Business

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Brightcove announced its first acquisition as a public company today, with plans to acquire cloud encoding startup Zencoder for $30 million. And while the purchase will add a small amount of incremental revenue, the bigger strategic bet for Brightcove could be around making its video offerings more flexible and extensible, and hooking developers with more of a freemium business model. First of all, Brightcove’s Zencoder purchase marks a huge opportunity to capture part of a fast-growing segment of the online video market. According to Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire, Frost and Sullivan estimates the market is worth $264 million today, and will grow to $630 million by 2017. For this year and next, the actual impact will be pretty small: Brightcove estimated that Zen...

DISRUPT Extra Early Bird ticket sales end tonight at 11:59 PM PST, so buy your tickets now! If you miss the Extra Early Bird tickets, you’ll be able to buy Early Bird tickets until August 11th. Our confirmed speaker line up includes industry luminaries like Mike Arrington, Marissa Mayer, Marc Benioff, Joel Klein, Ben Horowitz, Ron Conway, Mayor Ed Lee, and Vinod Khosla. And, you’re guaranteed to be equally inspired by the speaker announcements that we’re making next week. In addition to the amazing line up of speakers, we’ve also received an incredible number of high quality applications for the Startup Battlefield. As you know, the Battlefield is at the heart of DISRUPT. Startups don’t pay money to get into the Battlefield – the cost to get in is a good idea and the drive to build it.  Participating companies have six minutes to present to a panel of the most influential investors and thought leaders in the world. The Battlefield was the launchpad for the likes of Mint, Dropbox, Yam...