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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
A few weeks ago I was meeting with Peter Thiel and that pesky question of whether we’re in a bubble or not came up. In a debate both sides are getting bored with, Thiel made a point I hadn’t heard: That LinkedIn’s IPO wasn’t some Netscape moment that opened the markets up for everyone else. In fact, he argued, it was the opposite.
LinkedIn showed that you can have a compelling IPO and get an insanely high P/E if you’re a 10-year-old, profitable company, growing revenues at more than 100% a year that can command a $5 billion-plus valuation. That, he argued, is what the market wants right now, and those companies are in short supply.
In our final segment with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner I asked him his view on what his company just did for Silicon Valley: Open the markets or close them for all but the big five or so private giants? → Read More
We caught up with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner yesterday, just after his first earnings call as a public company CEO. In an earlier segment we talked about the surprisingly good quarter LinkedIn had; in this one we talk about the company’s insane roller-coaster of an IPO.
I asked Weiner what that week was like for LinkedIn, a company that’s usually the boring social media giant with no pedophile scandals, privacy uproars or stories of meth pipes and abandoned cats. He insists the team wasn’t distracted amid the media frenzy….yeah, I have a hard time buying that too. But he points out that the added pride associated with working at a company worth upwards of $9 billion increased the intensity to execute. I wouldn’t be surprised if all that talk of the company being overvalued lit a spark in the company too.
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LinkedIn posted its first earnings as a public company yesterday and in true form as a social network, the company used a number of social media outlets to disseminate this information. LinkedIn posted earnings slides on a SlideShare Pro Channel at the close of the bell yesterday, which made it much easier for bloggers and others to then embed and share these slides on their sites (we did).
LinkedIn also partnered with StockTwits for the live-tweeting of the company’s earnings. StockTwits’ LinkedIn ticker page includes this stream of information as well as the earnings presentation. → Read More
Wall Street was not in a happy mood yesterday. Thankfully for LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, the company made its debut on the quarterly conference call with surprisingly good earnings– particularly profits no one was expecting and significant jumps in user growth.
We spent some time with Weiner at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View yesterday to talk about a lot of things: The quarter, that valuation, whether LinkedIn has opened the market or proven you have to be a $5 billion-$10 billion whopper of a company to get out and sustain a good price, and the debate over whether people still want everything relating to their professional life siloed on one social network, or mixed in to Facebook and Twitter. → Read More
