Genomics was a hot topic last week at the Bio-IT World Expo in Boston, as tech companies and service providers highlighted their tools and hardware for exploring and interpreting the genome. It was no surprise to see that "genomics" was the most popular topic discussed in connection with the event on Twitter, blogs and Facebook, according to an analysis Semantelli prepared for FierceBiotech IT.
Meantime, the U.K. telecom giant BT Group ($BT) tied with BGI for the most online mentions at the event with 38 each. BT's popularity was likely linked to the company's debut last week of a new cloud-based service to support R&D software tools and online collaboration among biopharma partners. Bas Burger, BT's top executive for life sciences, launched the service with informatics providers Accelrys ($ACCL) and BioTeam as initial partners.
Last week's event sparked 85 mentions about "genomics" on Twitter, blogs and Faceboook, according to Semantelli, a social media analytics provider. Second in the hot topics category was "GPU Accelerated Cloud Computing" with 43 mentions, followed by "Big Data" with 34. All three top topics played a role in DNA sequencing provider BGI's news about a cloud-based bioinformatics product called EasyGenomics. China-based BGI's product uses Nvidia's ($NVDA) Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate analysis of genomic data.
Nvidia garnered the third-most mentions with 26, followed by Illumina ($ILMN), which unveiled plans during the meeting for an app store for genomics software, with 21.
Bio-IT World Expo drew more than 2,500 attendees, according to the publication. Semantelli CEO Siva Nadarajah said that the conference generated about 400 tweets.
Slideshow: Check the pulse of biotech IT in Boston