Panna is a digital cooking magazine for iPhone and iPad that features high-definition video lessons led by highly acclaimed chefs like Rick Bayless, Jonathan Waxman, and Anita Lo. An issue is released every months and contains 13 seasonal video recipes from the participating chefs. The emphasis is on home-cooking, so each chef guides the user step-by-step through their favorite recipes in a home kitchen environment.

“It’s inspiring to help anyone create amazing food for someone they care about, and that matters,” said founder David Ellner in an email. “People are always looking for inspiration around recipes to find new ways to impress the people they’re cooking for. Panna uses the best chefs to provide this inspiration. I’m trying to transform the way people follow recipes and give people recipes that are guaranteed to be delicious. I want people to cook more and build their confidence around cooking.”

The app includes highly visual, drool-worthy photography of lacquered chicken, lasagna, and caramelized cauliflower, to name a few. The content is highly curated, and the chefs not only provide basic instructions, but also little tips and tricks and suggestions, like how to cook for company or making the perfect biscuit, and shopping lists. Ellner said that Panna bridges the gap between traditional cookbooks and sites like YouTube which are not curated and often have lower production quality. It was named one of the best apps of 2012 by Apple and chosen as an Editor’s Choice in the app store.

The popularity of shows like Top Chef and the expansion of the foodie movement has led to increased interest in cooking tasty, high-quality food at home. Whether it is for a dinner party or a casual Sunday supper, people are excited about whipping up restaurant-quality food in their own kitchens. Panna caters to this crowd and provides chefs wider opportunities to engage with an audience. The first download is free and after that, individual issues are $4.99 with a year’s subscription for $14.99. Content never expires and each issue also contains one free recipe.

Ellner said that his biggest challenge with Panna is getting people to pay for content in an area where so much content is free. However, since the target audience is people who are passionate about food and the product is “worth it,” this should not be an obstacle to continued growth. Before founding Panna, Ellner spent 25 years as an executive in the media industry and brought his experience with video content and digital technology to make Panna as beautiful and seamless as possible.

Anthem Ventures led this round, with participation from Lerer Ventures, Crosslink Ventures, Maveron, Advancit Capital, RSL Venture artiness, Launchpad LA, David Tisch’s BoxGroup and angels. Panna is based in Hoboken, New Jersey. The company previously raised $435,000 and partnered with  brands like Sur La Table and Whole Foods to include new chef segments on cooking equipment and vegan friendly meals.

This round will be used to expand the team, produce new content, and accelerate marketing and sales efforts. Panna is currently expanding to Android, and the June issue will feature live fire Mexican grilling recipes.

Check out this video from Jonathan Waxman (pictured above) about how to make a perfect apple tart.

Photo Credit: Panna

News aggregation service Pulse debuted version 3.0 of its mobile apps for Android, iPhone, and iPad today, which brings lots of new features and interface tweaks.

The service allows you to pull in news sources from hundreds of different web publications and customize how it’s grouped together via category pages. With version 3.0, Pulse now lets you pin an unlimited number of sources/sites to your custom pages, and doesn’t limit how many different pages you can create. That should come in pretty handy for people who want to monitor for ultra specific news from just a handful of sources. For instance, you can now devote a separate page for NFL football, college football, baseball, college basket ball, etc.

After playing with the iPhone/iPad version for a while, it seems like Pulse 3.0 focuses on making its mobile apps more consistent with the recently launched web app version of the service. Pages are no longer displayed as horizontal tabs along the top of your sources. Instead, you navigate between pages using a sidebar that’s very similar to the web app. The new side bar also makes it much easier for you to reference any saved stories.

Pulse 3.0 also contains a new feature that lets you search for specific news that isn’t easily found within your custom pages. Its new news search tool scans Tumblr, Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, Google, Flickr, Blekko, and others.

The new apps (pictured below) are available now via the Google Play store and Apple’s App store.

The new features will emphasize compelling visual content as a companion to the suggestions. The goal is that browsing through the site feels like flipping through a glossy travel magazine, except that on Gogobot, the advice is provided by people you know and when a place piques your interest, you can click on it to find more information. It is a discovery as well as a planning tool.

