The Business And Technology Network

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Both Silicon Alley Insider and Mashable are reporting that Google is in talks to buy Web video provider Brightcove for $500 million to $700 million. If true,  The move would make Google’s YouTube, the top consumer Web video site, a powerful player in the commercial Web video industry as well. Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire says that the company is profitable and cash flow positive. Analyst estimates put Brightcove on pace to do $80 million in sales this year—which would put this deal around 6-9X revenue.

To date, Brightcove has raised approximately $91 million in venture capital. For those unfamiliar with the service, Brightcove is essentially the YouTube of business to business video, powering video streaming on large sites like AOL, The New York Times and The Washington Post. And if completed, such a deal would give Google significantly more reach in online video.

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TechCrunch is reporting that Zemanta, a platform that aims to help online content producers find related content from across the web, has released a Public API aimed at helping fuel their Content Suggestion Engine. The idea behind Zemanta is to help bloggers enhance their publication(s) by allowing many more blogs, articles, web pages, etc. to be fed into its system which then recognizes content and returns suggested images, smart links, keywords and relevant related stories from the web.

Below is a brief video explaining the service.

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New York-based VC Fred Wilson posted an interesting piece today about stocktwits, a Twitter app that lets investors interact with one another.

Wilson likes the idea and thinks a lot could be done with this and similar apps that extract meaning out of content on the web such as Adaptive Blue which recognizes pages about books, music, film, stocks, wine, people, etc., Outside.in which recognizes posts about places, neighborhoods, schools, parks, etc. and Zemanta which recognizes concepts in blog posts and recommends content to add to one’s post.

“What if they and others put out similar extensions?” he says. “Then twitter would get smarter. The links that people send around on twitter are one of the best things about the service. It’s like a live collaborative RSS reader. But if every tweet had links that were added semantically, then we’d really have something.”

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