PRX Relaunches Its iPhone App, Now Lets You Download All Your Favorite Public Radio Programs

The Public Radio Player app for the iPhone has been a round for a while now, but today, Cambridge-based Public Radio Exchange (PRX) is relaunching the app with a revamped visual design, new interface and, maybe most importantly, the ability to download episodes of shows so you can listen to This American Life, Radiolab, Car Talk or any of the other more than 1000 public radio programs and podcasts offline.

Hearst Is Revamping All Of Its Online Magazines With A Responsive, Personalized Design

Over the next few months, all of Hearst Digital Media's titles are getting a new look. Tom Smith, Hearst's vice president of technology and strategy, told me that the whole company is switching to a new publishing platform, which incorporates both responsive design and personalization. The first two magazines to make the switch are RoadandTrack.com and TownandCountryMag.com. (Other Hearst titles include Cosmopolitan, Popular Mechanics, Good Housekeeping, and Esquire.)

DISH’s Hopper With Sling Whole-Home DVR Now Available Nationwide, Following CES 2013 Awards Controversy

DISH today formally announced the nationwide launch of its Hopper with Sling DVR device, which allows users to record their favorite shows for later viewing, skip ads and also download DVR'd content to their iPad for offline viewing. The Hopper, which incorporates technology from partner Sling Media, Inc., was recently at the center of a controversy around the 2013 CES "Best of Show" Awards.

Nomi Raises $3M To Help Retailers Understand Their Customers, Online And Offline

Nomi, a startup led by former executives from Salesforce.com and Buddy Media, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by First Round Capital. Additional investors in the round include Greycroft Partners, SV Angel, Forerunner Ventures, Ralph Mack, Dave Tisch, Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn, and Mass Relevance CEO Sam Decker.

After Growing Revenue 270% Last Year, Personalization Startup Sailthru Raises $19M From Benchmark, Adds Bill Gurley To Board

Personalization startup Sailthru has been growing rapidly, with revenues increasing 270 percent over the last year. With that in mind, the company has raised $19 million in new Series B financing led by Benchmark. Along with the funding, the company is adding Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley to its board of directors.

Online Education Is Replacing Physical Colleges At A Crazy Fast Pace

Educators knew the online revolution would eventually envelop the physical classroom, but a torrent of near-revolutionary developments in the past month are proving that change is coming quicker than anyone imagined. In just 30 days, the largest school system in the U.S. began offering credit for online courses, a major university began awarding degrees without any class time required, and scores of public universities are moving their courses online. The point at which online higher education becomes mainstream is no longer in some fuzzy hypothetical future; the next president's Secretary of Education will need an entire department dedicated to the massive transition.

With Dual Mice And Collaboration In Any Window, YC’s Screenhero Gives WebEx And Screen Sharing Apps A Run For Their Money

We all love the idea of being able to connect and work with people in our always-online day and age, but ironically, when it comes to document collaboration, a lot of the software designed to aid in that -- WebEx, GoToMeeting and the rest -- is actually more geared to presenting rather than actually letting people work together on things, in real time, or focused on documents within a particular platform, like Google Docs. Enter Screenhero. Part of the current batch of Y-Combinator startups, Screenhero is launching with a way of letting two (and potentially more) people work on documents, or even each other's computer desktops, in possibly the easiest way to date, by simultaneously giving each collaborator an independent cursor and mouse, and complete control over a document, as if it were his or her own.

Cars.com And BP-Owned Castrol Put $13M Into Online Marketplace For Auto Repair, RepairPal

RepairPal, a marketplace for auto repair, has raised $13 million in funding led by Cars.com and Castrol innoVentures, the venture arm of Castrol, BP-owned developer of lubricants for engines and machines. This is the first technology investment for Castrol. RepairPal has raised $20 million to date.

Video Distribution Startup Rightster Buys Content Marketing Platform Preview Networks To Push Its YouTube Services Across Europe

A spot of acquisition news in Europe's digital video distribution space. Rightster, a U.K. video distribution and monetisation startup has made its first acquisition -- buying European content marketing platform and movie trailer distributor, Preview Networks, for an undisclosed sum. Rightster said the acquisition will bolster its global YouTube Multi Channel Network footprint.

Swrve Launches Targeted In-App Messaging To Get Games Players Reaching For Their Wallets

Dublin and San Francisco-based Swrve, which offers an in-app direct marketing platform aimed at mobile games developers or anybody making or responsible for marketing an app, has launched SwrveTalk to enable in-app marketing messages to be sent to users on a targeted and measurable basis. It can be employed to do things like cross-promote other titles in a portfolio or to improve conversion of time-limited in-app purchase offers, and so on.

Magma Venture Partners Completes $100M+ Third Fund Fundraising — Taking Its Total Fund Size To $300M+

Israeli early stage high-tech startup VC fund Magma Venture Partners, whose current portfolio includes online video-editing software developer Magisto, mobile analytics company Onavo, and navigation app maker Waze to name three, has completed fundraising on its third fund -- Magma III -- exceeding its target of $100 million. Magma said it manages more than $300 million to-date.

