I had a chance to catch up with Screenscape this week after they announced a new round of financing that came in just over $3million. The Prince Edward Island and Toronto based startup will be using the financing to expand sales capability and speed development.

Screenscape is a web-based tool that makes it easy to create one of the information displays that you see in shopping malls, doctors offices and other public places. Through a simple drag and drop interface you can create a “screen” and add news feeds, local information, and store specific information (such as sales, announcements, etc). They call it “the Google Adsense of place-based media” — and they have some interesting IP that backs that up. The content of a screen can also be tailored based on the overall “power” of the screen. That is: how many people see it, in which demographic?

The product has also been focused on being a “networked” tool from day 1: Venue owners can share content, advertisements and messages in a marketplace that makes it easy to cross-promote within a specific geography or with partners you select.

Before Screenscape there were a lot of options for software that would run a single display, or through which you could push content in a pre-determined way to a certain set of screens, but Screenscape is the first tool I have seen that helps decentralize content production, which makes using a display screen a far less daunting proposition for a smaller venue.

They also plan to add Foursquare and other integrations which could really help make things like Foursquare more accessible and useful for restaurants and retailers. Through the Foursquare API the restaurant could display things like the current mayor, current people checked-in and Foursquare-specific specials.

Mark Hemphill, the founder of Screenscape, first introduced me to the concept several years ago, before he had the company started or even the first product built. I had some concerns about the usual things: go-to market strategy, product focus and overall product-oriented execution. I was seriously impressed when I first checked in with Screenscape about a year later. The team had grown and so had the product. Mark’s dedication to building an incredibly refined tool for display-management seems to be paying off. The team continues to grow in both Charlottetown and Toronto.

The pricing, which starts at $10 a month, seems a bit problematic to me, but Mark tells me that they are selling more and more group licenses to brands such as Bauer which are higher volume deals.

ClusterShot.com was launched today by Charlottetown, PEI based Silverorange. The site is really pretty straightforward: Photographers post their photos, Clustershot handles reformatting them for display and handles the back-end payments and other headaches.

If you are a professional photographer or a hobbiest, clustershot is an opportunity to get your work out there and to make sure it is available, but without all the headaches of selling your own work.

Finally, ClusterShot takes 12% of the sale, which is more or less nothing when you consider the bandwidth and transaction costs alone. If you look at other stock photo markets, they are priced far higher than ClusterShot.

The site is really well put together, I bought a photo and it was really painless.

Silverorange is the design and development company that has been behind the scenes on sites such as GigaOm.com, Digg.com, DECA.tv and Bebo.

Full disclosure (thanks to everyone who emailed!): I was a co-founder of silverorange, but currently hold no ownership in the company or any of its ventures.

MeshEast is the latest entrant on to the Canadian Startup blog scene. I was excited to get an email from Lisa Rousseau, who is also working on her own startup, to see that the east coast would finally have a local startup blog. Lisa is going to have some work to do in finding and profiling those elusive east-coast startups, but my guess is that she will find more than enough to get started in her home province of New Brunswick.

So please, head over to MeshEast and subscribe. We have been covering some of the bigger happenings on the east coast, but there are always a lot of things we just can’t cover. We are working on our own profile of what is going on in Atlantic Canada, and so far I have been excited about what I have seen.

We have been trying to do as much as we can to encourage local blogs that will cover smaller regions in more detail. Montreal is the luckiest with MontrealTechWatch, which is run by Heri (who might be the hardest working blogger in Canada these days), and Ottawa has StartupOttawa, which is really starting to pick up steam. There are some gaps to fill, so if you are passionate about startups then it is time to get off your butt and step up to the place. I can think of dozens of local blogs I would love to see: Waterloo, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, and the Prairies all come to mind as the biggest gaps out there.

So get started, and get in touch. We want to help!

Planning a summer vacation on Prince Edward Island? You might not know it, but you?ll be booking a B&B using the Slumberland reservation system. And the B&B operator will be reporting their numbers to the tourism marketing authority using Tourism Stats. Internet Works is busy building web services for the tourism industry.

Internet Works’ pilot customer, Tourism PEI, was so pleased with the Slumberland reservation system and Tourism Stats data collection and analysis service that they?ve been showing it off to tourism authorities in other provinces. The company now has 5 employees, who are finishing off a conversion reporting module to track advertising response rates. Internet Works leases the web services individually or as a package. An enthusiastic pilot customer is a great start as Internet Works begins their journey to be the provider of choice for small to medium size tourism destinations.

Contact Dico Reyers