Privatization showed its face in the Maritimes again last week, and as you might expect most officials saw nothing but pimples and buck teeth.

The New Brunswick Liquor Corporation has released a 73-page report that raised the issue of whether the Crown corporation should be sold. The review, led by NBLC president and CEO Daniel Allain, decided it should remain in public hands.

If that ruling failed to elicit gasps of surprise, journalists in Nova Scotia asked New Democrat Finance Minister Graham Steele whether he believed the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation should be sold. His reply?

We’re hours away from it being official: the Atlantic Regional Venture Capital Fund will not open on schedule in February 2012. But people in the know tell me that the negotiations on hiring a manager for the fund are proceeding – they’re just taking longer than expected.

One complicating factor is that the talks include “potential LPs” which means that several parties must be satisfied before the organizers can announce the hiring of a manager.

Let’s backtrack a bit: Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have each committed $15 million to a venture capital fund, and have hired Wilson Executive

Innovacorp president and CEO Clifford Gross has left an organization that is much different than the one he took over in January of 2011. It’s incredible how the Halifax-based provincial agency has evolved in a year.

I think it’s fair to say that Gross took over an incubator that had an investment component, yet he’s leaving an investment agency that also nurtures the companies it backs and others. It has also served as the Nova Scotia government’s point of contact in a rapidly evolving investment climate.

Innovacorp announced the third week of February that Gross had left the Hollis

The total value of the jackpot is $8.85 billion, and there are 4,269 ways to win. Am I talking about a new lottery? No. It’s the funding mechanisms for research and development offered by Canadian governments.

According to The Funding Portal, an Ottawa group that helps innovators tap government funding, 4,269 government programs hand out almost $9 billion to people toiling to build a better mousetrap. Let’s add a bit of perspective to that figure: The entire New Brunswick government’s annual program spending is $8 billion.

So Ottawa and its provinces and territories are handing out more

J.P. Deveau insists his concerns about pending reforms to R&D funding in Canada have little to do with his company, but, worries about how the reforms could affect younger, more vulnerable companies. Deveau is the founder and CEO of Dartmouth-based Acadian Seaplants Limited, which has grown over three decades into a leading exporter of products made from seaweed, including fertilizer, animal feed, and nutritional supplements. The company has 300 employees, exports to 70 countries, and spends about 5% to 8% of its revenues on R&D. I thought he was the perfect person to demystify the current

There’s a new star in the constellation of Atlantic Canadian startups – DeNovaMed Inc.

The Halifax biotech, which is developing a new class of compounds to battle superbug viruses, was awarded the top prize Wednesday in Innovacorp’s I-3 competition, beating out 141 competitors from across Nova Scotia.

The company, which grew out of the research lab at the IWK children’s hospital, has used computer-aided drug design to develop a new class of antibiotics to treat infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria, known as superbugs. These superbugs have proliferated greatly in the last 30

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing a bit of work in the exempt market dealer segment, a class of asset I didn’t even know existed until now. You don’t hear much, if anything, about it here on the East Coast, but it’s an increasingly active market in Western Canada.

I think it’s something we should be more aware of, given the need for capital among regional companies in the coming decades.

So what is the exempt market? It’s a market for securities of issuers who are exempt from releasing prospectuses. For the purposes of this column, we’ll consider them young companies that

Today, we launch our Reader's Views section, in which we publish contributions from members of the Atlantic Canadian investor and entprepreneur community. We're starting with Brent Newsome, CEO of NewPace of Bedford, N.S., writing on the need for collaborative political discourse. Got a view? Let us know and we may publish it.

By Brent Newsome

On two mornings recently, I listened to the Minister of Finance and the Halifax Chamber of Commerce spar over their views of Nova Scotia’s economic dilemma on the province’s most popular morning drive time radio show.  Each party dissected the

 Last week I tried to explain the landscape of entrepreneurship in Atlantic Canada to someone from Toronto. Before I continue, I should explain what I mean by “landscape.”

The person was in Halifax because he needs to learn more about entrepreneurship in the region; he plans to come here regularly to build contacts. I told him that he can’t develop deep relationships in Atlantic Canada by only visiting Halifax. For better or worse, there are at least four communities of entrepreneurs in the region, and the links among them are tenuous at best.

One of our challenges in Atlantic Canada is

SimplyCast, the Halifax-based multi-channel marketing company, announced today that it has launched Version 7 of its software, as we reported in November.

SimplyCast is one of the more ambitious companies I follow here, and has been since its inception.  CEO Saeed El-Darahali was never content just to be another software-as-a-service company and took the time and money to find the staff to develop a unique platform-as-a-service company. Though I often write in praise of exits, I admire El-Darahali for stating openly that he does not want to exit this business until he’s established it as