LinkedIn has about 30 million members as of today.  Now all of these members will have access to applications launching on the professional social network.

“You’ll be able to work much more closely with your contacts on LinkedIn with tools such as file sharing, project management, business trips and many more,” wrote Reid Hoffman, Chairman and President of LinkedIn.  “The nine applications that you see live today on LinkedIn include productivity enhancing applications from Amazon, Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart, SlideShare, Tripit, and WordPress as well a Company Buzz application developed by LinkedIn. Each of these applications will help you stay current and competitive as a professional in today’s rapidly changing business world.”

All of LinkedIn’s applications are located here.  LinkedIn recently raised $75.7 million Series D, giving them a $1 billion valuation.

Apparently SAP, Goldman Sachs, Bessemer Venture Partners, and McGraw Hill believe that relationships DO matter.  Or at least back in June they did.  The four companies invested $22.7 million on top of the $53 million LinkedIn received this past June.  The total $75.7 million Series D investment is based on a $1 billion valuation.   

To date, LinkedIn has raised over $100 million for their professional social network service.  LinkedIn has about 370 employees and their revenues are growing 100% per year.  LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye informed TechCrunch that the company has been profitable since 2006.  

LinkedIn has about 30 million registered users.  LinkedIn receives over 4 million uniques per month.  The previous investors of the $53 million were Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.

“LinkedIn and CNBC’s partnership will present LinkedIn members with up to the minute business intelligence and the ability to engage with other professionals in and around CNBC’s on-air business coverage,” stated Dan Nye, CEO of LinkedIn. “Moreover, we will be able to draw out insights from LinkedIn’s global user base to generate fascinating new types of business content for CNBC to broadcast.”

CNBC and LinkedIn have officially entered an agreement. The agreement is that CNBC will be distributing content in the LinkedIn social network. This includes articles, blogs, and video from its current news and archived sources. CNBC will provide the content from across its North American, European, and Asian offices.

What does LinkedIn get in return? LinkedIn community-generated content will receive a fair amount of publicity from CNBC.

CNBC reaches about 400 million viewers across the world and 95 million in the U.S. LinkedIn has 27 million users. For previous LinkedIn coverage, refer to http://pulse2.com/category/linkedin/

The official press release is available here.

LinkedIn and Facebook together are now worth roughly $16 billion based on valuations given to them after funding.  Since Facebook and LinkedIn have not been acquired by public companies, I cannot help but wonder what they would say during an IPO of their own.  What would they say is their contributions to society or what are they doing to solve world problems?

The only joy I get out of Facebook personally is that I can mass upload photos that I take on my digital camera and tag my friends.  As a matter of fact, that is Facebook’s most popular feature because over 14 million photos are uploaded per day between their 80 million users.  YouTube solved a similar problem, but their emphasis was on videos only.

Is Facebook’s contribution to society “being a place to mass upload photos for your friends to see?”  Or is Facebook’s contribution to society “being a storage of personal information on your friends?” It seems like that they are all over the place.  Facebook self-describes themselves as a “social utility that connects you with the people around you.”  Their most popular feature makes me want to compare them to Shutterfly, but the way they describe themselves makes me want to compare them to Classmates.com or Match.com.

Facebook is one out of the top two sites in Alexa’s Top 10 sites that do not belong to a public company.  The other sites in the top 10 include Yahoo.com (Yahoo! property), Google.com (Google property), YouTube.com (Google property), Live.com (Microsoft property), MSN.com (Microsoft property), MySpace.com (News Corp. property), Wikipedia, Blogger.com (Google property), and Yahoo.co.jp (Yahoo! property).  Wikipedia is the other company that is not public, but the open source encyclopedia does not walk around sporting over a billion dollar valuation.

The aforementioned companies, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and News Corp. all have a pretty clear purpose and are constantly innovating otherwise their shareholders would get pissed.  Their innovations all revolve around their core services.  Yahoo! and Google have an emphasis on finding information quicker, Microsoft makes software that computers need to run on, and News Corp. distributes media all over the world.

Ford and GM’s valuation combined is about the same as LinkedIn and Facebook combined.  What makes this disturbing is because we know that those two automotive companies have done more to advance our society today than a couple of social networks.  The Richter Scales music video points it out too.

Perhaps there’s something I’m not seeing about LinkedIn and Facebook that makes their valuations worth it, so I encourage you to help me understand in the comments.  This is not intended to bash social networks, it is only to provoke discussion.

“If LinkedIn is able to achieve its goals and objectives in the coming years, this valuation of a billion dollars will be looked upon as very cheap,” stated Mark Kvamme, Sequoia Capital partner/LinkedIn Board of Director.

LinkedIn is making some Facebook-like moves.  LinkedIn has a fraction of the features of many other social networks, but apparently the “professional” card works.  Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners have combined their investments and gave LinkedIn a $53 million round of funding.  This gives LinkedIn a valuation at $1 billion.

What does the investors get in return?  Between the 5 companies, they received a combined 5% equity in LinkedIn.  Some of the investors have joined LinkedIn’s Board ofDirectors as well.  Earlier this year, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook for 1.6% equity.  Other valuations in LinkedIn’s sector include Ning at $500 million, Facebook at $15 billion, RockYou at $200-$300 million, and MySpace acquired for $580 million.

LinkedIn has about 23 million users in 150 countries.  LinkedIn is aiming for $100 million in revenue this year.  LinkedIn has raised $80 million in funding so far.  Although analysts are guessing News Corp. or Microsoft may make a bid for LinkedIn, but Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn stated that he preferred to remain independent.

