MASHABLE - May 14 - Prostitutes and escorts will have to find another social network to promote themselves. LinkedIn updated its user agreement terms on Monday. A LinkedIn rep confirmed that the wording is new, but noted that LinkedIn has always prohibited users from "unlawful" activities. The reason for the new wording,is that there are some countries in which LinkedIn operates, where prostitution is actually legal.
LinkedIn Is 10 Years Old
THE NEXT WEB - May 5 - LinkedIn has ~225M members and $325M in revenue. LinkedIn was founded by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant on May 5, 2003. Ten years on, LinkedIn has established itself as an international company, with 3,700 employees around the world. When LinkedIn started, the industry was in a “dot-com winter” and it was important to distinguish itself from everyone else. One of the first challenges was just how it could hit a million users. Hoffman admitted that LinkedIn wasn’t trying to work on a business model, at least not until 2005. Two years after launching, LinkedIn had ~1.7M professionals signed up and began unveiling several ways for it to make money. The first involved the launch of LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn also tried its hand at generating revenue through a subscription program. The last one involved advertising right on the site. LinkedIn took eight years before it went public, having filed back in January 2011. It traded its first share as the first social networking site to go public on May 19, 2011 at a price of $45. Now the stock is priced at ~$175. LinkedIn acquired mSpoke, ChoiceVendor, CardMunch, Connected, Rapportive, SlideShare, and Pulse.
LinkedIn Suffers Because Of Mobile Advertising
REUTERS - May 3 - LinkedIn's (225m members) share price fell 10% after disappointing revenue forecasts suggested that a revamped mobile app will not deliver on advertising growth as quickly as anticipated. LinkedIn results for Q1 blew past analysts estimates, marking 8 quarters topping Wall Street targets. The stock price is up 74% since the start of the year. LinkedIn's recruiting business accounts for 57% of revenue. Q1 net income was $22.6 million up from $5 million for Q1 2012. Revenue rose 72% to $324.7 million.
LinkedIn Beats Street, But Stock Takes A Dive
CNET NEWS - May 2 -
Q1 was better than expected with $325m revenue, but investors aren't impressed. LinkedIn counts 225m members and posted net income of $22.6m. Share prices have skyrocketed 60% from $124 to $201 since Q4 but the stock started falling Thursday afternoon anyway. Concerns seem centered around revised revenue estimates for Q2.
LinkedIn Reaches 1M Users In Singapore
TECH CRUNCH - Apr 30 - LinkedIn has acquired 1M users in Singapore, or 20% of its 5M population, since the service’s launch there in 2011. It means that ~70% of Singapore’s labor force and students now have accounts on LinkedIn. Other Asia Pacific countries with more than one million LinkedIn members are Australia (4M), India (19M) and China (3M).
LinkedIn CEO Gains $78 Million In 2012
USA TODAY - Apr 29 - LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner gained $74.5M exercising previously awarded stock options and another $2.5M from shares that vested last year. That's on top of a $535,000 salary and a $636,000 bonus incentive. Shares, first offered at $45, rocketed more than 80% in first-day trading and were trading mid-day Monday at ~$190.
LinkedIn Turns Its Contacts Section Into A Personal Assistant
TECH CRUNCH - Apr 24 - LinkedIn is relaunching its Contacts section as a smart contact management system that will let users link up and integrate connections on LinkedIn with those from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft apps; Evernote; TripIt; your iPhone and more, and then serve as a “personal assistant” to help manage the interactions you make with them. LinkedIn is also launching a Contacts app for the iPhone.
LinkedIn Acquires Pulse For $90M In Stock And Cash
TECH CRUNCH - Apr 11 - LinkedIn has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction is valued at ~$90 million in a combination of ~90% stock and 10% cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013. LinkedIn argues that it is acquiring Pulse because it wants the site to “be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Pulse was founded in 2010 as an iPad app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, including the web. The service currently has 30M users.
Link Into Earnings With LinkedIn
INVESTOR PLACE - Apr 5 - LinkedIn is the only one social media stock worth owning right now. It’s trading at ~$170 — almost four times the IPO and roughly double where it was after the first day of trading. Facebook has underperformed the market in 2013 with a meager 2% gain while LNKD stock is up 50% since Jan. 1. Enterprises or professional organizations that use LinkedIn for recruiting or marketing services jumped 78%. The big issue for LinkedIn, of course, isn’t its growth. Rather, the question is one of valuation. At roughly 80 times forward earnings and after a red-hot run, some are concerned they’d be buying a top.
