OK, this is cool. A new networking utility called Hachi is taking some of the best functionality offered by LinkedIn (searching by name, company, title, etc. and seeing how you’re connected to other users), and is merging that with your social graphs from other services like Facebook, and soon Google contacts, Twitter and even your Outlook address book. That way, you can see who you know where – meaning, the actual path of connections between you and another person – even if you’re not connected on LinkedIn.
Um, totally bookmarking this. → Read More
Although the iPad has been available for more than two years, LinkedIn has yet to offer its users a native app despite the fact that mobile engagement has been growing at a fast pace for the network. But last August, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said that the company is doubling down on its mobile strategy. And the network then debuted new versions of its iPhone and Android apps as well as an HTML5 mobile site. In fact, LinkedIn now says 22 percent of its active members have been visiting on mobile devices. And today, LinkedIn is finally launching its native iPad app to the public.
As LinkedIn’s head of mobile products Joff Redfern explains, the app was built with the user and tablet interface in mind. Since the iPad has become a leanback experience, LinkedIn wanted to make sure that the app satisfied iPad users’ needs. Via the web, LinkedIn noticed that iPad users were visiting the site mostly in early in the morning, which they call a “coffee session,” and in the evening, between 7 pm and 11 pm. With this data, the company wanted to build an application that allowed professionals to start the day and end the day with LinkedIn. → Read More
As you may remember, professional social network LinkedIn added a follow button for companies, which allowed users to follow a company on the network, and receive real-time alerts from its profile in their news and activity stream. LinkedIn is taking this a step further today with the launch of an embeddable button that companies can add to their websites.
Now, LinkedIn users will see ‘follow Company’ buttons on company sites, as well as on LinkedIn itself. Similar to Facebook’s Like button, as long as you are logged into LinkedIn, you can follow a company automatically by clicking the button. If you are not logged on, a box will appear asking for your LinkedIn credentials.
→ Read More
Bullhorn, which develops a recruitment software and applicant tracking system, is releasing a new Social Recruiting Activity Report, which examines the usage of social media in executive and job recruiting. Bullhorn found that LinkedIn leads among the frequency of usage by recruiters and their effectiveness for sourcing candidates, followed by Twitter, with Facebook coming in third.
It’s important to note that this study examines activity by recruiters as opposed to actual job hunters. Despite the rise of Facebook as a source for job seeking and professional networking, Bullhorn’s data shows that recruiters’ LinkedIn networks still drive more views than their Twitter and Facebook networks combined. Recruiters who post jobs on social networks are likely to receive more applications from LinkedIn, with the social network driving almost nine times more applications than Facebook and three times more than Twitter. → Read More
Professional social network LinkedIn just reported stronger than expected fourth quarter 2011 earnings today. Earnings came in at $0.12 per share. Revenue for the fourth quarter was $167.7 million, an increase of 105% compared to $81.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Net income for the fourth quarter was $6.9 million, compared to net income of $5.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Analysts expected the company to earn $0.07 per share on revenues of $159.72 million.
“Q4 once again exceeded our expectations for member engagement and business growth. It was a fitting end to a memorable year in which we reinforced our position as the pre-eminent professional network on the web,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. “We believe continued focus on our members and technology infrastructure positions us well for accelerated product innovation in 2012.” → Read More
When it comes to networking, there is no shortage of ways to connect with other professionals to talk shop. LinkedIn has become the most popular professional networking platform, with over 100 million users using the site to post their work experience, look for jobs, and connect with prospective employers. Facebook, too, has its own professional social network in BranchOut, or you can try startups like Identified or just go for some good old fashioned meetups. → Read More
LinkedIn is planning to shut down its Tweets application as of January 31, 2012. As you may remember, the Tweets application allowed users find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter, view Twitter feeds of connections, recommend Twitter users to follow, and more.
In an announcement, LinkedIn says that the application will be removed from all profiles and the homepage. From the announcement: At LinkedIn, we want to provide a simple and efficient experience for members like you. So from time to time, we take a look at our set of features to evaluate how they’re being used by our members. Part of this process sometimes means we decide to eliminate a feature, so we can better invest those resources in building more great LinkedIn products. → Read More
You have a long flight coming up. You don’t want to get stuck sitting next to (fill in the blank here). What if you could use your social networks to select your seatmate, based on your friends or common interests? Would that make for a better flying experience?
Such a service is going to be launched next year. The developer is not some bootstrapped startup. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, founded in 1919 and now part of Air France KLM, confirms to TechCrunch the feature will launch next year. → Read More
Earlier this year, LinkedIn acquired CardMunch, an iPhone app that lets you take a snapshot of a business card and have it added to your iPhone contacts. Today, LinkedIn is relaunching the CardMunch iPhone app with a brand new mobile experience for the professionals on the social network.
For background, CardMunch uses Mechanical Turk to convert business cards into phone contacts. In fact, millions of business cards have been digitized on CardMunch to date.
→ Read More
In September, two Stanford Business School, grads Brendan Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao, launched the beta build of Identified, a professional job search engine built on Facebook data that looks to take on LinkedIn and BranchOut (among others) in an effort to give job seekers and companies a better way to connect and find talent. The main feature of Identified is its so-called “Identified Score”, which assign a numerical rank (out of 100) to professionals based on their work history, education history and social network.
