Social reader Flipboard today releases a new update to its mobile app which takes it beyond articles and into the sounds of audio. The updated app features a new audio section that lets its users listen to audio whilst flipping through their favorite content and even using other apps.

Flipboard is the first app of its kind to truly integrate an audio experience beyond merely YouTube videos, and in-article audio interviews.

All audio is included in a new audio category that can found via the top right corner of Flipboard’s interface. The section is searchable but comes with recommended SoundCloud users, as well as popular shows from NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International).

Founder and CEO Mike McCue explains the vision:

“With this latest addition, we’re giving our readers a personal soundtrack to their Flipboard.”

SoundCloud, with its 15 million users, has scored a big win here with deep integration into the new category. Members of Soundcloud can access all the users they follow, as well as lists they’ve created. They can also listen to, comment on and like sounds from within the app. The good news is that you don’t need to be a SoundCloud member to listen to audio from the audio network.

While the audio you’ve selected plays you can browse Flipboard at your convenience and the next track in the audio category will simply play next. A music note at the bottom left corner of every Flipboard page lets you control the audio irrespective of where you are in the app. And as mentioned earlier, it’s also background enabled so you can still listen while you use other apps.

It’s a marvelous new way to distribute and listen to audio content, one I might just use specifically for podcasts. The user experience is unquestionably superior to iTunes’.

And how long before we see Flipboard dive into video? It’s somewhat surprising it hasn’t decided to explore the video space first. The social magazine already includes a video category but is limited in sources and isn’t ideal for video browsing. With no clear winner in the video magazine space (see ShowYou and TNW Startup Rally winner Shelby.tv), Flipboard can still make it its own.

This Flipboard update is available for all versions of its app now. And be sure to have a search for The Next Web’s daily news podcast, Daily Dose, to catch up on all the day’s tech news headlines.

Today also marks the release of a completely localized version of Flipboard for Japanese users – more on this new release here.

According to the BBC, Flipboard has been downloaded 8 million downloads and a user spends, on average, 90 minutes a month on the service. Impressive for what is essentially a publication . The company is based in Palo Alto and is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer, Index Ventures and Insight Venture Partners.

Not a month ago, Boris and I were discussing the absurd prices Adobe charges for its products. How could this supposedly innovative technology company be so behind the times? We were genuinely considering launching a campaign against Adobe (an advertiser on our site no less) in the hope that with enough support, Adobe would consider reducing its prices, or indeed providing a reasonable subscription for them.

Just moments ago I received an email from Adobe to inform me of the official arrival of its new subscription service, it’s called Creative Cloud and I’ve already paid for it. And to think I almost went ahead and ignored the email.

Adobe has been listening all along and taken a huge but necessary gamble; it has completely revamped its pricing system.

You can now get ALL of Adobe’s core products and more for $49.99 a month and upgrades are included – no need to ever purchase or pay extra to upgrade any individual product.

Yes we covered its announcement and yes, we knew its pricing, but to see it launch – particularly after years of pirated versions and paying through the nose – is glorious. Yes, glorious.

Comparison

Let’s take a quick look at the comparison below. For virtually every new product in Adobe’s Creative Suite 6, plus limited access to cloud storage, device sync, Business Catalyst (Adobe’s hosting service), Typekit (Adobe’s recently acquired font hosting service) and Story Plus (Adobe’s Screenplay Software) you’re paying $49.99/month. Yes, that’s $600/year you’re obliged to pay but remember that includes all future upgrades of each product.

If you were to purchase all of the products included, you’re looking at $2,599 for Adobe’s Master Collection or or $7000+ if you were to attempt to purchase a selection of the apps available individually [amended for clarity] .

That figure also excludes subscriptions services such as Adobe Muse (which enables designers to create HTML 5-based websites without writing code) and Typekit. What’s more, Adobe Lightroom is also soon to be thrown into the mix. For design and creative professionals it should be a no brainer.

It’s also worth noting that if you’re a student or licensee of Creative Suite 3, 4 or 5, or one of the individual apps, you’ll pay $29.99/month, that’s a very reasonable $359.88 for the first year. One caveat however, this offer is only available to customers who licensed the product direct from Adobe.

