Skift, the travel industry-focused site that was launched in July 2012 by PaidContent founder Rafat Ali and Jason Clampet (who previously ran content and editorial partnerships at Frommers.com), is announcing today that it has raised $1.1 million in additional seed funding.

The new funding was led by Lerer Ventures, with participation from various funds and angel investors (skip to the end of this post for the full list). It brings the total amount that Skift has raised to $1.5 million.

Skift says that it will have more than half a million unique users this month, and that 25 percent of its traffic comes from mobile. It also says its readers are likely to be “executives and managers from leading brands” in travel and related industries, such as Expedia, Priceline, JetBlue, Starwood and others.

If there was any question as to Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s resolve to re-imagine higher education in a more affordable, accessible virtual classroom — or their ability to actually make any real headway among the Ivory Towers of academia — we should probably just go ahead and put that to bed. This morning, Udacity continues to push forward with its plans to bring higher education online — and not just in bits, pieces and homework assignments. Following 2U’s lead, which set the ball rolling by pioneering the approach of partnering with graduate programs to go beyond asynchronous video learning to create custom, accredited full-service web and mobile-compatible graduate degree programs.

To date, 2U has worked with graduate programs in nursing, education, law, business and international, and today, Udacity took the next step — in what could mark an important moment for STEM education — announcing that it has partnered with Georgia Tech to jointly offer an accredited master’s degree in computer science, completely online. Not only that, but thanks to support from AT&T, the program will be offered for less than $7,000. So, really, this could be not just an important moment for STEM, but for MOOCs and online education as a whole.

The other point of note here is that Georgia Tech ain’t no safety school. According to U.S. News’ rankings of the best engineering schools in the U.S., Georgia Tech is tied for fifth place with Carnegie Mellon. So, it looks like Coursera and EdX aren’t the only ones providing online educational experiences with content from elite universities.

As online advertising transitions from desktop to mobile — research firm Gartner predicts that the global mobile ad market will grow 400% by 2016 to be worth $24.5 billion — it stands that startups operating in the wider mobile ad ecosystem are well-placed to benefit. To that end, click-to-call startup Freespee is announcing a neat tie-in today with Nasdaq OMX, Stockholm-listed Tradedoubler that will see the performance marketing network offer advertisers clickable phone numbers and, crucially, call tracking analytics in their mobile (and desktop) display ads.

It builds on Freespee’s proposition that if an ad can offer a painless way to initiate a phone call, those that take up that offer are likely to convert, and that for many types of businesses, especially local ones, a sale invariably takes place via a phone call no matter from where or how the lead is generated. Therefore it makes sense to not only build technology that makes that user-journey — online ad to phone call — as frictionless as possible, but also trackable. Otherwise it’s very difficult to know where to put your ad dollars. Furthermore, mobile ads are the perfect candidate for click-to-call, lest we forget that smartphones make calls, too.

Freespee says that Tradedoubler, which claims 140,000 website publishers and 2,000 advertisers use its performance marketing network, is utilising its platform and API to offer click-to-call and analytics. “The beauty of Freespee is we don’t have to reinvent the wheel – we can add clickable, trackable phone numbers to our desktop and mobile ad formats with just a couple of lines of code,” says Rob Wilson, CEO of Tradedoubler.

Flowboard is trying create the best tools for “interactive storytelling” on a tablet. And the best way to illustrate those tools is through a demo, so founder and CEO Brent Brookler stopped by the TechCrunch office today to show us the app.

First, Brookler showed us the beginning of creating a presentation. He chose a template, imported media, and was able to directly manipulate that media using the touchscreen. Then he showed us a finished presentation (it was kind of a like cooking show, where you skip all the boring stuff in the middle). The presentations look great on the iPad and, by allowing users to zoom in on specific images or topics, Flowboard enables the creation of presentations that “go deeper.”

The easiest way to understand what Flowboard is doing is to think of it as presentation-building software for tablets, but Brookler said he’s not trying to compete with PowerPoint.

If you can’t program, the future’s looking bleaker and bleaker. And if you can, learning to manage other code monkeys could get you promoted. Office-as-a-service provider RocketSpace’s new RocketU is a tech professional education program aimed to aid engineers no matter where they are in their career. RocketU offers rookies and programming veterans alike a way to get an edge in the job market.

There’s been a bit of a hubbub lately that there is actually no shortage of tech talent in America. “For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job. In computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year; of the computer science graduates not entering the IT workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable.”

