If Jeff Thompson hadn’t had so much trouble checking in online for a flight to Australia last autumn, New Brunswick might have missed out on one of its most exciting new startups.

As repeated error messages kept popping up on his screen, Thompson  wondered why airline staff didn’t realize that this sort of problem offered them  a chance to call a customer, improve the relationship and possibly make additional sales.

Thus UserEvents was born.

Fredericton-based UserEvents has developed enterprise software that allows large corporations or organizations to instantly detect clients who

The revitalization of the Newfoundland and Labrador Angel Network is gaining traction, as can be seen in the numbers. Membership last year tripled from 10 to 30, and the group that had no financing deals in 2011 is now preparing to close its third for 2012.

NLAN is not a large organization, but after a few years of uneven perfornance it is heading in the right direction and channeling its members' money into promising enterprises. Under its stewardship, angels have backed three different tech companies with global ambitions, and it is hoping for a fourth funding before the year is out.

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