Halifax accountant James D. Nicoll is gathering support for a regional equity tax credit that doesn’t involve legislation from the four Atlantic Provinces.

Instead, he is asking the federal government to handle it.

“What we’re trying to do is create a unified incentive to get money into the innovative companies that are the growth engine of the region,” said Nicoll, the Vice-President Deals at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Halifax.

Here’s the problem: Each province now grants equity tax credits, or ETCs, usually worth 35 percent to individuals if they invest in private companies within

The hunt has officially begun for Innovacorp’s CEO.

The Nova Scotia innovation agency announced Friday that the provincial government has assigned Wilson Executive Search to find the successor to Clifford Gross, who left the position in February after holding it for about one year.

The new boss at 1801 Hollis Street will have considerable success to build on and will also inherit an agency that is at a bit of a crossroads. The success comes first from a successful exit, having earned an estimated 10 times its investment in a year when GoInstant of Halifax sold out to Salesforce.com. And

As it seeks to raise $10 million in equity funding, Bedford, N.S.-based Livelenz Inc., has been selected to participate in two high-profile American programs and agreed to develop machine learning technology with Acadia University.

Livelenz, which develops real-time data analytics software for the quick service restaurant (QSR) and retail industry, issued a statement Friday saying that it is partnering with Acadia computer science experts explore using machine learning techniques, and predictive modeling, to increase the accuracy of restaurant sales forecasting.

Company President Greg

One of the interesting aspects of Invest Atlantic and MentorCamp in September was the prominent role played by tech experts from Arkansas of all places.

There’s no obvious link between our home in the North Atlantic and the landlocked southern state that produced Bill Clinton, Sam Walton and Levon Helm. But one similarity is the state is developing innovative businesses, and two of its representatives were delighted to come to Halifax to share ideas and experiences.

April Seggebruch, VP Finance & Operations of Merchant View LLC, of Fayetteville, and Jeff Amerine, Technology Licensing

GMS Surface Tech, which produces green and odour-free surface cleaners, has received commitments of about $600,000 in a $700,000 second round of funding that it hopes will fund expansion in the U.S.

 

The company, which was started by chemistry professors at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., is raising $400,000 in equity investment, mostly from outside the region, said Chief Marketing Officer Joe Menchefski in an interview. The company has secured $140,000 in support from NRC-IRAP and is hoping to finalize the remainder of the raise with the Atlantic Canada

We’d like to welcome Daniel Boltinsky, our new student intern, to the team at Entrevestor. Daniel is a student at University of King’s College in Halifax and his first piece for us is running today.

We’ve asked Daniel to report once every two weeks on startups coming out of the region’s universities. His stories will run the gamut from students starting a venture in their dorm to medtech companies being spun out of millions of dollars of research.

This is, of course, an important component of the Atlantic Canadian innovation segment, and we’ve found Daniel to be a real go-getter who’s

Having closed a seed round of funding, Halifax-based social media marketing company InNetwork Inc. is already talking to venture capital funds about a follow-on round, likely in the middle of 2013.

Innovacorp, the provincial innovation agency, announced Thursday that it made a $250,000 equity investment in the company, which helps social media marketers reach key “influencers” in their target market. A group led by Gerry Pond of East Valley Ventures Inc. put in $240,000. 

In an Interview, InNetwork CEO Chris Keevill said the company is already in discussions about further funding with

The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation said Thursday it is teaming up with the New Brunswick government to provide $1 million to hire technical staff for research at the province’s universities and research institutions.

NBIF, an independent, not-for-profit corporation, and the Department of Post-secondary Education, Training and Labour will provide money to hire the technicians and assistants who undertake applied research with the potential for commercialization.

Of the total funding, $650,000 will fully fund more than 75 undergraduate and graduate students to train and work in labs

I’m pleased to announce that Entrevestor columns are now being published daily in the Chronicle-Herald, Atlantic Canada’s leading newspaper. Each business day starting  today, our columns will be included in the Insider email notice, the print edition of the newspaper, and online at thechronicleherald.ca.

I’m really delighted to be returning to the Herald, which I first wrote for as a high school student in 1978 (Yep, I’m getting on). I had a lot of fun covering City Hall, reported on the Buchanan government and learned the ropes of business journalism in the Herald business department.

Sometime in the new year, at a cattle farm in Port Hood, Cape Breton, Chris van den Heuvel will launch a software product that could save thousands of dollars each for hundreds of thousands of North American farmers.

Van den Heuvel is a software developer and the founder and sole proprietor of Fireblade Software, which monitors real-time data on cattle farms. By identifying areas of weak performance, Fireblade can help a farm save an estimated $7,500 per year, which goes directly to the operation’s bottom line.

“We’ve been using it on our own place and are just tweaking it before we do