CEO View: Why LinkedIn Still Matters (Video)

September 16, 2010

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in the hot seat, trying to convince the audience that LinkedIn still matters in a Facebook world.

Don’t count LinkedIn dead… yet!

At the Demo Fall 2010 conference, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner woke up an otherwise sleepy audience, defending the unique values of his social network. LinkedIn is used by over 75 million professional users, and is adding 1 new user every second. “We connect talent with opportunity at massive scale.”

“There are primarily 3 value propositions [for LinkedIn].

  1. The ability to build your professional identity, your professional brand if you will. By virtue of creating a profile and having that profile search engine optimized, you’re going to show up at the top of search engine results. Especially if you’re maintaining a certain freshness to that profile. And the ability to carve out a piece of that digital real estate in this day and age and essentially presents to the world your experience and your skills, ultimately what you want to achieve, is pretty powerful dynamic and that creates opportunities.
  2. The ability to build, maintain and manage your network of professional colleagues, business contacts. Historically, when people thought of professional networking, they envision the guy at a conference handing out business cards as fast as he can. And today it’s very different. Professional network is essentially how business gets done. You’re relying on people within your professional network for the information and the knowledge you need to get effective and what you do; for more prospecting, certainly for recruiting, for closing all kinds of different deals. Essentially people who are relying on their network today are on a competitive advantage when compare to someone who’s not.
  3. The sharing and knowledge of information and data that enable to be more effective at the role you’re already in. And in this day and age, people are sharing so much more than they ever done previously. And one of our primary objectives is to extract as much relevancy from the information and knowledge flowing through it as possible. At LinkedIn we’re looking the signal from the stream.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by TechPulse 360

The Future Of Social Networking Communications?

September 15, 2010

What is the future of social networking?

Ask LinkedIn, the world’s largest network for professionals, and the answer is communications.

In the past year, the number of “status updates” LinkedIn circulates among its users increased 10 fold, says CEO Jeff Weiner. Up next? The company is exploring the use of instant messaging and video conferencing, Weiner said during an interview at the Demo Fall 2010 conference in Silicon Valley.

LinkedIn is exploring instant messaging and video conferencing, says CEO Jeff Weiner

The goal is not just enable people to connect but to communicate, he said.

But LinkedIn’s communications-focused vision wasn’t the majority opinion at the entrepreneurial conference. Far more social network start-ups zeroed in on the traditional notion of information sharing. While many of the business plans were not new, they did appear to be well executed – at least at this early stage of their development.

Here is a sampling of the companies at the event:

*Real estate social network site HomingCloud as a dating site for homes, apartments and condos. List a property for sale and the site will match the post with buyers looking for a similar property in the area. Once connected, the buyer can view a video and decide whether to move ahead.

“Who needs a broker?” asks CEO Tina Fine. “Now you don’t.”

*Needly of Santa Monica also wants to bring buyers and sellers together, but to sell merchandise, not real estate. People post items for sale and list items they would like to buy. Then they search the site for a match.

That site doesn’t yet have an automatic matching feature. Maybe that is version 2.0.

*Online shopping site Zappli likes to bill itself as the Facebook for merchandise. Clearly, The San Francisco company has a long way to go. But the service offers several valuable features for shoppers, including advise for buying a gift for a friend. Learn about her preferences and buying habits from the profile she posts on the site before making a purchase. Users also can get advice on products from friends.

The Facebook for merchandise is a big claim. More likely it is a feature Facebook should build into its site, but so far hasn’t.

*What about finding a new restaurant or club? Ishi Systems used the event to launch Picksie, a service that recommends places of interest based on a user’s profile. Add a review and the site learns more about what someone likes and doesn’t like.

*Then there is Copia, a social network for books. Display favorite books for friends to see and share reviews. Then create a book club. The site also has an online bookstore.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

[Video] SecondMarket To Launch IPO Lock-Up Shares Marketplace

July 27, 2010

SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert wants to completely disrupt the financial industry.

Wall Street should be wary of this financial startup that is trying to bring the financial industry upside-down.

New York City-based SecondMarket’s 14,000 participants manage over $1 trillion in investable assets and include global financial institutions, hedge funds, private equity firms, corporations (Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga…) and high net worth individuals.