Wallace and Ajao call these rankings “Google Page Rank for people”; just as the search giant ranks websites based on their relevance to certain search terms, Identified uses its scores to do just that with professionals. The ranking is a proxy for relevance, so based on a user’s most up-to-date background information, they will show up in searches for categories that are relevant to their most recent jobs, etc. → Read More
You could previously connect with contacts from college and grad school on LinkedIn by searching by name or by the educational institution, but LinkedIn is now making this process a much easier, feature rich experience. LinkedIn is debuting a new tool today, called Classmates, which gives the professional social network’s users new insights and networking features to connect with fellow alumni of colleges and universities.
Via Classmates you can choose a network by university (i.e. Columbia University, which is my alma mater), and I can see via graphs where most of my classmates work, what they do (by industry), and where they live. You can also see a list of alumni with whom you share connections, and send them messages from the feature.
→ Read More
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron recently joined social networking sites LinkedIn and Foursquare in an effort to expand his digital presence and better connect with both citizens and businesses alike. On LinkedIn, Cameron will network with “people and businesses the PM meets regarding U.K. business, enterprise and manufacturing,” according to the official blog post from the PM’s office.
Meanwhile, on Foursquare, the PM will check-in to various venues in order to “illustrate the events the Prime Minister participates in during his day-to-day duties beyond Downing Street.” → Read More
Professional social network LinkedIn is on a bit of an acquisition spree. In its second purchase in two weeks, LinkedIn has acquired hosted search startup IndexTank. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
IndexTank is a real-time, hosted search engine service that allows developers to quickly build search-based applications without having to worry about hosting their own search software. IndexTank’s features include: real-time feed indexing, instantaneous availability of search data, geo search, automatic faceting, range search and instant insights about indexed data from search. → Read More
U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a stop with professional social network LinkedIn, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View today to chat about job creation and the economy from LinkedIn members. The meeting will feature questions from a live audience, as well as questions from thousands contributed by LinkedIn members over the past week. For the past year or so, LinkedIn has taken a number of deep data dives on the profile information of its 120 million members to highlight trends. Today, the network has developed an infographic that examines the economic opportunity and growth in industries from LinkedIn’s members over the past two years.
For example, LinkedIn says that there have been 7.4 million job changes or starts of its members since 2009. The top industries for these changes are higher education, healthcare, information technology, and marketing and advertising.
→ Read More
Is LinkedIn ripe for disruption? There have been various attempts in the past, and now New York-based Workfeeds, launched today, is throwing its hat into the ring – and they have a good chance of making LinkedIn at least nervous. (Unlike Branchout or Identified, Workfeeds doesn’t piggyback on Facebook profiles or log-ins, but is a full-fledged, standalone service.)
Workfeeds’ hypothesis is simple. LinkedIn may be the world’s biggest business social network and obviously offers value to people, but users aren’t really into the experience: recruiters (not members) are the key constituency of the site, the UI has become too cluttered over time, and – most importantly – LinkedIn is just a vast collection of user resumes, and not really social or networking-oriented.
Workfeeds, on the other hand, tries to be “like LinkedIn if it launched now” (and not in 2003). Resumes only play a secondary role. → Read More
Web and mobile payments platform Dwolla announced today that it now includes integration with LinkedIn’s API, allowing users to send and receive payments to their connections on LinkedIn’s social network. Previously, Dwolla had integrated with Facebook and Twitter to offer similar functionality. And just last week, Dwolla added Foursquare support, too, allowing Dwolla users to passively check-in to a location when making a purchase.
→ Read More
LinkedIn has taken a number of deep data dives on the profile information of its 120 million members to highlight trends. The company has compared men and women networkers, professional names and more. Today, the company has focused on examining the profiles of entrepreneurs, and sifted through its millions of public profiles, to analyze tens of thousands startup founder profiles on the site.
Here’s how LinkedIn evaluated and separated the data. Linkedin considered professionals as Startup Founders if they identified themselves as founders (or co- founders) of U.S. companies created after 2000, with a LinkedIn company profile, and that currently have between 2 – 200 employees. LinkedIn excluded small law, consulting and real estate firms, as well as LLCs (the pool ended up with over 13,000 entrepreneurs). LinkedIn then compared founders them with the average LinkedIn member and highlighted characteristics that disproportionately appear among startup founders.
→ Read More
comScore’s July traffic numbers are out and similar to June’s findings, Facebook and Twitter both saw record traffic in terms of U.S. unique visitors in the month. In July, Facebook saw a whopping 162 million unique visitors, compared to 160.8 million unique vistors in June, and 157.2 million uniques in May.
Twitter also posted record traffic in its five year history; with 32.8 million unique U.S. visitors in July, up from 30.6 million unique visitors in June, and 27 million unique vistors in May. As we’ve noted in the past, the steady increase in traffic is a big deal for Twitter, which splits traffic between its own mobile clients and the many third-party clients that are used to access the network. And Twitter just completed the switch from the old web interface to its redesigned, feature-rich web app. → Read More
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner explained on the company’s first earnings call a few weeks ago that the company is planning to make a big investment in its mobile strategy. Today, the professional social network is bringing a significant update to its mobile apps, including a new iPhone, Android and mobile web apps.
LinkedIn Mobile is growing 400% year-over-year in terms of users, and LinkedIn says that because of this engagement, the company’s mobile apps needed to be tweaked to reflect a better user experience. The network has re-organized its iPhone and Android applications around 4 areas—Updates, Inbox, your profile, and groups. You could search for and access updates, your inbox, profile and connections from the previous versions of the iPhone and Android app, but the ability to browser and interact with your groups and add connections through LinkedIn’s ‘people you may know’ feature is new. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