Yes, the United States is graduating a ton of engineers. But startups and tech giants don’t want just any engineers, they want 10X code masters and visionary innovators. That can take more than a degree from a well-known university, and a lot more than some random Codecademy tutorials. It can take hardcore training in the latest programming languages, and understanding of how to cobble code together into great products.

Rushmore.fm, a new London-based startup founded by Fictive Kin and Betaworks, is de-cloaking somewhat today with what sounds like the rather lofty but noble mission to fix the music industry. Described as a “music ecosystem”, the (currently) invite-only site initially consists of a Wikipedia-like music resource where you’re encouraged to contribute and follow content, although the site’s broader aim is to connect music fans “directly and effortlessly with the artists and labels they love”, and in doing so make it easier to make a living from music.

In fact, it’s what Rushmore sees as a disconnect between fans and artists that it’s trying to solve. Bring these two groups closer together and the company thinks there’s money to be made, which in turn can be reinvested in music. Of course, if it’s successful, that’s also how the startup plans to generate revenue via related services. “We need to get these folks connected with the fans that love them, and subsequently enable some sweet, sweet commerce,” reads the site’s mission statement.

With that in mind, along with its public (partial) unveiling, Rushmore is announcing the appointment of Alex Hunter, the former Global Head of Online for Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, as its CEO. While it may seem odd to hire an “outside” CEO so early, it’s a reflection of the incubation model that New York-based Betaworks, Rushmore’s backer, is employing. It’s teamed up with neighbouring design collective Fictive Kin who are charged with researching and coming up with a startup’s concept, before handing it over to take forward and scale — a methodology we’ve compared to the studio model employed by Hollywood.

With a new iPhone app called Limelight, Oliver Cameron (best-known as the co-founder of private social network Everyme) aims to answer the question, “What am I going to watch tonight?”

The app’s basic functionality is pretty straightforward. You can create lists of movies that you’ve watched (rating them between 0 and 5 stars) and that you want to watch. You can also browse lists of highly rated or popular movies in the app, as well as lists created by other users. (You can follow those users, too.) The ultimate goal, Cameron said, is to help users “organize your movie library” (library might not exactly be the right word for it, since it’s not necessarily a list of movies that you own — but I think it conveys the basic idea) and find new titles to watch.

A lot of this functionality is already available in other services. Netflix is famous for its algorithmically driven movie recommendations, and another one of my mainstays, IMDb, also has user ratings and a “watchlist” feature. But in those cases, those features are mixed in with a larger service, whereas Limelight has pared things down and is all about ratings and recommendations.

Parents of preschoolers can finally let go of “iPad guilt” – the term that refers to that terrible feeling you get when you use the iPad as babysitter. Today, a company called Kidaptive is launching one of the most comprehensive feedback systems for parents to date, allowing them to get a hand of their child’s learning and development by simply handing over the iPad and letting their child play.

It’s a shame that despite the wide variety of educational apps out there, too many parents still treat the iPad as a toy, letting kids rot their minds with time-wasting games and goofs, instead of using screen time to learn. But as any kid will tell you, learning is just sooooo boring. That’s why Kidaptive has so much promise – it merges the lean-back experience of watching TV with mini games kids actually think are fun.

The company first launched its “edu-tainment” iPad application called “Leo’s Pad” back in fall 2012. The app was designed by a team that includes CEO P.J. Gunsagar, who also co-founded and served as president of Prana Studios, a 3D visual effects studio with 1,000 employees in L.A. and Mumbai, India; “Chief Learning Officer” Dylan Arena, whose background is in cognitive science, philosophy and statistics, with multiple degrees in all three from Stanford; and Creative Director Dan Danko, who has written for a number of children’s TV shows including “Rugrats,” “Fresh Beat Band,” and PBS’ “Word World.”

A handwritten note is becoming a lost art in the age of email, Facebook, SMS, and more messaging apps than you can count. But if anything, that rarity has only led to increase its value and perceived thoughtfulness, even as our penmanship skills decline. Today, a startup called Postable is bringing back the “handwritten” note with a service that allows you to type in handwriting fonts, then print to high-quality card stock.

Postable got its start back in 2011, when co-founders and lifelong friends Scott Potash and Jesse Blockton grew tired of all the thank you notes they had to painstakingly handwrite. However, instead of immediately launching a service that took thank you card creation to the web, they first decided to target one of the bigger hurdles with building such a service: the fact that people don’t have each others’ mailing addresses anymore.

In March 2012, the team launched a free, online address book service. “The easiest way we thought to get people’s addresses would be to ask them to give them to you,” explains Blockton. “It’s just a simple, friendly crowdsourced address book.”