Now it’s not all butterflies and roses. In Europe you have to pay 61,49€, which is almost 80$ a month, roughly 960$ for the year. Still cheaper than what it would cost to purchase but more expensive than the US. It’s also not available worldwide yet which will frustrate many.

Will The Gamble Pay Off?

Adobe’s main competitor in this space isn’t competing products interestingly enough; it’s Bit Torrent. Will $50/month convince the masses that are still pirating the software to go legit? My money’s on yes. A subscription works out to less than $2 a day. That’s less than the cost of a cheap sandwich. And with it you receive full, legal, supported access to all Adobe products with update requests that don’t make you sweat.

So…will you pay?

➤ Adobe Creative Cloud

My favorite take away…”you will never be successful until I don’t have to give you a dime to do what you do.”

Also if you haven’t watched Will Smith’s secrets to success, you should.

We’re a company of Asana users. While not perfect, it’s about as close as we’ve come to finding a fast, versatile, real time project management tool that works for our team across the board – from our managing editors, through to our developers and designers.

Last week I was offered the opportunity to have a sit down with the Asana team to discuss a significant upcoming announcement. It wasn’t minutes into the meeting when it became clear that this company, in all likelihood, was going to become a serious player in the enterprise and small business project management space.

Asana already has a roster of the Valley’s hottest companies using it (Linkedin, Twitter, Foursquare, Airbnb) and no doubt, in time, many more. Even more impressive is that 75 percent of the people who adopt Asana are retained. That’s an impressive stat.

While the app itself doesn’t have the beauty of a Basecamp or Flow, it’s when you begin creating workspaces, projects and tasks, you begin to recognise the elegance and beauty in its functionality – the little details. Details like including tasks in multiple projects, drag and drop reordering everywhere (I still can’t believe how many apps decide not to include this), real time discussions, smart collaboration options and more.

Today’s Announcements

Remarkably Asana has managed to grow with a few severe limitations, the most notable in our case: project-level permissions. Being able to share projects only with specific people. Prior to today, you would have had to choose between making a project completely private or making a project (and all its tasks) accessible to everyone in your company. This meant our ‘design team’ would have to be privy to everything our ‘ editorial team’ were working on, and vice versa. Frustrating.

Today that changes and is in actual fact, part of a far more significant milestone in Asana’s life, it’s going to start making money.

Until today, companies were limited to a maximum of 30 people in a workspace.  Now, Asana is available to teams larger than 30 through Premium Workspaces and any team can upgrade their existing Workspace to a Premium Workspace, which offers:

• More Workspace members – upgrade to a higher tier of members, starting at just $300/month for up to 50 teammates. Tiers of 75, 100, or more members are also available.
• Project-level Permissions – share private Projects with a small group within your Workspace, so exactly the right people see the Projects they should see.
• Priority Support – questions and issues from customers in Premium Workspaces go to the front of the line for response from our outstanding support team.

If you’re part of team smaller than 30, you can keep using Asana for free, however, you’ll be missing out on project-level permissions and priority support. Thankfully you can still upgrade for the cheaper price of $100; not peanuts considering there are hundreds of other project management app alternatives out there, but not ridiculously expensive once you consider the value Asana adds.

Still some way to go

While it’s great to see Asana growing up and features such as unlimited users, project-level permissions and priority support are nice. My gut tells me it’s going to take more premium features before the masses come knocking the same way they have for other premium project management tools. Asana’s most obvious downfall is something that the team is acutely aware of, mobile. While it has a decent mobile interface which works perfectly well for browsing tasks and adding one occasionally, as a tool for someone on the go – it leaves a lot to be desired. Thankfully, Asana are working towards solutions as you read this.

Other drawbacks such as not being able to pull up a single list of tasks across Workspaces. For many, this might be a deal breaker.

It’s also worth noting that Asana is task focused, and unlike tools such as Convo and Yammer, it’s less about tasks around discussion, but rather discussion around tasks. We use both Convo and Asana for different things, Convo as a newsroom/forum and Asana for task management. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to.

It’s important to note that every bit of feedback raised at the meeting, including those mentioned above, were met with positive responses. Either: “we’re already working on that” or “that’s something we should definitely consider.” With companies with as much experience, visibility and traction as Asana, that isn’t always the way.

