Google Ventures scouts for talent

Internet search giant Google has started its own venture arm jointly based in Cambridge and Mountain View, California, states Boston.com.

Google Ventures will scout for entrepreneurial opportunities in a broad range of fields, from search and advertising to mobile computing to medical records and personal genomics. Its target is to invest $100 million in the coming year, with the Boston area being one of its geographic areas of interest.

Google says it's open to funding biotechnology start-ups such as therapeutics companies.

Western Digital, the second-largest hard disk drive maker in the world behind Seagate Technology, has acquired Silicon Systems for $65 million in cash, reports eWeek.com.

Silicon Systems, founded in 2002, is a major supplier of embedded SSDs and its SiliconDrive products are used in the medical, network communications, industrial, military and aerospace markets.

Western Digital toyed with the idea of buying Fujitsu's spinning disk drive business in 2008 but didn't, due to the decline of the dollar compared to the yen. Toshiba then stepped in and acquired the Fujitsu hard drive division.

Greenway Medical Technologies has begun offering its research solution, PrimeResearch to physicians as part of its integrated electronic health record solution, says FoxBusiness.

PrimeResearch offers access to a vast network of clinical research, quality and safety initiatives to boost processes, improve patient care and increase practice revenue.

A key benefit of PrimeResearch is that it is designed to sync with the general workflow of a practice. Using radio frequency identification, PrimeSuite retrieves the form within the application and the user does not have to go to a separate system to re-enter the clinical study data.