“The rise of social and mobile technologies has completely transformed the way we consume information and interact with the world around us,” said CEO Travis Katz in a statement. “Gogobot is re-imagining trip planning for this new world, leveraging social and location data to always show you the most relevant information in a format that is both beautiful and useful.”

Gogobot recently surpassed 1 million registered users and has a new member joining every 15 seconds. According to a study conducted by AppData, it has significantly more traction than its competitors in the social travel network space, like Trippy, Trot, and Wanderfly. Because of this traction, the company has been able to secure $19 million in funding over the last year and a half from Battery Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Innovation Endeavors.

The company started in 2010, after Katz and his wife grew frustrated with the arduous trip planning process, and has grown to 20 employees. It is based in Menlo Park, Calif.

After all the turmoil Yahoo has gone through in the past month, the company is finally making moves on a legitimate plan to consolidate its resources on a handful of successful products and services crucial to its bottom line.

Today Yahoo announced that it’s shutting down digital magazine news app Livestand, which it only launched back in November 2011.

“When we discontinue products, it will be so that we can focus on opportunities where we lead and where we can create the most meaningful experiences for people using our products, and for our partners, developers and advertisers,” Yahoo stated in a blog post. “One of the first decisions we’ve made along these lines is to discontinue our personalized digital newsstand app, Livestand for iPad.”

Livestand was facing plenty of more popular competitors, such as Flipboard, Editions by AOL, Pulse News, Zite, and Google Currents. But even in a crowded market, Yahoo didn’t need to be focusing its efforts on side projects like this. The company said it still plans to focus on creating a more mobile web-friendly experience for its existing products. As we said at the beginning of the year, Yahoo can start by revamping Flickr.

It’s nice to see new CEO Ross Levinson actually doing something to lessen the company’s glut of useless services and products. But the work is far from over.

Fortunately, we’ve comprised a list of 10 products Yahoo needs to immediately shut down. (Well, it’s actually only a list of nine, since Livestand is now dead.)

The partnership kicks off with some impressive additions: You can listen to NPR and Public Radio International shows on Flipboard, even while reading other content on the graphics-heavy aggregator. You can find these programs in the content guide under a new Audio category. To play or pause your current audio track from anywhere in Flipboard, tap the music icon on the top of the screen (iPhone) or lower corner (iPad).

In another great use of sound, Flipboard has added VoiceOver features that let visually impaired users listen to articles on the app.

If you already use SoundCloud, just add your login on Flipboard’s Accounts screen and SoundCloud will appear as a new tile on your main Flipboard page, alongside your other topics such as photography, tech, or fashion. Tap, and you’ll be taken to a SoundCloud landing page where you can navigate to your stream and see what sounds friends and family have shared, as well as your SoundCloud Likes, Sounds, Sets, and Groups.

Just last week, SoundCloud unveiled the beta version of its new web app, Next, which featured continuous play and improved social features. The move towards social makes the company a natural fit for Flipboard, which already lets you add accounts for 10 other popular social services, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Instagram, Tumblr, 500px, and Sina Weibo.

Flipboard has also added support for Readability and Pocket to make it easier to enjoy content in-depth later. There is also a new Japanese version of the app, released today.

Major publishers use Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) to craft digital versions of their InDesign print publications for tablets and smartphones. It began when Adobe teamed up with Condé Nast publication Wired to create a digital version of its magazine for the then brand-new iPad. Now many big brands use DPS, including multiple Condé titles, National Geographic, and Wenner Media.

Designers will be most excited about the new Alternative Layout feature, which makes it possible to re-purpose a single InDesign layout for multiple devices without having to start from scratch. They should be able to create one layout for an iPad, then use it for a Kindle Fire, iPhone, or any other screen with a different aspect ratio.

This labor-saving feature is just in time — Adobe also announced that DPS can now publish to the iPhone and iPod touch with its new Content Viewer. The New Yorker was the first publication to show what a magazine designed for the iPhone might look like using the new feature at Adobe’s Digital Publishing Summit in New York this morning.

