Business

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More Since it first appeared earlier this year, Boston-based educational startup Boundless has been on a mission to ensure that college students have a free alternative to the pricey and bulky world of physical textbooks. The startup believes that an oligopoly of textbook publishers has been driving up costs for years (as the four top publishers currently control the lion’s share of the market) and so it set out to change that. Naturally, as a result, Boundless has found itself on the receiving end of litigation — courtesy of three of those top textbook publishers. Leaning on the $8 million it raised in April from Venrock, Nextview, Founder Collective and Kepha (and nearly $10 million total), the startup has since gone on the offensive, filing a motion to dismiss two of those claims last month, as it buckled d...

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 VidCaster was founded in 2010 to make creating video sites easier than ever, and has signed up a number of customers who use it to deliver free, or ad-supported videos online. Now it’s adding the ability for its clients to charge for access to their library of content, with the launch of VidCaster Paywall. Other online video platforms like Brightcove or Ooyala only provide a video player to their clients, which requires them to build out their own sites, which videos can then be published into. VidCaster, by contrast, provides a full-service solution, enabling users to quickly create a fully customizable site for their content, without having to go through the work of hiring an outside design firm or whatever. It’s also cheap, relative to other solutions out ther...