At the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford today, SecondMarket CEO and Founder Barry Silbert unveiled his company’s plan to launch a marketplace to buy and sell IPO Lock-Up Shares.

“When a company goes public you have 6 months of a lock up [when you can't sell your shares],” Silbert said. Adding that banks hated his idea because they control those shareholders for 6 months and “they extract every last penny out of these transactions.”

Silbert also told the audience of entrepreneurs and investors how he finds new market ideas.

“If they [the banks] puke all over the table, we know that is the market that we want to get into because they’re making so much money off of the spread and the opacity that we know we can completely disintermediate that market.”

It’s getting personal!

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Search Engines See Search Competition From Social Networking

August 11, 2009

Online search is a splintering market, and social networking appears to be a big reason why.

Three billion searches are conducted each month on You Tube and a billion are launched on Facebook. Twitter is getting its share.

So how is a traditional search engine going to remain relevant?  Search engines are spending a great deal of effort better understanding the intent of searchers and figuring out how to deliver better results.

People search for events on Twitter and for people on Facebook, says Hitwises Heather Dougherty

People search for events on Twitter and for people on Facebook, says Hitwise's Heather Dougherty

All things equal, they probably produce the best results.

But social sites are having success in special niches. For instance, a lot of Facebook searches are for people, according to Heather Dougherty, direct of research at Hitwise. This would make sense since it a network connecting people.

LinkedIn attracts business searches and Twitter sees “a lot of event-driven searches and people-driven searches,” Dougherty said Tuesday at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.

The Iran election was one such event. “Real-time search will have a strong impact,” she said.

In this changing environment, searchers engines better keep looking over their shoulders. Users could find they turn elsewhere depending on the information they seek.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

MotherApp Turns Web Sites Into Native Apps For iPhone, Google Android, Windows Mobile

April 15, 2009
MotherApp generates a native mobile phone application from a Web site

MotherApp creates native mobile phone applications from Web sites

Looking for a recession proof business? Try mobile applications, and more specifically for the Apple iPhone.

In just a little more than 9 months, Apple will serve the one-billionth iPhone application from its App Store.

A gold rush that left many companies on the starting blocks, incapable of building their own application, either because of a lack of expertise in Objective-C – the computer language used to develop iPhone applications – or of available iPhone developers.

And that’s where MotherApp comes in handy.

The Hong-Kong base 7-people startup offers a an automated service that will take any Web application and turn it into a native app for the iPhone, Google Android and/or Windows Mobile devices.

Support for the Blackberry is coming in July and in September for Symbian/Nokia.

All you need is a web site to build a iPhone app!

“MotherApp is a kind of compiler and it’s a 2 step process. First you develop a Web site using our HTML standard that includes some proprietary extensions to access the mobile phones special hardware, like the GPS radio or the camera. Then send us a link to the Web site and a day or two later, we send back the native application for any or all of the supported mobile platforms,” explains Ken Law, one of the three co-founders and an ex-Googler (pre-IPO) that I first met earlier this month at the Web 2.0 Expo conference.

A MotherApp application costs $1,000 per mobile platform.

The biggest stumbling block in MotherApp service is that customers have not access to the native mobile application source code. “But they can modify it as much as they want for 6-months for free and we are thinking of a business model where companies would pay a $99 a month subscription for example which will let them change their applications as much a they want,” responds Ken.

The other limitation of MotherApp’s technology is the kind of applications that MotherApp can actually “compile.”

“We are focused on client-server applications, like the Facebook, Youtube or LinkedIn apps. And they can be pretty complex like OpenRice, the Yelp of Hong-Kong. But we can not handle “fancy” applications like video games,” confides Law.

Although MotherApp raised an Angel round from Googlers, the startup is mostly self-funded by the 4 wealthy ex-Googlers co-founders and is already profitable.

The company is looking to expand in Silicon Valley, seeking to partner with Web developers with expertise in developing Web sites and gadgets/widgets and looking to offer mobile apps as well, and Web 2.0 companies wanting to turn their web site into native mobile applications.

For Law, MotherApp’s main competitor is open source development tool PhoneGap.

“The PhoneGap is embedding a browser inside the native application. So instead of learning Objective-C, you can use Web standards like AJAX and CSS. But it’s not a true iPhone app and you can not use the camera or access the device’s file-system for example,” warns Law.