Yardsellr, The “eBay For Facebook,” Becomes The Latest Casualty In Social & Local Commerce

In the fall of 2011, we caught up with social commerce startup, Yardsellr, which the founders claimed at the time had grown into a community of over 5 million people. The Facebook-based social commerce platform was listing 6K new items for sale each day (at the time) and had over 120K items for sale in total. This, by the way, came after the company raised $5 million from Accel in 2010. However, at the time, only 175K of its 5 million users were active on the site each month -- a number, which in retrospect, might have rung a bell. Last week, in a blog post, Yardsellr announced that it would be shutting down operations in the next 60 days.

The Top Mobile Games Are Grossing More Than 4X What They Were A Year Ago, GREE’s Dharni Says

After a couple early stumbles in building out a mobile gaming platform in the West, GREE did a bit of a pivot with its San Francisco office over the last year. Initially set up after the $104 million acquisition of mobile gaming network OpenFeint, the office is now entirely geared toward building first-party games. It’s a turnabout for the $3.5 billion Japanese gaming company, which built its business in astonishingly short eight years through being a major feature phone gaming platform. (Yes, eight years is short in Japan where the culture can be averse to risky, new entrepreneurial ventures.) They aimed to replicate that success as a dual game developer and platform in the West with a few big-ticket acquisitions. But now it appears that the U.S. arm is just doing games for now. “We’re pretty singularly focused on content,” said Anil Dharni, GREE’s senior vice president of studio operations, in an interview from the company’s Mission Bay offices. “The platform — whenever it’s ready for the U.S. market — will get integrated later. The produce spirit and guidance had to happen from Japan.” Dharni was one of the co-founders of Funzio, which GREE bought last year for $210 million. That change was a bit of a difficult one, with layoffs for several U.S.-based platform focused employees. More senior GREE managers who came over with the OpenFeint acquisition like Eros Resmini recently left to pursue other opportunities. It came around a tough earnings quarter for GREE, which saw net profit actually decline year-over-year on the back of a tougher regulatory environment around game mechanics in Japan. Dharni said that all of Funzio’s four founders are still working at GREE. (That’s unlike what happened with OpenFeint, which saw its original CEO Jason Citron leave not long after the acquisition closed to work on other projects.) “Even if you look at the attrition rate from the ex-Funzio guys, overall it’s gone really well,” Dharni said. “All four founders are here and they have pretty significant chunks of responsibility in terms of product.” Some Funzio employees were affected by the recent layoffs however. Like many other game developers on the iOS and Android platforms, GREE is trying to prove that it’s not so vulnerable to the hits-driven nature of the business by having a network of users that’s so large that it can cheaply distribute games of its own or of other developers.

Apple, Microsoft, Adobe Called By Lawmakers To Defend Higher Prices In Australia

Three American companies-Apple, Microsoft and Adobe-have been summoned by the Australian Parliament to explain why they charge higher prices Down Under than in other countries.

Using Antonyms To Understand The Difference Between The Cloud And Everything Else

The difference between new and not-so-new technology has a way of revealing what is elastic and dynamic compared to what is rigid and static. It's not a measure of which technology is considered good or bad. It simply represents the progression from client/server technology to the Internet-scale, data-driven services that are gaining such momentum.

Visual How-To App Snapguide Passes 1M Uniques, Snaps Up YouTube Designer, And Gears Up For Growth

Daniel Raffel says that when he started work on the app that eventually became the how-to platform Snapguide, people advised him to make a “food guide” app (he has worked as a chef so might naturally gravitate to that vertical). He resisted, possibly because he had a bigger ambition in mind: “My goal is to inspire people to make things that they might otherwise buy,” he told me in a conversation earlier this week. In an online/offline world filled with lots of ways to consume just about anything you want, wherever and whenever you want, Snapguide is one of those places that runs counter to that, and its flavor of DIY -- delivered via a series of mobile-friendly, photographic and video-led how-to guides covering everything including crafts, makeup, cars, and -- yes -- food, is growing.

Menlo’s Shervin Pishevar And Goldman’s Scott Stanford Leave Their Day Jobs To Do Something Really Vague, By Design

Menlo Ventures' Shervin Pishevar and Goldman Sachs managing director Scott Stanford have left their day jobs to build a new venture called Sherpa. The creation of the firm, which was first reported by AllThingsD, is designed around a new model for building and creating companies through a mix and match of strategic corporate partnerships and working with well-known entrepreneurs.

A Dell Was Gotten, Dude

The year was 2004. I had just graduated college and my old Gateway mini tower PC was on its last legs. I was about to move out to California to begin my life. My parents asked what I wanted as a present before I left. But they already knew the answer. Dude, I was getting a Dell. I went online and customized the hell out of an Inspiron 8600. The price tag was well over $3,000. The thing was a beast. If computers came with hemi engines, this would have had one. When the fans kicked on it sounded like a space shuttle launch. It was thick enough to stop a bullet. It just about as portable as a Microsoft Surface — the original kind. It had a retina-searing red cover. I was in heaven.

The Future Of Fractional Ownership

The sharing economy is great, but if we're talking about true efficiency, it seems to me that we're going to need to go a step beyond just the owner-renter model for the collaborative consumption market, and into an area that's based on fractional ownership of goods.

Apple Reportedly Developing A Curved Glass Smart Watch

Both The New York Times Bits blog and the Wall Street Journal have reported that Apple is currently developing a smart watch. According to anonymous sources, the company is experimenting with "wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass" that would operate on Apple's iOS platform in its Cupertino headquarters.