[Updated 4:20 pm] An acquisition, a product launch, some executive shuffles, and more in this collection of recent tech-news headlines from around the Boston area:
—Nuance Communications, the Burlington, MA-based speech-recognition software company, is digging deeper into the automotive industry. The company (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NUAN]]) says it’s spending $80 million to buy a connected-car business from the Tweddle Group, a supplier to the auto industry. The technology that Nuance is buying, previously called Tweddle Connect, provides the software behind in-car “infotainment” systems for Toyota and Lexus. The group that produces Tweddle Connect is based in Bellevue, WA, part of a cluster of connected-car expertise in the Seattle region.
—Twitter‘s Boston-area office is in the news again: Crashlytics, the social media company’s debugging software for mobile apps, is now available on the Android operating system. Twitter bought Crashlytics at the end of January, paying more than $100 million for the startup. Shipping a version for Android, which has the largest market share in smartphones, shows that Twitter is keeping its promise to continue developing the software, which finds which line of code crashed a mobile app. Last week, Twitter rolled out its version of the TV ad tracking software it collected by acquiring another Boston-area startup, Bluefin Labs. (More on Twitter Boston’s growth plans in the Boston Globe.)
—Carbonite, the Boston-based computer backup software company, is restructuring its executive roster. The company said in a recent SEC filing that Bill Phelan had resigned as executive vice president of cloud backup, the company’s core business. Phelan took that job just a year ago, after serving as senior vice president of products. He joined the company in 2010. A Carbonite spokeswoman says the company won’t be filling Phelan’s slot, instead deciding to shift responsibilities as the company focuses more on small-business customers. Executive vice president Swami Kumaresan will now be in charge of the company’s product development and marketing divisions. [Updated with more detail on restructuring]
—NuoDB, a Cambridge, MA-based startup that makes a new type of software for handling advanced online databases, has a new chief technology officer. Seth Proctor will fill the top technical job, succeeding co-founder Jim Starkey, who retired late last year. Proctor was the fourth employee at NuoDB, and he previously worked at Nokia and Sun Microsystems.
—Adelphic Mobile has formed a partnership with digital-ad firm VivaKi to build a mobile-advertising targeting platform. The basic idea is to crunch data on how consumers interact with content to help brands and advertisers target the right mobile users for campaigns (without violating privacy).
