[Ed. note: This belongs to a series of posts from LinkedIn operations around the world. We recently announced LinkedIn's Country Manager in the Netherlands, Eugenie van Wiechen, who shares her thoughts on the opportunity at hand from our office in continental Europe.]

As I get settled in to our new LinkedIn offices at the World Trade Center in Amsterdam, I can’t help but think of my first interview for this position with Arvind Rajan, our vice president of international operations. He told me that of the 55 million professionals on LinkedIn, the member base in the Netherlands was one of the most active and highly engaged groups with the highest number of LinkedIn members per capita outside of the U.S.

Echt? (English: Really?)

That’s impressive.

As I dug deeper into LinkedIn’s proposition to professionals around the world, it made plain sense why my peers have taken to online professional networking.

Last week, Hari Krishnan, our country manager based in Mumbai, launched our India operations with the objective to connect all of India’s professionals. Here in Central Europe, the bar is just as high. By creating programs and partnerships to raise awareness and engagement with LinkedIn in the Netherlands, I believe we can help Dutch professionals succeed in the new decade and beyond and put them on a path to business and career opportunities that otherwise may pass them by.

We already have a strong team here on the ground in Amsterdam. Our near-term focus will be to establish local partnerships and ramp up our general operations. Critical to that will be hearing from you on what we can do to make LinkedIn more helpful to you in your business and career in the Netherlands.

It may be a rainy day here in Silicon Valley, but a little sunshine has just poked through the iTunes App Store.  Earlier this morning, the new LinkedIn for iPhone v3.0 app went live.

Download LinkedIn for iPhone v3.0

On the heels of the opening of our LinkedIn platform, this new version represents the next step in our efforts to bring LinkedIn to whereever you work.  Professionals are increasingly mobile, and we believe that mobile business applications are better when they are built over a platform of your reputation & relationships.  This app has been redesigned and rebuilt from scratch to help you keep your professional network in your hands, whenever and whereever you need them.

New User Experience

The minute you launch the new application, you’ll immediately see the difference.  We’ve worked to bring the most common and important features to the top of the application, to make it easy to get what you need as quickly as possible.  We wanted to make sure that even if you only have thirty seconds to spare, you can get something done.

LinkedIn for iPhone v3.0

The Power of Search

Never walk into a meeting unprepared.  Whether it’s an interview, a client meeting, or a sales pitch, now you can go into any meeting knowing who you are going to meet with, and what you have in common.  LinkedIn for iPhone v3.0 includes a completely new search interface, making it trivial to easily find people whether they are in your connections list, or one of the 55 million professionals who now belong to LinkedIn.  Whether you type in a name or keyword, LinkedIn will get you the information you need whether it’s five days or five minutes before your important meeting.

The new application has revamped the profiles screen to quickly provide you:

• A summary of details about the person
• A review of their education & experience
• A list of the people that you both know in common
• The ability to mark that person a favorite

The new Favorites functionality makes it incredibly easy to keep track of people, so you can find them later in seconds.   In addition, all of the new Updates views let you filter your updates to see only updates from your favorite people.

LinkedIn for iPhone: Profile

Your Professional Updates

Professionals increasingly need instant access to news and updates from their professional network. This new application also features a redesign of our updates functionality, giving you up to date intelligence about your network. There are now four modules to help you quickly check your updates: All Updates, Status Updates, Profile Updates, and Discussions.  You can even filter your updates to see only those from your favorite connections.

More importantly, these updates are now actionable. Based on heavy demand from our users, we have added the ability to read and submit comments on updates, right from the iPhone.

LinkedIn for iPhone: Updates

More Powerful Inbox & Addressbook Integration

The response to the recently launching Inbox on LinkedIn for iPhone v1.5 has been phenomenal. On average, our iPhone users are now checking their LinkedIn messages twice a day. v3.0 brings with it significant improvements to the Inbox, including an improved design, dashboard badging, and most importantly, support for sending invitations from a profile without the email address.

The Connections feature has been enhanced as well.  Now your connections are just a touch away, and you can easily send any of them a message on LinkedIn.  If your connection has a matching entry in your iPhone contacts, their phone numbers and email addresses will automatically show on their LinkedIn profile.  You can now also choose to download your connections into your iPhone contacts, and the application will alert you when you have a new connection who has not yet been downloaded.

LinkedIn for iPhone: Invitations

Connect In Person

LinkedIn for iPhone has added a number of new features, but we expect many will want to try out In Person.  Leveraging the new Bluetooth capabilities in iPhone 3.0, In Person allows you to find and connect with other people running the LinkedIn application in real time.