Information Source:
[1] AP via Wired]

Reid Hoffman is part of the PayPal alumni club.  Former PayPal employees include:
1. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawad Karim - YouTube founders
2. Roelof Botha - Sequoia Capital Partner
3. Jeremy Stoppleman - CEO of Yelp
4. Max Levchin - CEO/Founder of Slide
5. Elon Musk - Founder of SpaceX
6. Peter Thiel - President of Clarium Capital and early Facebook investor

There seems to be a trend of former PayPal employees that go off and start their own successful ventures.  And LinkedIn is no different.

Dave Wehner, a Director at Allen & Company is working with LinkedIn to find venture capital for the professional network to be given a valuation at $1 billion.  This valuation is about 1/15th of rival, Facebook.  Wehner also supposedly helped Bebo sell to AOL for $850 million.  

LinkedIn has raised over $27.5 million thus far in the form of 3 rounds.  The company is expected to earn $100 million in revenue this year.

I have a LinkedIn account, but I rarely use it.  I really only login when another friend adds me.  I think that’s the social networks greatest flaw: retention.  I could be the only one, but I’ll let this poll decide.

[poll=7]

Information Source:
[1] TechCrunch:  Allen & Co. Pitching LinkedIn At $1 Billion by Michael Arrington

 

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK is reporting a story that News Corporation may acquire LinkedIn.  Butcher mentioned that nothing is official, but his source is someone close to the matter.  This deal would indicate that News Corp. really wants to grow up from their reality shows on FOX and their notorious MySpace social network.

News Corp. made a $5 billion acquisition offer for Dow Jones, parent company of The Wall Street Journal.  And Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the media company specifically mentioned that he would want to make WSJ.com available for free.  Integrating LinkedIn with the Wall Street Journal could be an interesting synergy if there is any viability to this rumor.

More details on this rumor after Thanksgiving.

If the rumor about what the Google executives previously dubbed NBC and News Corp.’s idea for Hulu is true, I see them as being completely hypocritical. Around March 2007, rumors were afloat that News Corp. and NBC were parterning to develop a YouTube competitor and Google executives were supposedly not worried about it because they were reportedly nicknaming the company that didn’t exist at the time as ClownCo. Today that company is named Hulu and they have impressed the hell out of several media bloggers including Pulse 2.0, TechCrunch, and GigaOM. Mashable seemed to have a more undecided opinion about how Hulu will perform in the market.

The reason why Google would give such a nickname to the company is because of the number of players involved. Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!, MySpace, FOX, NBC, and News Corp. were all involved somehow as partners of the company in some shape or form. But the reason why I am calling Google hypocritical is that they seem to be pulling the same trick: partnering with a large number of companies to try and one-up a company that they cannot stand to see score a good deal for themselves. Microsoft’s investment in Facebook is what I’m referring to specifically.

I am making a bold statement by calling Google execs a hypocrite, but I have to admit that I was partially influenced by the article title on today’s New York Times: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook. And when hearing Google and Friends Ganging Up on Facebook, I think of a $220 billion search monopoly picking on a 23 year old with a good idea. Shame on you: Schmidt, Brin, and Page. You guys should just take some money out of the bank and take a bath in it or buy more Boeings.

Who is Google allying with? Other social networks of course. These social networks include:
1.) LinkedIn
2.) hi5
3.) Friendster
4.) Plaxo
5.) Ning

Other companies involved in Google OpenSocial include Oracle and Salesforce.com. Just for the record, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch also mentioned that the only image associated with OpenSocial is a horny Elmer’s glue thing. As funny as that comment was, I agree that there is something highly wrong with this image.

All opinions aside, do I expect OpenSocial to really take off? I think developers will explore the prospects of OpenSocial, but won’t be as receptive to developing applications for Google’s partners. This is because Facebook’s core users are college students and young, urban professionals that are still receptive to adding applications that make networking more “fun.” And the social networks that Google has partnered with are losing their edge. As a recently graduated college student myself, I have personally left Friendster years ago and never looked back.

I think Google is an amazing service and will not sway from using their search engine unless something amazing comes along, but I think OpenSocial seems too much like a product created out of a grudge. And that doesn’t go along with their “Don’t be Evil” philosophy. When Facebook Applications were released, they were promoted as a way for developers to explore the creative senses while leveraging Facebook’s user base.

There are rumors circulating in the blogosphere that LinkedIn[1], the professional social network created by Reid Hoffman, is plotting the development of APIs for developers to generated products within the website. This is similar to Facebook’s F8 efforts[2]. The API will be unleashing within the next 9 months or so.

The reason why LinkedIn is developing APIs may be because the social networks that allow applications and widgets which include MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook, are dominating the market. Logically it makes sense though. Widgets and applications enhance profiles if done so correctly. MySpace and Photobucket had their share of widget problems before MySpace acquired Photobucket. Not to mention, Facebook took a little bit of criticism for the applications features.

Speaking from my own point-of-view, what drew me back to Facebook initially was free, unlimited photo uploads. I believe back then, Yahoo! Photos had a cap and so did the other photo services I’ve seen. Also, Shutterfly’s upload process was not as appealing to me. Friendster also did not have unlimited photo albums back then either. If LinkedIn offered unlimited photos around the same time Facebook, things may have been quite different.

LinkedIn’s users include those who have privacy concerns against Facebook. Until LinkedIn has more to offer, it will be difficult to poach from Facebook’s users. This is why I believe the LinkedIn APIs feature will be a great addition.

[1] LinkedIn.com
[2] Facebook Developers

References:
[3] TechCrunch: LinkedIn To Open Platform In Response To Facebook
[4] All Facebook: LinkedIn Opening Platform