What’s more, the company also releases features and improvements more frequently than any other product I’ve used – most recently its REST API – many more you can read about on their new features blog. For a user, I don’t think there’s a more obvious sign of a determined team than that.

Background

Asana was founded in 2008, raised $9 million in funding, and launched publicly 6 months ago to about as much fanfare as you’re likely to see for a project management startup.

While it undoubtedly deserves the recognition it’s received for the quality of product it’s built, being co-founded by Dustin Moskovitz (co-founder of Facebook) and Justin Rosenstein (ex-Google and Facebook); and funded by some of tech’s most prominent investors, including Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and Ron Conway, is bound to have helped in getting the word out there.

Interestingly enough, the product started off as a side project of Moskovitz’s at Facebook. He eventually ended up focusing exclusively on it and building an internal team to continue the development of the product. Facebook still use the original tool Moskovitz built internally.

Massive Health, a start-up with huge ambitions to revolutionize health care, has made some significant internal changes.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Sutha Kamal, has left the company and will be succeeded by co-founder, and user interface expert, Aza Raskin. Raskin’s official job title will be Chief Vision Officer.

Raskin and Kamal say the departure is primarily a result of different and conflicting visions for the company. Raskin, known for his infatuation for ‘design as a feature’, will make this the primary focus for the company’s health focused products going forward.

“We think it’s critically important to have somebody whose core is design leading the company” says Raskin. And with his pedigree (his father was interface expert and Apple Macintosh designer Jef Raskin), Raskin’s previous experience as head of user experience at Mozilla Labs (amongst other founder and design roles), and the fact that Raskin was giving talks on User Experience at age 10(!) -  he’s undeniably qualified.

On a personal note, Raskin is currently the only reason I’m still using Firefox. He led the development of a feature called Tab Candy (now tab groups), surprisingly yet to be ‘stolen’ by competing browsers, although I wish they would.

As for Kamal, in an email he emphasises that he will continue to be an ardent supporter of Massive Health and its team. He refrains from giving away too much about what his next role might be but says “my vision for what’s next in healthcare – and the value of design – hasn’t changed, and I’m intensely excited about what I’m working on next. ;)”

Design as a Feature

Massive Health aims to help solve health care through data analysis, and the importance of design in doing so is not to be sniffed at. Raskin elaborates:

“There’s this wonderful paper called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data (PDF) and it shows that for every increase in order of magnitude of data you have, it beats all improvements in algorithms. For me this means to get data, you have to get people to use you…so design is the necessary prerequisite to the data that you want.”

And with the success of its first mobile app, The Eatery (App Store URL), which is a smart and simple way of keeping track of your daily eating habits, the findings and conclusions to help benefit the world’s health are already being presented.

New Recruit

Kamal’s departure isn’t the only significant change the in the company. Massive Health also welcomes on board Michael Margolis, previously at Apple working on the user interface of AppleTV, to focus on development of the company’s iOS apps.

Background and Future

Seed funded to the tune of $2.25 million by some of technology’s most prestigious investors (Greylock, Andreesen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures & MDV) the expectations for Massive Health are huge.

With funding in place, Raskin and his team have time to make big things happen. Massive Health’s plan is to launch a number of products and experiments for the consumer over the next year or so, but it maintains a firm long term goal of eventually using the data collected to help hospitals and clinics fix the notoriously messy American healthcare system. The method is similar to how Dropbox has managed to infiltrate the enterprise by making it a priceless tool for the customer first, eventually forcing businesses to buckle and use it because of its sheer popularity among staff.

With its management in place, Massive Health is focusing on building design-led products – specifically mobile apps – to transform health. Raskin is keeping schtum on what the follow up to its first app The Eatery will be but helping in the areas of sleep, exercise and stress are to be expected. In the mean time, developers interested in joining its revolution should consider taking a peek at its jobs page for opportunities; and if you haven’t downloaded The Eatery (our review) yet, do so, it might just change your life.

We’re looking for a full time (maybe PT if necessary) San-Francisco based tech writer.

You need to be incredibly passionate about technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship and Internet culture. You’ll be keen to immerse yourself in the SF technology scene – or indeed already be part of it. You’ll enjoy chasing up stories and the people behind them for interviews/comment. You’ll love people, events and developing relationships. You’ll be keen to learn the background to a story, thrive on the details and above all, be passionate about being first to a story.