LinkedIn for iPhone: In Person

What are you waiting for?

There are too many features in the new application to detail them all here – the best way to get familiar with LinkedIn for iPhone v3.0 is to download it now.

This application represents just the beginning of our mobile efforts in 2010.   We’re just putting the finishing touches on our first native application for the Blackberry, and planning a long stretch of mobile products and enhancements in the year ahead.

If you are one of our LinkedIn for iPhone users, please join the conversation in the LinkedIn for iPhone group.  We’re very excited to hear from you and hear suggestions for new features and improvements.

Saturday night, December 12th, LinkedIn celebrated 2009 in style at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. As our CEO, Jeff Weiner, said at the party, our families make it possible for us to do the work that we do on a daily basis by supporting us at home. This night gave us an opportunity to say thank you for our families’ support, enjoy the company of our co-workers and celebrate 2009 together.

The historic architecture of the Ferry Building was converted the into a hip winter wonderland with white, blue, silver and ice.  Guests enjoyed a lounge ambiance throughout the party with white leather seating, mirrored tables and modern décor.  As attendees entered the party, they were greeted with a blue carpet exclusive entrance and professional photographs. See more pictures here.

The party included two distinct areas to celebrate with a large party space in the main foyer complete with a DJ and dancing, professional lighting, photo booths, a bar complete with a branded ice sculpture and candy displays for keeping the sweet tooth satisfied.  Additionally, a lounge was created with an acoustic trio, ice lighting, lounge furniture and topped off with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the Bay Bridge.

The party was the perfect way to end an exciting year. Thank you to our partners, Paula LeDuc Fine Catering, Sugar Shack, MPortraits Photography, Red Cheese, Entire Productions, DJ Imani, J. Russo and Clear Memories for helping make the night a huge success.  Thanks to Florina Xhabija, LaRae Hakes (both of whom are standing with me in above picture), Jan Choi and Veronica Vallez – the LinkedIn party planning team – for all their help in making this happen.

Bring on 2010!

Since September of 2008, LinkedIn members have earned over $1 million by participating in targeted research surveys on professional topics. Over 100,000 members from more than 85 countries have shared their experience and opinions on topics spanning from cloud computing to healthcare reform to real estate through these research surveys. LinkedIn Surveys enables members to share their valuable experience, help shape important business decisions, while also earning a reward for contributing their opinions.

Members who qualify and complete a survey can receive an honorarium between $5 and $100, which they can select from a variety of options such as Amazon e-certificates, Paypal transfers, Starbucks cards, books, song downloads, or donations to global charities. Over the past year, LinkedIn members have donated over $150,000 of their rewards to charities like Doctors without Borders and the International Red Cross. Here are thoughts from one of our users, Warren Sypteras:

“I was sent an invitation to do a survey  from LinkedIn.  I normally hate doing these things because I spend my time giving data for free.  Ergo;  the surveyors only benefit.  I was surprised to find that LinkedIn actually DO value the opinions they get.  Thanks!”

Launched late last year, LinkedIn Surveys allows business professionals, market researchers, consultants, or investors to gain market insights from targeted professional audiences around the globe. If you’d like to learn more about using LinkedIn Surveys for your own research, click here to learn more about our offerings.

Participation in research studies is by invitation only and members are selected based on their profile information and relevance of their expertise to the research topic. If you are interested in participating in upcoming research studies, you can improve your chances of being invited by making sure your profile is complete and up-to-date.

Here at LinkedIn, we believe that people search is one of the most valuable new areas of search technology. Late last year, we announced the launch of the new people search platform, rebuilt from the ground up. Since that launch, I’m happy to report that the enhancements have resulted in nearly doubling overall search activity on LinkedIn. Thanks for tons of great feedback you provided since we launched that has helped spur these numerous improvements.

Today, I am excited to announce the release of another huge improvement to LinkedIn’s People Search experience: “Faceted Search”.

“Faceted Search” offers dynamic filters that are automatically generated based on your actual query results. These filters let you quickly and easily hone your query over 50 million LinkedIn profiles based on 8 facets: current company, past company, location, relationship, location, industry, school, and profile languages.

A new module titled “Refine By” will include a list of the most relevant facets, based on the actual results of your original query.

The filters are generated in real time for every query by parsing all matching results and extracting the most important attributes. We then present those to you in an intuitive interface that lets you select one or multiple filters per facet. You can refine, expand or stumble upon insightful information by simply clicking on the search options that matter to you.

