Innovacorp’s announcement Wednesday that it will boost its funding for Halifax biotech DeNovaMed to $500,000 is further evidence that 2012 will be a strong year for venture capital funding in Nova Scotia.

The provincial innovation agency said in a press release that it would invest $500,000 in the company, which is developing compounds that can battle “superbugs”. That total includes the $120,000 the company received as the winner of the I-3 innovation contest in January.  The funding will give DeNovaMed enough money to last about a year.

"We're very excited to be working with a team

As it moves toward its Phase I regulatory trials, Halifax-based biotech DeNovaMed is showing admirable flexibility in its financing options.

The company, which is developing compounds that can battle “superbugs”, sprang to prominence in January when it won Innovacorp’s I-3 competition for innovation. The four co-founders have been working on the project for five years and believe they have isolated compounds that can battle these viruses, which are resistant to antibiotics currently available on the market.

During its presentation at the I-3 competition, the team made the potential of

Neurodyn, the P.E.I. biotech developing early treatments for neurological diseases, has closed a deal to buy NeuroQuest, the Halifax-based drug development company spun out of Origin Biomed two years ago.

This interprovincial deal is significant because it enlarges one of the region’s leading young biotech companies, marries two superb management teams and combines their suite of drug candidates that target neurological afflictions.

Founded by CEO Kenneth Cawkell, University of British Columbia scientist Chris Shaw and CSO Denis Kay, Neurodyn has discovered a natural extract from

Clarity, the Moncton-based online marketplace for entrepreneurial advice, is welcoming a few new employees to its office today, bringing its total number of staff to six. It’s another small sign that serial entrepreneur Dan Martell is driving another enterprise toward success.

A consummate networker, Martell is a Moncton native who has successfully exited two companies in the last four years, and divides his time between Moncton and San Francisco. In December, he launched Clarity.fm as an online resource that allows people to find experts to tap for advice for a fee.  

The company’s

Flush with the success of its first major installation in the U.S., Halifax Biomedical is out to raise at least $17 million in capital to finance the roll out of six more sites in the next 18 months.

Mabou-based Halifax Biomedical has retained Precipice Capital of Dartmouth to arrange the funding, which it hopes will comprise at least $10 million in equity financing and $7 million in debt. It plans to close the round by June.

“It would be seen as an appropriate raise for the type of work we’re doing,” said CEO Chad Munro in an interview Wednesday.

The size of the fund will require

On August 14, Chris Dobbin will wade into the chilly water of the Northumberland Strait for the second time in a year and swim from New Brunswick to P.E.I. to raise money for children with chronic diseases.

The gruelling 14-kilometre swim -- dubbed The Big Swim -- has a special resonance for Dobbin, the president of Precipice Capital in Dartmouth, as it was only 16 months ago that he lost his five-year-old son Jack to a terminal illness.

In the initial swim – shown in this video – Dobbin, Todd McDonald and Peter McCormick raised $50,000, including donations to the Jack in the Clouds

For the second time in 85 days, Jordan Smith and I met Monday at Fred’s Café in Halifax. What a difference. In less than three months, the OneLobby CEO has raised $200,000, hired a `Dream Team’ of executives and attended SeedCamp New York.

When Smith and I first sat down in May, he was a bootstrapper’s bootstrapper. OneLobby was a simple system that offered a social network to conference organizers, so attendees could network online before, during and after a conference. Smith was operating out of Fred’s with a laptop and a cell phone, subsisting on $78,000 in grants.

But he had a

Early in June, Dr. Kirk Hillier of Acadia University stood before the people who’d been backing research into commercial applications of insect pheromones and reported their collective efforts had already resulted in sales.

Hillier, a graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland, has spent several years working on an interesting conjecture. He is leading a group of researchers and companies focussed on extracting and synthesizing the pheromones of specific insects that destroy forest and crops and using these products to lure them into traps or to disrupt their mating cycle. In its

Azorus, a Halifax company that offers customer relationship management software to universities and colleges, has signed a major partnership agreement with Tribal Group of the U.K., with the aim of using the British company’s large client base to support growth.

The two companies offer complementary services to universities, but Tribal has much deeper penetration in the British market, so the alliance between the two should assist Azorus in its aim of gaining critical mass in the U.K.

“They’re going to be able to assist us with growth,” Azorus CEO Stephen MacDonald said in an interview

Mathew Georghiou is so convinced that early adopters will like MediaSpark’s new wellness eBook that he’s offering it at a 93 percent discount for the next 43 days.

The Sydney-based eLearning company has just launched its new gamified eBook, GoVenture Health, to teach wellness to a broad range of people, including students as young as age 10. In an introductory offer, it’s selling the eBook to schools until Aug. 31 for $99, which is a $1400 discount on the regular price of $1499. (After Aug. 31, schools will still be able to purchase it for $399 for one month, then the full price kicks