Here’s a video excerpt of my conversation with Law in a Mountain View, Calif.-cafe:

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Good News For Facebook, MySpace: Online Social Media Ad Budgets Appear Poised To Rise Next Year

November 10, 2008
Good news for Web 2.0 execs like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook

Good news for Web 2.0 execs like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook

A new study offers good news for the burgeoning advertising efforts of Web 2.0 social media sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and the like.

While many advertisers consider themselves beginners in placing ads on these sites, they are eager to become more proficient, and many say ad budgets will go up next year despite the economic pressures of a soft economy, according to a study by the Marketing Executives Networking Group, an international trade group.

The Connecticut-based organization conducted a survey of its members last month and found 67 percent consider themselves to be beginners or advanced beginners in using social networking and other Web 2.0 sites that let individuals post their own information, form networks of friends and interact with other people online. Just 17 percent consider themselves to be skilled.

But most seem ready to spend more. The survey found only a small percentage of advertising budgets is now dedicated to social media sites – 76 percent of respondents said less than 10 percent.  But 67 percent said they would significantly or modestly increase spending next year. Thirty-one percent said spending would stay the same.

The survey also found that 69 percent of marketing executives say their ads are just as effective or more effective than ads placed with traditional media, such as television networks, radio stations and print publications. Sixty-eight percent said results were equal to or better than search, display and other online ads, though the majority said they rarely or never do thorough studies of ROI, or return on investment.

The study found that 73 percent advetise on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn; 45 percent advertise on video-sharing sites such as YouTube; and 66 percent use blogs to reach customers.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

Salesforce.com Will Add Social Networks LinkedIn, MySpace to Enterprise Cloud Platform

November 5, 2008

Salesforce.com confirmed that they will be adding social networks LinkedIn and MySpace to the the list of partners.

This follows the San Francisco, Calif., company partnership earlier this week with Facebook to create a new class of enterprise applications, combining Salesforce.com more reliable infrastructure and Facebook’s social features.

“We love LinkedIn and MySpace and there’s no reason why the things that you saw with Facebook will not also work for the others. But you want to start with the best, the #1 social network in the world,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com.

To further explain the choice of Facebook, Benioff points to the lack of heavy integration required to link Salesforce.com and Facebook, as opposed to the other social networks.

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LinkedIn Joins The Apps Craze (Finally), But Spawning Innovation Is The Next Test

November 5, 2008
LinkedIn is being smart, says Mike La Rotonda

LinkedIn is being smart, says Mike La Rotonda

With less fanfare than the more boisterous Facebook, LinkedIn open the doors of its site to third-party applications.

The social network for job hunting and business relationships quietly invited its users in an e-mail early this week to use nine applications from developers such as Google, Tripit, the blog site WordPress, Amazon, Box.net and Huddle.

The question is whether this more trepid approach will foster the innovation and excitement Facebook spawned when gave the go-ahead to developers last year.

Clearly, LinkedIn and Facebook have different goals. Facebook is something of a come-one, come-all site for individuals to strike up friendships and trade news with existing pals. LinkedIn has the greater demure of a place for business and has made setting up links with other people more arduous.

In that sense, it doesn’t want the same kind of free-for-all that has been created by Facebook apps, many of which remain frivolous tools with little productive value.

“I really do think LinkedIn is being smart by focusing on the utility of applications,” said Mike La Rotonda, CEO of Votigo, a company that helps corporations write applications for social-networking sites. LinkedIn is said to keep tight control over what gets on board by requiring developers to submit their ideas before an app is approved.

But innovation is unpredictable and difficult to foresee. And it comes through experimentation. From the prospective of growth, “I think they are making a little mistake,” said Harrison Tang, co-founder of Spokeo, an aggregator of social networking sites for consumers. “It’s not very enticing for third-party developers to develop on that platform.”

Clearly no one can tell yet whether the LinkedIn applications program will be a success, or whether a vibrant community of programmers will evolve. But one thing seems to be in LinkedIn’s favor.

The opportunity for an application to sell advertising is attractive on the site given the business demographics of many LinkedIn members, said La Rotonda.

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Posted by Mark Boslet

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