LinkedIn Adds Facebook-Style Mentions Of People And Companies In Status Updates
TECH CRUNCH - Apr 4 - LinkedIn's new Facebook-style mention feature, letting users tag companies or users, is officially official. You simply type in the name of the LinkedIn connection or company within the status update field. You’ll see a drop-down menu with matches, and once you post, that user or company will see your status update appear in their notifications list.
LinkedIn Improves Its Search
MASHABLE - Mar 25 - Following in the footsteps of Facebook, which recently overhauled its search, LinkedIn has announced a revamped search with auto-complete, suggested searches and other enhancements. The search is now streamlined as well, so users no longer need to search for companies, people and jobs separately.
LinkedIn: 4 Million Members In Australia
BRW.COM - Mar 13 - LinkedIn has passed 4M members in Australia. “It’s an incredible milestone,” says Cliff Rosenberg, managing director for LinkedIn in south-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand. “It means pretty much every professional in Australia is now up and running with a profile.” LinkedIn passed 200M members worldwide in January and says it is adding another million every week. At its initial public offering its shares were $45, they’re now $170.
LinkedIn has also recently introduced a new product called “Sales Navigator” to help sales staff to find out whether anyone in their organisation is already connected to a prospective lead.
LinkedIn Will Buy Pulse App For $50 To $100 Million
MASHABLE - Mar 12 - LinkedIn is close to acquiring Pulse, a popular news reading app, for as much as $100M. Pulse had been in acquisition talks with several big companies, including Yahoo and Microsoft, but that LinkedIn won out. Pulse has raised $9M to date and currently has ~ 20M users reading 10M stories per day.
Endorsements, LinkedIn’s Answer To Klout, Passes 1B Recommendations
TECH CRUNCH - Mar 6 - Endorsements, a lightweight way for people on LinkedIn to recommend each other’s skills, has passed the 1 billion milestone in just 5 months. Before the introduction of endorsements five months ago, LinkedIn let users gather testimonials about their skills — but these were in the form of longer recommendations. Those written recommendations are still there, but what endorsements has done is turn this into a quicker process, as fast as it takes a user to click a box, with a prompt for adding them in appearing at the top of profile pages to encourage more endorsing.
LinkedIn To Launch Corporate Social Network
CNET NEWS - Feb 26 - LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said the professional network is cooking up private, collaborative tools for a corporate clientele that would help facilitate private communication and allow staffers to better benefit from their rolodex on the professional network. It sounds like the beginnings of a customer relationship management system or private corporate social network. Yammer and Salesforce, beware.
LinkedIn Sets 80 Million Member Goal For India
DNA INDIA - Feb 20 - LinkedIn is expecting to grow the number of its members in India to 80M from 18M now. Growing at 400% annually, India has become the second-largest market for LinkedIn in three years of its launch here. Globally, LinkedIn, which has 200M members, adds two members per second, gets 5.5 billion professional search queries per year, and is growing at 64% outside the US.
LinkedIn More Dominant Than Ever Among Job Seekers And Recruiters
FORBES - Feb 6 - A new survey by Bullhorn, a company that makes technology products for employers and recruiters, shows how powerfully LinkedIn still dominates the world of job search and recruitment. The results of a poll of 1,848 staffing professionals: 98.2% said they tapped some form of social media for recruiting in 2012. That’s up from 94% in 2011. 97.3% used LinkedIn as a recruiting tool in 2012. 19.1%, said they plan to use Google Plus for recruiting this year and 3.6% will use Pinterest. 17% made hires using Facebook in 2012. By contrast, only 13% said they made hires from their Twitter prospects. Graph Search is still in the beta phase, but once it’s fully up and running, it will allow recruiters and job seekers to search for a range of relevant terms. One other area Facebook has yet to penetrate: job listings. In Nov Facebook announced a new job search tool, Social Jobs App, a partnership with the U.S. Labor Department, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), DirectEmployers Association and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA). There are also links from the app page to several job search sites like BranchOut and Monster.
LinkedIn Is Perfectly Poised To Make A Huge Acquisition
SF GATE - Jan 24 - LinkedIn's performance since its IPO has made investors very happy. Its shares are trading at ~3x its opening day price of $45, and has almost a $13 billion market cap. LinkedIn needs to look for external growth opportunities in order to maintain that pace. Analysts say LinkedIn should consider acquiring these companies: SilkRoad, Monster.com, ChinaHR, Viadeo, Quora, DemandBase, Bizo.
Mark Brooks
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