Companies often develop into family trees, with clusters of progeny growing hither and yon, and an interesting group of shoots is sprouting in northern Nova Scotia around an intriguing entrepreneur called Joe Menchefski.

He is the CEO of Billdidit, a design-and-manufacturing concern best known for drumming products, and he has teamed up with chemistry professors from St. F.X. to form GMS Surface Tech, which produces green cleaning products now selling at such chains as Staples, Grand and Toy and Basic.

Born and raised in Whitney Pier, Menchefski received an engineering degree from the

Moncton-native Dan Martell has another exit on his resume.

Tech entrepreneur and angel Martell, who sold Moncton-based Spheric Technologies in 2008, is a co-founder of Flowtown, a San Francisco online gift marketing enterprise, which sold out today to San Francisco-based Demandforce for an undisclosed price.

Flowtown helps companies deepen customer relationships by sending gifts over Facebook and Twitter, and the service will now operate off the platform of Demandforce, which offers a range of services that help small businesses retain and enhance customer relationships.

 “When Dan

VidCruiter, a Moncton-based video recruitment company, will soon expand its product offering with its new VidTrainer function and social sharing features.

CEO Sean Fahey told me in an interview this week that the two-year-old company will officially launch VidTrainer in two months, which will allow companies to train the employees they hire using VidCruiter. ``We’re also building it because it will train our clients to use our product,’’ he quipped.

VidCruiter offers clients a customized video format that allows job applicants to video-record their submissions, so HR teams can speed up

Neurodyn, a Charlottetown-based biotech, is working its way through a $1.5 million round of fundraising, with which it hopes to bring its own natural treatment for Parkinson’s Disease to market in just over two years.

The company, which is developing a ginseng extract called ND-602, now has commitments of about $300,000 to $400,000 and is continuing to raise money in Canada and abroad, said Chief Scientific Officer Denis Kay in an interview.

Working with the Shanghai Innovative Research Centre for Traditional Chinese Medicine, Neurodyn has discovered an extract that can arrest or slow

Innovacorp, Nova Scotia’s technology commercialization agency, is hoping at least 100 companies apply by the Oct. 20 deadline for its I-3 competition, a beauty pageant of sorts of startups in the province.

Shelley Hessian of Innovacorp said the agency is receiving a lots of inquiries about the competition and expects most of the submissions (which are three- to five-page business plans) to flood in in the days before the deadline.

This will be either the third or fourth biennial I-3 competition, depending on how you categorize it. Innovacorp started the competition in Cape Breton in

Two social networks have been quietly launched in Atlantic Canada already this year, and a third quasi-social-network is set to launch within a month.

In the up-and-running category, Equals6 and Bright Seeds are Halifax-based social networks targeting specific groups of young people, and both are scalable so they could expand outside the region. And by the time Halloween has come and gone, the Moncton Cyber Social is expected to have launched its social media site to complement its regular gatherings of techies.

Equals6, a site that connects students with prospective employers, has the

Gerry Pond, the patron saint of New Brunswick tech investors, has made an investment in Charlottetown-based ScreenScape Networks and is joining the company’s board.

A person familiar with the situation said Pond is now backing the company, which allows businesses or organizations to post web-based displays on video screens in public places, reducing the cost of displays and expanding the choice. A spokesman for the company declined to comment on Pond’s investment.

A former CEO of NB Tel, Pond is now the chairman of Marine Partners in Saint John and is known as the savviest tech investor

There are people at work in New Brunswick today who will benefit for years to come from the Q1 Labs sale to IBM, and they’re not just the Fredericton-based employees of the security software provider.

They’re teachers, nurses, office workers and the like employed by the New Brunswick government.

Their pension fund, managed by the New Brunswick Investment Management Corp.,  or NBIMC, had the foresight to invest in security software company Q1 Labs, which sold out to IBM yesterday for an undisclosed sum. That investment created employment and R&D benefits in the region and is now

Hoops Innovation, which makes a shooting aid for basketball players, has received more than $200,000 in investment from the First Angel Network and will soon launch a fundraising round in the U.S. with a target of $3.5 million.

The Halifax company asked the angel network for $200,000 as the final component of its round of seed funding. The FAN members oversubscribed the issue and Hoops agreed to take the additional capital. The seed funding included investment from family and friends and investors from outside the region.

Now that the seed funding round is complete, the company plans to

Q1 Labs, an online security provider founded in Fredericton in 2001, has been purchased by IBM Corp. for an undisclosed price – the second New Brunswick-born tech company to exit this year.

The sale of Q1, which is now based in Waltham, Ma., but retains a strong presence in Fredericton, follows the $371 million sale of Radian6 to Salesforce.com of San Francisco. Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association recently named that sale the Deal of the Year for 2012.

The sale of Q1 Labs will only accentuate the growing feeling in New Brunswick that its tech sector is flourishing,