Maine’s startup community lost an important member this week. Charles “Kip” Moore was a technology pioneer (he was on the student team at Dartmouth that developed the BASIC computer language) and one of the first venture capitalists in Portland to invest in early-stage Maine companies. He was a mentor to entrepreneurs and served on the […]

There’s good news and bad news in the year-end data we have on venture capital investments made in Maine startups during 2014. On the one hand, the amount of VC invested in Maine startups fell roughly 32 percent, from $27.5 million in 2013 to $18.7 million in 2014. On the other, the number of companies […]

Portland’s startup community is basking in the warmth of some national attention this week. Popular Mechanics has picked Portland, Maine, as one of the top “Startup Cities” in the country. In its February edition, on newsstands now, the magazine’s editors chose 14 cities as “the best new places to start a business in America.” Portland is at No. […]

— Jason Cianchette, the entrepreneur who founded Liquid Wireless in 2008 and sold it a few years later to Publishers Clearing House for an undisclosed amount of cash, has launched a new startup in Portland. Cianchette remained with Liquid Wireless until earlier this year, when he left to pursue a new opportunity. What we know […]

On Tues., Dec. 16, at 4 p.m., one of the granddaddies of innovation in Maine will take part in an honored tradition in the business world: Ringing the closing bell at the NASDAQ stock exchange. When Jonathan Ayers, CEO of Westbrook-based biotech firm Idexx, rings NASDAQ’s closing bell this afternoon at its site in Times […]

Pamela Castrucci is the latest entrepreneur to discover the benefits of crowdfunding. On Nov. 12, she created a campaign on the popular crowdfunding website Kickstarter seeking $10,000 to help her build Voice Kite, a software product that will allow people to more easily preserve and share memories by tethering digital photos with audio recordings. As of Friday […]

Top Gun, the startup accelerator run by the Maine Center for Entrepreneurial Development, keeps getting bigger. MCED on Thursday announced the Top Gun Class of 2015, which contains 35 companies spanning the manufacturing, aquaculture, food production and IT industries. That’s the most companies ever accepted into Top Gun, a result of the increasing number of quality entrepreneurs applying […]

— In a dystopian future, everyone works for the Company and is siloed into a job based on an aptitude test. Your job is to build websites for the Company. Working for the Company has its benefits, and you could rise in the ranks if you perform well. But there’s also a rogue element that wants to topple the […]

— Unless you’re a Luddite who spurns SmartPhones and avoids the Internet, it’s likely you’re familiar with TED talks — those short, often insightful talks about “ideas worth spreading” given by everyone from graffiti artists to astrophysicists to entrepreneurs. The phenomenon that is TED — the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design — began as a one-off conference in […]

The group of investors known as the Maine Angels has invested north of $10 million in early-stage companies since it formed in 2003. To date, no investor in the group has ever received a return on those investments — or what’s known in venture-capital lingo as a successful “exit.” However, that long-sought-after milestone may be on […]