Sharing is a sticky spot for these digital publications. The full issues usually cost a flat fee, but how do you make money off sharing, especially when audiences are so used to free content shared from websites? When so much traffic comes from articles being posted on Facebook and Twitter, it would be silly to prohibit it altogether. The first stab at a solution is tightly controlled sharing features. Publishers can decide what content is sharable, set up a paywall, and control how many times a person can read articles from an issue before being prompted to buy the app.

Other tweaks to the suite include improved analytics tools, integration with new CS6 custom-animation tool Edge, and a bevy of new fonts in the Adobe library that publishers can use in tablet publications without dropping money on additional licenses and per-use fees.

In addition to the changes, Adobe has landed a big new client, Meredith, which was previously using DPS’s now-neutralized former competitor Woodwing. Meredith publishes Fitness, Better Homes and Gardens, and Parents, and claims it is the largest publisher in the world based on total circulation.

Zeen, the newest project from YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, aims to help normal people make and discover digital magazines.

With our industry’s laser-like focus on gorgeous, magazine-like design, we can see this idea being a huge hit. User interfaces these days — particularly for mobile devices and touchscreens — are all about the glossy print aesthetic. Take a look at Windows 8. Take a look at Flipboard. Take a look at any app with full-screen images and gorgeous typography, and you’ll know what inspired it.

The clean, minimalist, grid-based look and feel of today’s interfaces all hark back to print’s glory days and the biggest of big-budget magazines. So bringing a refreshed, easy-to-DIY version of the digital magazine to consumers is a smart and (more important) a very timely idea.

For now, though, we have relatively few details about how Zeen will work and what Zeen-spawed ‘zines will look like. You can go to the app’s landing page now to reserve a username and connect the account to an email address, Facebook identity, or Twitter account.

Zeen is a product of Avos, Hurley and Chen’s San Mateo, Calif.-based web shop. The company is hiring a small group of visual/UI designers as well as engineers for the project.

hat tip: Fusible

Image courtesy of Sheftsoff, Shutterstock

Mobile news aggregator Zite is giving popular web publishers their own sections within its digital magazine apps, the company announced today.

Zite, which was  was acquired in August 2011 by CNN for over $20 million, lets you build a custom digital magazine by pulling in shared links from bookmarking and social sites, such as Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious and Read It Later. It then builds a personalized selection of articles based on activity from your social profiles. Unlike most of its competitors, Zite learns your reading habits by giving you voting buttons for each piece of content. The idea is to give you more of what you actually want to see without having to disregard all the boring and/or uninteresting stuff.

Unlike Zite competitor Pulse, the new publisher-specific sections aren’t just a bland RSS feed that dumps content into the app in real-time. Instead, the publisher sections will essentially function like regular topic-based sections (Technology, Politics, Science, etc.). The only real difference is that all the content comes from one source rather than several.

Initially, the Zite Publisher Program will add sections for a handful of news partners, including Bleacher Report, CNN, The Daily Beast, FOX Sports, HLNtv, Motley Fool, The Huffington Post, The Next Web, and yes, VentureBeat. Zite said the program will  be mutually beneficial to both itself and publishers.

“A publication like CNN publishes hundreds of posts everyday across (a wide range of) categories ,” said Zite CEO Mark Johnson in an interview with VentureBeat. That can be overwhelming for tablet users trying to find only the articles they care about. “With Zite, we’re able to aggregate a collection of only the posts that interest you within an algorithmically-curated section.”

Navigating through a content-heavy publisher’s website from a tablet’s native web browser is frustrating. You could easily spend more time searching for news than actually reading it. And since time is valuable, there’s definitely an advantage to having do the Zite curation for large news sites with a wide range of news coverage.

But news organizations with fewer daily posts and a specific range of news coverage (like VentureBeat or Bleacher Report) can also benefit from the Zite Publisher Program, the company said. In addition to an algorithmically curated section within the app, publishers also gain an attractive digital magazine-style user interface that’s optimized for mobile devices and social sharing. It’s also worth noting that most publishers don’t have the resources (or desire) to create and maintain an app with the same functionality of Zite.

