Video conferencing startup Blue Jeans Network is all about making video conferencing easier and more accessible for companies, with a cloud-based way to connect video conferences between existing infrastructure and even consumer-facing apps like Skype. Today it’s giving its users one more way to connect — with LinkedIn.
By integrating with LinkedIn, Blue Jeans will allow users to use their social network credentials to sign in. Once they’ve connected, other users they are video conferencing with will be able to see their headshot, bio, and other information stored on LinkedIn, as it will be automatically uploaded to their Blue Jeans profile. That will give members the ability to learn more about people on the call, without having to click through to other sites. They’ll also be able to send each other messages offline through LinkedIn during and after the conference.
For Blue Jeans, the LinkedIn integration will offer up more ways to connect, particularly for those in the HR and recruiting field. One advantage Blue Jeans has over other conferencing solutions is that users don’t have to “buddy up” to take calls with one another. Recruiters can create temporal meetings, without having to worry about being contacted on Skype by interested applicants who aren’t quite right for a particular job. LinkedIn has more than 175 million members across 200 countries, so it offers a pretty large user base who can take advantage of the feature.
The integration follows on previous work that Blue Jeans had done to allow users to connect with their Facebook credentials. It also announced in September an integration with Salesforce.com that will allow users to make calls from directly within the Salesforce app.
Blue Jeans has raised about $50 million since being founded in 2009. That includes a $25 million round of financing from NEA, Accel, and Norwest Venture Partners that it raised earlier this summer. The company is on pace to enable 25-35 million minutes of video in a year, which Stu Aaron, chief commercial officer of the startup, estimates is about 10 percent of the enterprise video conferencing market.