Faceted Search offers the following benefits to your search experience on LinkedIn:

• Enables True Guided Navigation: A list of filters are generated dynamically for every search in order to guide you through the optimal path to find the most relevant people

• Provides Intuitive Interface: Refining your search is easier than ever with an intuitive user interface that allows you to slice and dice search results by 8 facets

• Improves Precision: As LinkedIn continues to grow by the millions, increasing search space requires increased precision to help you find exactly the right people

• Increases Efficiency: Find talent, business partners, customers or a former colleague faster than ever before.

• Reduces Need for Complex Queries: It significantly reduces the need for complex Boolean queries. This was a particular need we heard from many of our power users.

Here is a quick video that highlights the key elements of Faceted Search:

We believe these improvements will help augment your productivity and we’d love to hear your feedback, questions and suggestions.

Ed. note: Nearly 54 million professionals across different industries use LinkedIn to their competitive advantage. Starting this month, we’d like to focus on how professionals from different verticals are finding value on LinkedIn. Thanks to Don Low – Biotech Project Lead at Baxter Biosciences, for sharing LinkedIn tips for biotech professionals.

It’s human nature to mark the passage of milestones, and people often place special significance on those that have round numbers attached to them. Two round milestones with global significance happened in 2009 – 150 years have passed since the publication of Charles Darwin’s landmark Origin of Species, and 40 years have gone by since the Department of Defense launched ARPANET, the nucleus from which the modern Internet developed.

Darwin’s work revolutionized our understanding of biology, and is now part of the scientific foundation supporting the modern-day biotechnology industry.  Similarly, the Internet has grown from a network connecting a modest 4 host computers to the worldwide web linking millions of hosts, forever changing the way we gather and handle information.  These seemingly disparate global phenomena are becoming increasingly intertwined as Internet technologies find ever more uses in the biotech workplace, speeding communication. We’ve come a long way from Darwin’s elegant letters that he exchanged with fellow scientists in his field.

Today, social networking sites like LinkedIn are emerging as powerful tools to identify and connect with hidden resources that can give a project team leader a much-needed edge in an increasingly competitive world. The following slide deck is a presentation I gave to the NorCal Biopharma Project Managers group on how biotech professionals can find ways to maximize their usage of a social network like LinkedIn.

These are stormy times for the industry – we face a severe economic downturn and downward price pressures due to increasing globalization and the prospect of large-scale health care reform.  Perhaps Darwin’s ideas are relevant to our industry in another way – social networking sites are growing in power and rapidly changing to better suit the needs of our specialized projects.  Forward-looking biotech companies must in turn adapt and utilize the latest tools to stay ahead and escape – you guessed it, extinction.

A few weeks ago we announced we were doing limited testing of a new navigation design for LinkedIn. Thanks to all of you who have sent us feedback. We are now in the process of rolling out the new design to all of our users. If you don’t see the change yet, you will sometime in the next week.

The first thing you’ll notice in the new design is that there is no persistent left-hand navigation. All global navigation is in the top navigation bar. We did this in order to free up space for page content – information about you and your professional network.

Another thing you’ll notice is that the new global navigation bar takes up less vertical space. Page content is moved up higher on the page – less scrolling!

The global navigation bar

The global navigation bar is always available and provides convenient access to all LinkedIn services. Pass your mouse over the bar and you will see menus that provide quick access to the most popular LinkedIn features. For example, the Groups menu has links for finding and creating groups; it also has quick links for the groups you access the most often.

Additional applications and services are available under the More menu.

Local Navigation

When you are in an area of LinkedIn  (such as Contacts or Groups) you see local navigation. The major sub areas are in tabs along the top of the page. If the page allows filtering of content (such as Discussions or Search Results) these options are shown on the left.

On some pages, the new navigation can increase the amount of space available for page content by almost a third. In the coming weeks and months, look for continually improved and relevant content to occupy this space. Stay tuned!

Ed. note: This belongs to a series of posts on how web sites and services are integrating LinkedIn functionality using the recently launched LinkedIn API. Thanks to Jeremy Glassenberg, Platform Manager at Box.net, for this week’s post.

Business today is complex. Not only do we need to share content with co-workers around the globe, we also need to connect and collaborate with clients, partners, and other key business contacts. Box.net’s latest initiative with LinkedIn is going to make sharing with all these parties much easier.