You should be keen to make a name for yourself within the tech circle but more importantly, interested in being part of the Internet’s fastest growing technology blog and its team of global writers.

Conditions:
Unwavering passion for technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship
A hunger for breaking news.
Fast, confident writer.
Natural attention to detail
Natural drive to get to a news story first, and the story behind the story.

Responsibilities:
Watching out and reporting breaking news stories, anywhere on the planet – but especially within SF.
Reviewing start-ups from across the planet – but particularly within SF
Writing thoughtful discussion posts about the International technology scene; the companies involved, influencers and everything in between.
Attending events and conferences.
Interviewing influencers and companies involved in the headline.

Salary: Millions!
Apply: Click here to apply

Image Credit / Franco Folini

If there’s one thing Google clearly does better than its competing tech giants, it’s April Fools. We were honestly having difficulty writing up pieces on each of Google’s announcements as they flew in so to simplify things, for you (and us!), here’s a round up of all of them:

Google’s first prank we reported on earlier: Google Maps in 8-bit, especially designed for the ever-popular Nintendo.

Secondly, there’s Google Really Advanced Search, which goes beyond anything mere Advanced Search can do, bringing options like “rhyming slang for” and the “this exact word or phrase, whose sum of unicode code points is a mersenne prime.” How we lived without the latter for this long I have no idea. Really Advanced Search even lets you filter by “embarrassing grammatical faux pas” and font.

Next up, Chrome Multitask Mode, which lets you browse the web with multiple cursors at the same time! Genius. Now you can get more done faster in what Google is calling the “ambinavigation” revolution. Part of me thinks I could actually do this :)

Fourth, tying into its very real self-driving car project, Google Co-founder Sergey Brin himself announces Google’s partnership with Nascar to answer the question of “what if you built a self-driving car capable of navigating a track at speeds upwards of 200mph while surrounded by other cars?”
Its answer? Google Racing.

Brin does a brilliant job of convincing you this is legit, even starring in the video below. All jokes aside, if anyone can pull this off, it’s Brin and Page. Have a read of Brin’s announcement of the ‘partnership’ here.

Fifth, a lesser known option, Google now lets you change the weather! I could use this here in San Francisco, miserable.

Sixth, Gmail Tap, taking the standard QWERTY keyboard from 26 keys to just two(!) and utilizing the retired-but-not-forgotten communication method of Morse Code. With Gmail Tap it’s now possible to type without looking and with an option for two sets of buttons you can even type two emails at once! Here’s how it works (featuring a LL Cool J cameo):

Seventh, Click-To-Teleport, a Chrome extension that allows potential customers to instantly teleport to a business location directly from a search ad. One day, one day…

Eighth. To add to its already extensive street view coverage in Australia, Google will be strapping 360-degree head-on cameras to more than a thousand Kangaroos to reveal what its cars can’t. The project is called Google Street Roo and you can read the full announcement here.

Ninth. You can now have all of YouTube delivered straight to your door (or as a gift to for friends and family) with The YouTube Collection. Delivered in convenient giant packages, organised and divided into categories, you can now get all of your favorite YouTube videos offline on DVD.

Tenth. Solving the increasingly frustrating problem of accessing mobile internet on rotary phones across the US, Google is announcing GoRo. GoRo aims to fix the problem that 100% of people using rotary phones have, accessing a website. My grandparents will find this particularly useful. Click here to find a Rotary Site developer. Expect big monetization opportunities here developers.

Eleventh is Google Fiber (bar). Yep, we’ve all been wrong, Google isn’t working on Fiber optic ultra-fast Internet but rather Fiber Bars, yes dietary fiber. Google’s bars come with 100 times more fiber than any source of fiber available today. Impressive but a sad day for Kansas.

Twelfth, Google Voice for Pets! Thanks to Google’s own “special Voice Communication Collars” you can now record audio directly from your dog or cat’s vocal cords. What’s more, a tiny micro-LED emitter built into the collar projects a keyboard onto the floor, so your pet can tap their front paws to send text messages. A little far fetched but there’ll be a few numbskulls out there who fall for this one.

