Yesterday Apple announced a digital textbook platform. McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw chatted with reporters and explained why the company decided to consider selling digital textbooks for $15.

This Thursday Apple Inc. is expected to make a huge technology education announcement. So far the announcement is believed to be related to digital textbooks, but sources say that Apple will be releasing tools for publishers to create interactive e-books (i.e. a “GarageBand for e-books”).

Digital textbook startup Inkling has raised $17 million in funding to grow their company, which works with textbook publishers to create interactive iPad versions of their books. The funding comes from Tenaya Capital, Jafco Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Pearson Education. Inkling is already working with publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson. [GigaOM]

Inkling is a digital textbook startup company that has raised a multi-million dollar round of funding from McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Sequoia Capital, Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures. Inkling had previously raised an undisclosed Series A round of funding in August 2010. Inkling’s technology has the ability to deliver interactive textbooks. Users can collaborate, add multimedia, and chat with each other within the specific content. Some of the dynamic content included in Inkling’s technology is 3D objects, videos, quizzes, etc. [TechCrunch]

Bloomberg LP has won the acquisition bid for BusinessWeek. Bloomberg is the the financial company built by current New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The terms of the deal are not known, but it is rumored to be worth about $2-$5 million in cash and Bloomberg will be responsible for the liabilities of the news print company. These liabilities may include severance payments.

BusinessWeek employs about 400 people and several of these jobs will be cut. The parent company of BusinessWeek is McGraw-Hill. The news print business as a whole has been suffering as many readers have been turning to the Internet for real-time news. As part of the deal BusinessWeek editor-in-chief Steve Adler announced that benefits will be given to employees for about one year after the deal closes.

“The reporting and analytical resources of Bloomberg and BusinessWeek are unparalleled in their ability to deliver timely, distinctive and credible content to an influential and highly sought-after audience,” stated Bloomberg LP Chairman Peter Grauer. BusinessWeek is Bloomberg’s first major acquisition ever.

Apparently SAP, Goldman Sachs, Bessemer Venture Partners, and McGraw Hill believe that relationships DO matter.  Or at least back in June they did.  The four companies invested $22.7 million on top of the $53 million LinkedIn received this past June.  The total $75.7 million Series D investment is based on a $1 billion valuation.   

To date, LinkedIn has raised over $100 million for their professional social network service.  LinkedIn has about 370 employees and their revenues are growing 100% per year.  LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye informed TechCrunch that the company has been profitable since 2006.  

LinkedIn has about 30 million registered users.  LinkedIn receives over 4 million uniques per month.  The previous investors of the $53 million were Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.

BusinessWeek.com, subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (NYSE:MHP) and the online version of the magazine publication announced that they are launching topic pages. 

“With advertising revenue sliding, publications try a lot of things online to get noticed, like — pardon the jargon — verticals, aggregation, user-generated content, popularity rankings and even something resembling social networks,” stated Richard Pérez-Peña of The New York Times.  Richard was referring to BusinessWeek.  The ironic part of this quote is that The New York Times also recently created a social network around their publication.

BusinessWeek is launching a new service called Business Exchange.  BusinessWeek has been quietly working on the new social system over the last 2 years.  Business Exchange will launch in late September.  There will be hundreds of topic pages that has a wide range of subjects.  The topics will link to other blog posts and news articles. 

“As journalists, we’re good at finding great sources of information and distinguishing what’s important, but we also want to harness the very significant capabilities of our community,” stated Stephen J. Adler, a chief editor at BusinessWeek. “It only takes a very small percentage of people being active in a topic for it to be really vibrant and valuable for everybody else.”

Each user on BusinessWeek will have profile pages.  Users can upload photos, add descriptions of themselves, and track what other users are reading and posting.  Information can be imported from LinkedIn as well.  BusinessWeek has about 900,000 print subscribers. 

Related Links:
1. paidContent