That said, Zite’s publisher sections could actually end up boosting readership for its news partners. As part of the new program, Zite will send its news partners regular analytics reports to better understand how their sections are performing. Additionally, each news partner has the option of placing two house ads within their section. The ads, which are entirely optional, can plug official iOS or Android apps, subscription deals, premium memberships, and other forms of self-promotion. That definitely gives publishers an incentive, while encouraging people to stop using Zite’s app in favor of a preferred news source.

Zite’s Johnson said, however, that company isn’t concerned with people fleeing because Zite provides something individual news publishers can’t: quality news aggregation.

“People aren’t going to stop using aggregators, even if the majority of their news comes from one place,” Johnson told VentureBeat. After comparing Zite to some other popular news aggregators, I’m inclined to agree with his logic, too.

For example, a large chunk of links submitted to community news sharing site Reddit come from image sharing service Imgur. But surfing Imgur directly produces a fraction of quality results compared to Reddit’s user-generated news aggregation. Clearly, people value a good aggregator nearly as much as the news itself. The same is true for Zite when it comes to aggregating news on mobile devices.

The company said it will be adding several new partners to its Zite Publisher Program in the coming months. Founded in March 2011, San Francisco-based Zite faces a growing number of competitors, including Flipboard, Editions by AOL, Pulse News, and Google Currents. Zite’s app is available for free on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch as well as Android- and WebOS-powered devices.

Screenshots of Zite’s new publisher sections via Zite

Building on the success of its iPad app, Zite is rolling out a new iPhone-optimized version of its personalized news app today.

Zite lets you build a custom digital magazine by pulling in shared links from bookmarking and social sites, such as Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious and Read It Later. It then builds a personalized selection of articles based on activity from your social profiles. Unlike most of its competitors, Zite learns your reading habits by giving you voting buttons for each piece of content. The idea is to give you more of what you actually want to see without having to disregard all the boring and/or uninteresting stuff.

“A lot of services, like Twitter (for example), suffer from giving you too much information if you follow lots of sources or not enough if you follow just a few,” Zite CEO Mark Johnson told VentureBeat. “I call it the Goldilocks Problem. It’s either too much or not enough.” Logically, that would make Zite the just right amount of information, according to the classic fairy tale story.

Initially, I assumed many of the user interface elements from Zite’s iPad app would get lost in translation of the iPhone’s smaller screen, but that isn’t the case. The experience of reading news is just as enjoyable, especially during idle moments throughout the day (standing in line, boring meetings, waiting for the bus, etc.).

The biggest change in the iPhone version is the app’s navigation. Since side bars aren’t practical for the smaller screen, the news sections are displayed at the top. Switching between news sections is done by swiping the section name horizontally, which is nice if you only have one hand free. Articles from each section are arranged in a vertical stack with thumbnails that help break up the text.

Earlier this week, Zite competitor Flipboard also launched an iPhone version of its popular iPad app. The launch was so successful that it actually crashed the Flipboard service for a time. Clearly, people like the idea of a customized digital magazine even if it’s a fraction of the size. Johnson said that isn’t much of a surprise, as a Zite iPhone app was the most requested feature from users.

One thing you won’t find in both the iPhone and iPad Zite apps is advertising. The company does have plans to integrate advertising, but not until the ad spots are useful/relevant to the user and don’t distract from the overall experience, Johnson said. However, he is optimistic about generating revenue through branded channels, which aggregate news related to the brand’s expertise and help promote its own blog posts. The Zite recently launched its first branded channel partnership with health and fitness retailer Lululemon. The channel is also ad-free and requires opting-in to see its curated content.

Founded in March 2011, the San Francisco-based company was acquired in August by broadcast news organization CNN for over $20 million . Zite faces a growing number of competitors, including Flipboard, Editions by AOL, Yahoo’s unreleased Livestand and recently launched Google Currents.

[iPhone app screenshots via Zite]