwing bodies at something. It’s a matter of understanding how to get it done.”

The result was that less than two per cent of the order had to be revised and the game launched on time.

Raised Media produced a fantasy game that ties in with the TV story so players choose their teams of fishermen and win if their team lands the biggest catch. They can play against people they know on social networks, and Discovery awards weekly prizes to top players.

The game now has 50,000 registered users. The average visit lasts seven minutes, far longer than the industry average.

 “Deadliest Catch fans are among the most passionate, and the fantasy game is bringing them even closer to the action and deepening their engagement with Discovery,” Jason Robey, digital executive producer, Discovery Channel, said in an email. “With more than 50,000 registered users and average visit times of seven minutes, the fans have clearly spoken.”

With the Deadliest Catch game, Raised Media has scored a massive win to add to its long line of successful commissions. Rizkalla said the company is now at a crossroads. Most immediately, it is looking for about three developers, including a front-end developer. But in the longer term, the company wants to morph from designing projects for clients to developing its own products.

Rizkalla is coy about what exactly the proprietary product will look like, but he did say Raised Media will remain a tight group of highly focused people.

“We’ve worked with companies with 200 people and that’s not for me,” he said. “Our company is going to get better and better as a small company.”

But here’s the interesting thing about Heimdall: By the time DeLeskie granted an interview, he had already raised more than $1 million in angel funding from a single investor. He didn’t use a formal network. And he didn’t leave Nova Scotia to secure the funding. A single individual invested $1 million-plus in the company, signalling something curious that’s happening in the region.

 “I was lucky to be able to work with an angel who could and would fund my start-up,” says DeLeskie.  “I not only saved time beating the bushes but was also able to walk away from what would have been not so good deals for me as a founder.”

Angels are loosely defined as individuals who invest in companies during the early stages, and they’re becoming a more and more important factor in the financing of Atlantic Canadian young companies. The successful exits of such companies as Radian6, Q1 Labs, and GoInstant has piqued the interest of wealthy individuals in regional start-ups. There was a time when such people would invest mainly through the First Angel Network, which has channelled about $9 million into 23 companies over eight years. More recently other groups, such as the Newfoundland and Labrador Angel Network and East Valley Ventures, have leant structure to angel financing.

But increasingly, Atlantic Canadian founders are approaching angel investors and getting more from outside an organized group. According to data collected by Entrevestor, 43 Atlantic Canadian companies received at least $17.9 million in 2012, which excluded funding by Clarity because it featured VC and angel funding. The previous year, 11 companies  reported raising at least $8.4 million. These figures include funding by founders, including the $3.6 million that CEO Chuck Cartmill invested in LED Roadway Lighting in 2011. (We admit that data on angel funding is never complete because so many investments are made quietly. These figures reflect investments that were reported to Entrevestor.)

One important factor in angel-funding growth is that 21 companies brought in money from individuals outside the region last year. That’s important because young companies in Atlantic Canada need to expand their networks and increase sales overseas. Attracting outside investors helps expand contacts in other markets.

In broader terms, the rising trend of angel investing helps because it tends to be less complicated than attracting money from a venture capital firm; there’s less legal work and fewer hoops. Generally speaking, you can save time and resources by finding early stage funding through angels.

DeLeskie has a single funder, meaning he can keep in touch with his source of funds with one phone call. “I believe it will produce a better end result, in terms of meeting and managing expectations and my time,” he says. “And every founder knows that time is the one thing even more scarce than money.” [Editor's note: this is the latest in the series of articles taken from Progress Media and Entrevestor's supplement on the Atlantic Canadian Ecosystem.]

We will continue to post articles from it in the coming days on Entrevestor and the Progress Media website.

We’ve been collaborating with Progress for years, and have enjoyed a great partnership with Publisher Neville Gilfoy and Editor Pamela Scott-Crace. We’re really happy to be working with them on these supplements, which will delve into the startup segment of the Atlantic Canadian economy.

We’re already at work on our next Entrevestor Intelligence supplement.

Many thanks to our sponsors: Innovacorp, East Valley Ventures, Nova Scotia Business Inc., ABM Integrated Solutions, and Nautel. They made it possible to bring you the most in-depth examination yet of what’s happening in the Atlantic Canadian startup space.