Boston Tech Watch: DraftKings, Everbridge, GE & NuTonomy

As summer winds down, we are tracking tech startups, big companies, a proposed IPO, and a couple of sectors fraught with regulatory challenges (daily fantasy sports and self-driving vehicles):

—General Electric’s new Boston headquarters officially opened on Monday. About 175 employees have moved into the Fort Point offices, and the energy and manufacturing giant expects to employ about 800 people at its new campus by the end of 2018.

—Burlington, MA-based Everbridge, a maker of communications software for emergency situations, filed initial paperwork for an IPO late last week. The nominal total offering price is listed as $90 million. There has been only one Boston-area tech IPO so far this year (Acacia Communications). Everbridge has been around since 2002 and is led by CEO and chairman Jaime Ellertson, who was previously CEO of CloudFloor and Gomez.

—Cambridge, MA-based startup NuTonomy has started a public trial of a driverless taxi system in a Singapore business district. Things are moving fast in this sector, and there has been some consolidation of startups already. Uber, which is rolling out its own driverless vehicle fleet in Pittsburgh, has acquired self-driving truck startup Otto (which just came out of stealth in May), and GM acquired Cruise Automation in March.

—Daily fantasy sports companies DraftKings (of Boston) and FanDuel (of New York) are the subjects of this ESPN piece on “the implosion” of the sector. Which prompted a defense of the industry, posted in Fortune.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.