About 90 novice entrepreneurs will gather in Fredericton tomorrow to go through the Bootcamp of the 2013 Breakthru competition, the biennial contest for New Brunswick entrepreneurs organized by The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation and the law firm Cox & Palmer.

NBIF Chief Executive Calvin Milbury said his agency this year received 47 applications to participate in Breakthru – a rise of more than 50 percent from the 31 entries for the 2011 competition. They feature a range of startup segments, including ITC, biotech and cleantech, and they come from all parts of the province.

“We’re

Neato Entertainment is looking for about 25 Maritime television aficionados willing to test its new technology, which allows you to enhance your TV time with a simple application on your smartphone.

The company, formed last year by TV production veteran Michael-Andreas Kuttner, is founded on the premise that smart TVs (which converge television and the Internet on a single monitor) should offer people a more relaxing and enjoyable viewing experience rather than using it for more games, video downloads and the like.

 “The television-watching experience is pretty well perfected,” Kuttner

Having recently pivoted to expand its scope, 2nd Act Innovations of Halifax has hired two C-level executives in Silicon Valley to lead its sales and engineering efforts and help to raise a $5 million round of venture capital financing.

Reza Kazemipour has joined as Chief Executive Officer and Guillaume Oget as Chief Technology Officer, and together they will join a four-member executive team with Co-Founders Andrew Doyle and Peter Hickey. Kazemipour and Oget will both be based in the San Francisco area, while Doyle and Hickey back home in Halifax will continue as board members and retain

VidCruiter, a Moncton-based video recruitment company, has been accepted into the Canadian Technology Accelerator, or CTA, in Silicon Valley.

CEO Sean Fahey said Tuesday he will spend the next three months traveling between New Brunswick and San Francisco so he can attend the prestigious accelerator. It’s the third accelerator program he has entered in the past year – last year he attended both PropelICT’s Launch36 program and the McKenzie Accelerator at McKenzie College in Moncton.

VidCruiter offers clients a customized video format that allows job applicants to video-record their

CarbonCure, the Halifax cleantech company dedicated to low-carbon concrete products, has signed a licensing agreement with Ontario concrete manufacturer Atlas Block to make its products available in Ontario.

The deal is an important one for CarbonCure because it should establish a recurring revenue stream in a large market, building on the traction it gained with individual projects in such markets as Toronto and Halifax.

Midland, Ont.-based Atlas has been testing the technology for several months and will now permanently install CarbonCure’s technology and apply it across its broad

On Jan. 24, a group of business, financial, and legal experts will convene in rural New Brunswick to discuss what the province can and should do to allow companies to raise equity through crowdfunding.

This meeting, led by Nancy Mathis, the executive director at the Wallace McCain Institute for Business Leadership, is noteworthy because New Brunswick in the past three months has been at the cutting edge of the national discussion on crowdfunding. Though the New Brunswick Securities Commission (NBSC) has not yet committed to attending the meeting, it does have a keen interest in the

Cellufuel’s plan to open a demonstration biofuel facility in Brooklyn, N.S., this summer is just the first step of an ambitious industrial enterprise intent on having 10 plants within five to six years producing $200 million in annual revenue.

The Halifax company captured media attention late last year when the provincial government said it would set up a facility in the former Bowater Mersey paper mill in Brooklyn, near Liverpool, which had just closed due to weak demand for paper. The biofuel facility, financed in part from a $500,000 contribution from the provincial government, will be

Livelenz Inc., a Bedford, N.S., maker of analytics tools for fast food restaurants, and Epson America, Inc. have launched a smart receipt printer that helps restaurant owners analyze their operations in real time with a view to increasing profits.

The launch is significant because Epson’s new Omnilink printer, which uses Livelenz's analytics software, is the only product available that allows fast food operators an analytics tool in a free standing printer. That means franchise owners can install it without an expensive upgrade to their entire Point of Sales, or POS, system.

What’s

Gerry Pond, one of the region’s leading tech investors, has been named to the board of directors of a national foundation that encourages startups to donate some of their equity to charities.

The Upside Foundation is a new philanthropic body that asks startups to commit options to national charities, so that when the company exits, society as a whole will benefit from the company’s success.

“Good entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have always given back to the community,” Pond, a co-founder of East Valley Ventures in Saint John, said in an interview. He added the Upside Foundation

ScreenScape Networks, the Charlottetown-based video display developer, has named Ken Schneider, a former system engineer at Research In Motion Ltd., as its new Chief Technology Officer.

Schneider has been working with the company for the past six months, and CEO Mark Hemphill said the parties worked well enough together that Schneider has invested in the company and joined management. He will be based in Ontario and oversee the engineering team, most of which is based in Charlottetown.

ScreenScape is a software company that develops the systems that allow state-of-the-art video displays