Thirteenth, Jargon-Bot for Google Apps. This little beauty turns all that business jargon at the workplace into coherent no-BS understandable English. This is how it works, with a few fine examples:

Fourteenth: Google is clearly keeping them coming with its latest prank – interplanetary reporting on Google Analytics. The new feature takes Analytics far beyond just your run of the mill Earth-bound visitors. Want to find out about visitors coming from neighbouring stars and planets – with Google Analytics, now you can!

Fifteenth belongs to Google’s HR department who reveals details of its Canine hiring process. Believe it or not (hopefully not), Google has a rigorous hiring process for anyone wishing to bring their dogs into work. So rigorous that in that in many respects, it equals the processes involved in getting a human job at Google. You can view some candid shots from the interview process for one dog here. “Bloodhounds are a natural fit for Search, while Rottweilers are often drawn to our corporate security positions.” Lol.

Sixteenth is a cracker. When you search for Taylor Swift in Google Play on Android, guess who it reveals?

Keep ‘em coming Google. I’ve got all night.

Catch up with today’s latest Google news at TNW Google.

There are people in the industry who I have personally respected from afar. Quite often the possibility of them becoming colleagues has always seemed so unlikely because of their stature, existing role and experience, you simply don’t consider it. One of those people is BBC reporter Jamillah Knowles.

After contacting her on numerous occasions, quite often just to find out if she knew anyone who might be interested in joining us, she one day, not so long ago, said that she might be. Leaving a behemoth like the BBC for a ‘small’ organisation like ours is a bold move, but I hope you’ll agree, a wise one. After a few short meetings Jamillah signed on the dotted line. :)

See, Jamillah has been with the BBC for over ten years, a journalist for 17. During that time she’s managed and monitored the development of news in a social arena, staying closely atune to the impact technology has had on news reporting and delivery. In short, she ‘gets it’ in ways many seasoned journalists don’t.

She’s a veteran in her own right, previously reporting for BBC News, Radio 5Live and the BBC World Service on her show Outriders dedicated to exploring the frontiers of the web. (More on that shortly.)

It’s also worth noting, we pride ourselves on the global team we have in place at The Next Web. It adds to our character, mindset and knowledge, whilst ensuring wherever you, our readers, are, we have someone close by who can understand the news that’s important to you. Thanks to Jamillah’s work at the BBC, arguably one of world’s most global news organisations, and her voluntary work as a Global Voices Editor; she’s going to fit right in and shine.

Above all else, Jamillah is incredibly passionate about the web and technology. So much so that she’s currently pursuing a BSC in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in her private time. Ambitious lady.

Please give a warm welcome to Jamillah Knowles, The Next Web’s new UK Editor. 

Succeeding previous UK Editor Paul Sawers, who moves on to become our Apps & Media Editor, Jamillah will dive into the UK’s technology and entrepreneurship space giving startups coverage that they deserve, profiling entrepreneurs, dissecting business models and delivering scoops & analysis on what’s hot. The UK technology space is flourishing and as our second biggest readership base, it needs someone with the drive, passion and connections to unravel and reveal what you, our readers, want to read about.

If you’re a UK startup, entrepreneur, investor or simply a technology enthusiast, drop Jamillah an email at jamillah@thenextweb.com, or follow her on Twitter.

Image Credit / Christian Payne

Three months after the acquisition of Gowalla by Facebook, the company has officially closed it doors. The screenshot below can be found on the location startup turned travel guide‘s homepage.

The termination is a timely one. The company was headquartered in Texas, home to SXSW, which is being held this week. The event is synonymous with the launch and promotion of location based startups including Foursquare, Gowalla’s slightly uglier big brother and now the location space’s clear winner. If there’s money to be made in the check-in space, the ball is well and truly in Foursquare’s court.

Gowalla launched in 2009 and raised approximately $10 million in funding from Greylock Partners and angel investors Chris Sacca, Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis, amongst others. Facebook’s acquisition price hasn’t been disclosed but is rumored to be primarily Facebook stock and not an entirely satisfactory return for early investors. Calacanis penned a post claiming “the actual result of the small amount of money I invested in Gowalla is that I’m getting back less in the form of Facebook shares.”

If you forgot to delete your account prior to the acquisition, fear not, the Facebook acquisition did not include all of the data the company has collected on your whereabouts over the years. Facebook has enough of that already.

Image Credit / Pro Cycle Works

This was his reply: