Startup and Technology News

Fresh from closing its purchase of newsreading app Pulse, LinkedIn has made another acquisition to dive deeper into the mobile space. TechCrunch has found out, and confirmed, that the social network has aqui-hired Maybe, the social polling startup founded by Omar Hamoui -- the man who set up, ran and then sold mobile ad company AdMob to Google for $750 million.

LinkedIn, now at 225 million users, continues to introduce more features to its site to keep people returning to it and staying there for longer. Today it's the turn of LinkedIn Today, its social news page, which is getting a new feature called Channels. Channels is rolling out starting today to English-speaking users. LinkedIn says that it plans to announce the service formally on Wednesday. Update: here's the formal announcement.

It’s fair to say that the “ambient location” craze has passed. Several of the mobile apps intent on connecting people with friends and other recommended users nearby are still struggling to find mainstream adoption. Some, like Glancee and Glassmap have sold. Others, like Kismet, have moved into new product categories. And today, the business-focused networking app Intro, is pivoting. Gone are the “ambient location” features which once alerted you to nearby users based on things like geotagged tweets or check-ins. With the new version, the company has shifted the focus solely to making one-to-one introductions between members of LinkedIn or Meetup groups. Explains co-founder Anthony Erwin, the decision to make this switch came from observations of user behavior. The best and most powerful introductions the app enabled were those where the members were each in the same group already. 90 percent of the time when an intro was created and members would connect, they cited being in the same group as the reason, he says. “I think what’s happened in this space, is because it’s dealing with connecting strangers – people are kind of wary of that,” says Erwin. “If you’re going to create connections that work, they’re going to have to be very familiar; almost not like strangers, in a way.” Users told him that when they were shown other group members, those people didn’t feel like random strangers. Intro has always been more sensitive to the potentially creepy nature of ambient location apps, having previously introduced features that would allow users to switch of networking with those not outside of a set of preferred groups, for instance. The revamped version of the app is something of an extension of that earlier concept more than it is a hard pivot to an entirely new vertical. In the updated application, available now on iOS and for Android in a few weeks time (currently the Android app is the older version of Intro), you’ll still be shown other group members who are nearby, but now the app take a wider view of your location. It begins by offering you connections across your city, as opposed to at your exact location. You can then quickly swipe through the suggestions to connect or reject the proposed connections. However, when there is an event or other congregation of members in the same location, the app’s algorithm will immediately adjust to sort its recommendations by degrees

LinkedIn has just reported Q1 earnings of $324.7 million, up 72% year-on-year, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.45, both soundly beating analysts' estimates (via First Call) of $317 million and EPS of $0.31; as well as LinkedIn's own guidance from last quarter, when it said it expected between $305 million and $310 million in revenues. Net income for Q1 was $22.6 million a big rise on the $5.0 million in earnings last year. Nevertheless, shares of the work-focused social network, however, are down nearly 11% in after-hours trading on news that next quarter won't be quite as rosy.

Yelp, the local online business and restaurant guide that first launched in the U.S. in 2004 and now lives in 21 countries and 12 languages, and has more than 100 million monthly unique visitors as of January this year, launched in New Zealand this morning. On the heels of bringing its review data to Kiwis and continuing its international expansion, Yelp announced its first quarter earnings at market close today. In the fourth quarter, Yelp missed earnings expectations, with net revenue coming in at $41.2 million in Q4 of 2012, a 65 percent growth in new revenue from 2011, while it saw a net loss of $5.3 million, or $0.08 per share. Today, Yelp turned things around, as it announced net revenue jumped to $46.1 million in Q1, reflecting a 68 percent growth from Q1 2012, while cumulative reviews grew 42 percent year-over-year to more than 39 million, average unique visitors grew 43 percent y/y and local business accounts grew 63 percent. Wall Street’s consensus estimates were that Yelp would see $44.5 million in revenue for the quarter, and $1.5 million EBITDA. Yelp hurdled over the bar, in fact, seeing a net loss in the first quarter of 2013 of $4.8 million, or $0.08 per share. This means that while net losses only fell slightly from Q4 2012, it saw a more significant reduction in losses year-over year, $9.8 million, or $0.31 per share, over the first quarter of 2012. In addition, compared to Wall Street estimates, Yelp said that adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2013 was $3.2 million, in comparison with an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $1 million for the first quarter of 2012. In the quarterly earnings release today, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman trumped up Yelp’s milestones in the last quarter, namely its hitting a record 102 million unique users over the last quarter, while touching on its plans to improve on its mobile experience. Something that should be music to the ears of anyone with a smartphone. “We had a great start to the year and are excited about the large opportunity in front of us,” Stoppelman said. “This quarter we achieved many milestones including a record 102 million unique visitors on a monthly average basis, demonstrating the strength of our content and the trust we have earned from consumers. We provide valuable leads to local businesses because consumers turn to Yelp at the

LinkedIn has acquired one million users in Singapore, or 20 percent of its 5 million population, since the service's launch there in 2011, the professional networking site announced today. This milestone means that about 70 percent of Singapore's labor force and students now have accounts on the Web site, according to the company.

With the ink still drying on last week's acquisition of news aggregation app Pulse, LinkedIn continues to double down on mobile, the fastest-growing consumer service among its 200 million members. Today it's announcing a major update to its iPhone and Android apps -- the first big upgrade in nearly two years. And, to take advantage of the traffic it's seeing on mobile, it is also introducing ads, in the form of sponsored content in the LinkedIn stream that is still in test mode.

LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013. Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been rumors about talks between the two companies for a few weeks now. 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. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs.” “We are thrilled to be able to add Pulse’s considerable talent, technology, and products to our growing ecosystem of content offerings, and we believe that they will help us accelerate our ability to deliver to our members the insights they need to be better at what they do, on any device,” said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience, in a statement today. “To continue to deliver that value to our members, our vision for content is that LinkedIn will be the definitive professional publishing platform, and Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.” Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Stanford University. The service started out as an iPad app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, including the web. Just recently, Pulse started to dip its toes into social by adding a number of social features to its apps. Given today’s acquisition, chances are Pulse will put a stronger focus on this in the near future. The service currently has about 30 million users in more than 190 countries. Approximately 40 percent of its users are outside of the U.S. Kothari writes in his announcement today that the “Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.” Pulse raised an $800,000 seed round in October 2010. Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Mayfield Fund, e.ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated in this round. In June 2011, Pulse raised a $9 million Series A round from New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft

LinkedIn has been launching a number of new features to improve engagement on its site, and today it's taking that strategy out to one of its premium products, LinkedIn Recruiter, with the launch of a new look for the homepage. It brings the look and function of the Recruiter page closer to that of LinkedIn's main homepage -- including the new search features introduced in March. The idea is to increase the amount of time spent on the page and usage of LinkedIn's Recruiter homepage, both to get more people signed up to use it, and to make sure that those who are already paying for premium features continue to do so.

LinkedIn has just announced on its blog that a new Facebook-style mention feature, letting users tag companies or users, is officially official. This morning, TNW noticed a feature being tested on LinkedIn that would let users mention other LinkedIn members or companies in status updates, instantly sending a notification to that user or company's profile. Not every user had access to the mention feature this morning, but it appears LinkedIn is rolling it out to users as we speak.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine now knows quite a bit more about people and places, thanks to an upgrade to its Satori entity engine and a partnership with LinkedIn. This means Bing now features the profiles of “web-active” users, professionals and celebrities in its Snapshots bar and has a significantly better understanding about places and things. Today’s update, Microsoft says, marks the “most significant updates to Satori (which you will see show up in the Snapshot feature on Bing) since its introduction.” The updated Bing doesn’t just show this information, though. It also makes it available through complex natural language queries like “Who won best actor in 2009?” The search engine is smart enough to understand that you are talking about the Oscars and knows that you are probably looking for Sean Penn. Because it also knows more about places, you can also ask it “What is the deepest lake in the world?” and get the answer immediately. For many of these questions, it is worth noting, Google doesn’t find an answer in its Knowledge Graph, though there are obviously some parallels between Knowledge Graph and Microsoft’s Satori project, which forms the basis of today’s updates. In the view of Microsoft’s senior director of online services Stefan Weitz, Google’s Knowledge graph is indeed a “kick-ass encyclopedia” that’s great at highlighting facts. That, he said, “is interesting and hard and cool,” but he wants Bing to go a step further by not just linking all of this information together, but also by making it actionable. Restaurant data, for example, includes a link to reservations. Movie listings show you where you can rent online, and results about a school will show you where you can apply. And starting today, Bing is expanding this by adding more information about people, things and places to Satori, its answer to Google’s Knowledge Graph. People On Bing Currently, Weitz told me earlier this week, people searches account for about 10 percent of all searches on Bing. When it comes to people, profiles and Bing, the company that probably comes to mind first is Facebook, given that Microsoft already has a close relationship with the social network. However, most of the people searches on Bing, Weitz argues, involve people who are tying to find professional information about somebody, and that’s where LinkedIn has a major advantage (he did not exclude the possibility that Microsoft would add information from other sources later on, though). Just showing information about

Collegefeed launched today, offering a social platform for students to connect with each other and employers long before the career fairs and short interviews begin. The service is designed for college kids who do not have the experience yet to have any meaningful use of LinkedIn and need to connect in different ways than people already in the workforce.

Endorsements, a lightweight way for people on LinkedIn to recommend each other's skills, has picked up some significant traction in its first five months of life. Today, LinkedIn is announcing that Endorsements has passed the 1 billion milestone -- with 58 million members getting recognition on their profiles for different areas of expertise, according to a blog post from Peter Rusev. The marker is a sign that, were LinkedIn so inclined, it could likely give sites likes Klout, which measure influencer status, a run for their money.

Tech companies try to stay lean. They don't want to hire too many sales people, and they can't build the perfect advertising tool for every buyer. So following in Google and Facebook's footsteps, today Twitter and in November LinkedIn launched ads APIs. They set up a powerful value exchange: "Help us sell more ads, and we'll give you a cut."

Did you happen to get an email from LinkedIn recently, which congratulated you on having one of the most popular profiles on the site? Then, good news - you're special. Just like millions of others. The campaign, which ran this month in celebration of LinkedIn's 200-million-users milestone, involved these ego-boosting emails sent to the network's "top" users, which urged them to share the good news on Facebook and Twitter. You might be surprised how many took the bait.

Technology is a wonderful thing, especially when your employer hooks you up with gadgets for free. Today, we’ve learned that LinkedIn has decided to give all of its employees an iPad mini. This reminds us of Oprah Winfrey giving things to her audience and exclaiming “You get an iPad, you get an iPad!” A spokesperson from LinkedIn confirmed this for us, as it’s not something that you’d want to report if it weren’t true. Employees could have gotten sad. We wanted to acknowledge the hard work and accomplishments of all of our employees in 2012. During today’s bi-weekly All Hands meeting, we surprised our employees with iPad Minis as a small gesture of the company’s gratitude for their contributions. Here’s a look at CEO Jeff Weiner standing with a whole bunch of them: The gifts were given out because the company had such a great 2012, “beating the streets” consistently in each quarter. The company currently has 3,500 employees, so if each costs $329, that’s $1,151,500.00. Someone at Apple is smiling. I wonder if they got a discount? In direct response, or not, we’re told by a source that every Intel R&D engineer just got a fully specced out Lenovo Yoga at $1,500 a pop. I’ll take the iPad, thank you.

Right after yesterday's earnings, LinkedIn shares (NYSE:LNKD) have popped 19.16 percent to 147.86. It is clearly linked to the company's earnings. Revenue is up 81 percent to $304 million and net income is following the same trend.

The business-focused networking site of record, LinkedIn, rode a wave of growth through 2012, turning itself into a Wall Street darling in the process. The race to win the professional networking market isn't really "a race" anymore, as LinkedIn dominates online networking for the world's working professionals, now over 200 million users-strong. Oh, and it's adding an average of two users per second. With growth continuing, LinkedIn has consistently outperformed expectations over the last three quarters, so this time around, expectations are high. The consensus estimate for revenues in the fourth quarter has been $280 million, up 68 percent from the same period last year. Meanwhile, adjusted earnings has been forecast at 19 cents per share, compared to 12 cents for Q4 2011.

LinkedIn has announced it has reached 200 million user registrations worldwide -- with new users being added at an average rate of two per second (or 172,800 per day). Not bad for a professional social network (but obviously still a far cry from Facebook's one billion+ active users).

LinkedIn is announcing a new Ads API, which could bring more large-scale social marketing campaigns to the professional networking site. In a blog post that the company plans to publish on its marketing website later today, Marketing Solutions Lead Jen Weedn writes that API access has been one of the most-requested features from LinkedIn's "tens of thousands" advertisers. Until now, those advertisers were limited to the company's self-serve interface, but with the API outside developers can build customized tools for running LinkedIn campaigns.