We recently debuted a new OpenBox action, making it simple for Box users to access and share content with their LinkedIn networks from within the Box environment. The process takes all of a few seconds: Box users can select the LinkedIn application from the OpenBox tab and click “Add Application.” From there, sharing your Box files with anyone in your LinkedIn network is just a few clicks away, as outlined in our blog post. This new functionality adds to our earlier integration with LinkedIn – the Box.net Files application – which makes it easy for LinkedIn members to manage and share documents, folders and presentations on Box from within the LinkedIn site. Now you can access your content and contacts whether you’re on the LinkedIn or Box platform.

Sharing your Box.net content with your LinkedIn connections

Box and LinkedIn have very similar philosophies: we believe in open platforms, and connecting those cloud-based platforms to address the needs of businesses. Our developers were thrilled to find that LinkedIn’s open API was very easy to use, so much so that writing this latest OpenBox Action took only a few hours. This kind of easy integration is critical for the adoption of cloud-based enterprise tools to begin the massive hyper-growth stage that we’re anticipating. Over the next year, we hope to see more companies working together and connecting their cloud offerings in much the same manner.

Want to learn more about how to develop or integrate with the LinkedIn platform? Then plan on attending the LinkedIn Developer Meetup at Kube Hotel, Paris (December 9th at 5:30pm CET / 17:30 hrs) that we’re holding on the sidelines of the Le Web Conference this year. A big thanks to Dave McClure and Loic Le Meur for helping with the developer meetup!

At the meetup, we’ll show you how you can use our Developer Portal to quickly get up and running. You’ll also get to hear from other developers who’ve already built integrations with our APIs. We’ll have ample time for Q&A and some networking after that (of course)!

LinkedIn Developer Meetup at Kube Hotel, Paris (Le Web 09) on Dec 9th, 09

Since we opened the LinkedIn APIs for all developers, we’ve seen a tremendous response from the developer community. We’ve seen developers quickly build a community at our Developer portal and build the tools and techniques that make it so easy to integrate with LinkedIn. These include a PHP Library, a Ruby Gem and .NET integration via DotNetOpenAuth.

We believe this rapid uptake is the result of open standards such as OAuth, which allows other developers to use off the shelf libraries and open-source projects to quickly take advantage of them. I look forward to discussing these topics at the meetup mentioned above.

We’re excited to see integrations like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Sobees and many more that now allow you to bring LinkedIn to your desktop. Similar integrations announced earlier this month with Microsoft Outlook 2010, Blackberry, etc. will continue to help you extend your LinkedIn network to all areas of your  professional life – wherever you work.

[Ed. note: This is the first in a series of posts on different web sites and services integrating LinkedIn functionality using the recently launched LinkedIn API. Thanks to Todd Pringle, VP of Product Management at Yoono, for kicking off the series with this initial post]

Here at Yoono we’ve just launched the latest upgrade to our social aggregation app, Yoono 7. It has many new features but one of the things our we are most excited about is (yes, you guessed right) LinkedIn integration! Our focus has always been deep integration with the most popular social networks (and instant messaging services) rather than supporting a hundred social networks in a half-baked way. For a while now the missing link (sorry, had to pun) for us has been LinkedIn – it’s consistently been the most requested social network addition from our users for over a year.

As professionals leverage their real time social stream more and more for content discovery and relationship management, LinkedIn has become a must have network for us.  Thanks to the new open LinkedIn Platform, we’ve been able to deliver that in an extremely short amount of time.

For developers considering the LinkedIn platform, we can say with confidence that it’s been extremely easy to develop on.  Within a couple days of getting our developer key we’d completed our initial integration that enabled our users to view their LinkedIn updates stream, update their LinkedIn status, or view and search their LinkedIn contacts.

Yoono already leverages oAuth for other supported social networking services such as Twitter, MySpace, and FriendFeed so it was a big bonus with LinkedIn’s embrace of oAuth as well. We’re already working on designing additional features supported by LinkedIn and most of all we’re excited about the possibilities.

If you’d like to learn more about Yoono 7, check out our blog post here.  You can download our Firefox add-on today with LinkedIn support as well as new features such as support for Twitter Lists, Facebook Inbox & Notifications, multiple accounts per social network, Groups (yes, you can add LinkedIn users to a group with friends from other networks then filter your updates stream by group) and full text search of your social stream so you can see what your LinkedIn connections have to say about a particular topic. We’ll also be updating our Yoono Desktop for Windows and Mac with LinkedIn support later this week, so stay tuned.

We recently passed 3 million downloads and we’re confident LinkedIn integration is going to further extend our reach and provide more value for our users. Congrats to the LinkedIn team on a great start for the Platform!