The Boston-area innovation community continues to recover from the horrific events of last week. A nonprofit called Technology Underwriting Greater Good has raised more than $250,000 and is working with One Fund Boston to support victims of the attacks. A number of local tech companies are also working in relevant areas, ranging from Recorded Future in social media and Web intelligence, to Salient Stills in enhancing surveillance images, to iWalk in smart prosthetic devices for amputees.
In other innovation news…
---EMC has spun out a new enterprise cloud-computing company called Pivotal, and General Electric is investing more than $100 million in it.
---Meanwhile, Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ stock has risen by about 50 percent in the past week on results of a clinical trial for a new cystic fibrosis drug.
---Our biggest deal of the year so far is Waltham-based Thermo Fisher Scientific paying $13.6 billion to acquire Life Technologies, a maker of biotech equipment in California.
---And lastly, hardware design companies could be the next big thing. Local startups like GrabCAD, Bolt, and Dragon Innovation are advancing the notion that physical devices connected to the Internet can become faster and cheaper to make, just like software. But please, don’t let them tweet.
